We have been taught to find our “tribe” or our “clique” since we can remember – in elementary school through high school to present day. We choose to exist within these tribes because they give us structure. They help to define who we are, our points of view.

Often we make these tribes smaller and smaller, so that we may be able to more clearly define ourselves. The limited confines of these tribes shut out the outside world and we begun viewing those not in our tribe as different.

I’m not saying being a part of a tribe is all bad, but I think the cons outweigh the pros. Let’s take a look at some pros and cons of tribes as we know them today:

Pros: we find safe spaces, we connect with similar stories, we find validation.

Cons: we limit the potentiality of our humanity, we cut off the capacity to hear others and gain greater compassion’s and understanding, we limit ourselves from finding compromises within society at large.

In a time where leaders leverage their power and have difficulty finding common ground and compromising on critical matters it is important that we don’t separate ourselves further and further into separate factions, but that we try to understand each other. That we try to see “humanity” as the real tribe and not ten thousand separate tribes within humanity.