From the Editor’s Desk: Tribe (Premium)

Leo mentioned the term tribalism on a recent episode of Windows Weekly, and it’s perhaps the perfect term to describe our very human need to belong to something bigger than ourselves individually.

Now I can’t stop thinking about it. We all understand tribalism because we all feel it to some degree. But it occurs that this is another example of me vaguely understanding a concept while not being fully educated about what it really means. There’s probably a term for that as well.

For example, I’m sure I’ve written in the past about my love of Star Wars, and my need to consume as much content as I can, be it the movies, TV shows, books, comic books, YouTube videos, whatever. But I also soundly reject what I see as an extreme, infantile need to dress up like a favorite character from this universe and walk around a convention center waving a fake lightsaber. You can be part of that world—a card-carrying member of that tribe, so to speak—without being a childish idiot, right?

But a love of Star Wars is at least organic, something that develops naturally. (Or doesn’t. Your choice.) Just as is a love of personal technology, which is what led us all to this same place. But even as a child, I wondered openly about the connection we feel to more coincidental circumstances, like the place we were born, the sports teams that happened to be there, or the religions our parents didn’t exactly give us a choice to follow. It all seems too random to me to matter so much.

This morning after our walk, my wife and I swung by the mailboxes in our little development which, despite its small size, are all clustered together in a single structure in a curiously non-central location. And as we walked back to our home, I commented on the number of Penn State flags that people have planted in their yards. This allegiance is curious to me because we moved here from Boston, an area that has the highest concentration of higher education institutions in the country, and yet it’s far less common to see that kind of promotion there, at least percentage-wise. To the rest of the country, Penn State is a non-event, but it’s clearly the center of the universe for many here.

I don’t get it. Of course, I would never put bumper stickers on my car either. Or buy logoed merchandise of any kind.

When I was a child, my dad split a pair of season tickets for the Boston Celtics with a few friends, and we were lucky enough to experience some incredible games in the Larry Bird era. When we got older, my brother and I took over the tickets, and we went to so many games over a decade or more that I lost track of most of it, though our attendance at the series-winning NBA Championship game in 2008 is, of course, a memorable highlight. Anyway, my wife Stephanie once asked me why I didn’t wear Celtics gear to the games, but I would never spend money on such a thing: “I give them thousands of dollars every year, they should give me a shirt,” I replied. They never did.

By the time my brother and I were heading into what I will still call the Boston Garden regularly as adults, I had matured to the point where the partisan sports nonsense of my childhood was replaced with a more nuanced view of sports. I appreciated the skills of other players and teams, even from that hallowed 1980s timeframe, and I stopped seeing sports through a Boston-tinted lens. But when I was visiting the area before Christmas, I witnessed friends, who had insisted they were over the dreary Patriots teams of recent years but nonetheless screamed at their TVs during a pointless and uninteresting loss en route to a last-place 4 and 13 finish. These are successful adults, unable to distance themselves from a tribe that, frankly, doesn’t deserve their attention, let alone loyalty.

I’m not sure if I’d call that relationship toxic per se, but it doesn’t seem particularly healthy to me. And this episode triggered yet another round of self-examination, in which I considered my own loyalties and the communities that I hold dear. And my brain went in a surprising direction.

Years ago, Stephanie’s parents retired and did something understandable but unexpected: Despite her dad being a life-long homebody who literally lived in the same house for his entire life, they sold their home and moved south to better weather. They went back and forth between various places in South Carolina and Florida over several years, and we visited them many times, as did Steph’s brother and sister and their families. And, of course, her parents visited everyone in the Boston area many times as well, often spending summers there.

A few years ago, however, they gave up this lifestyle, sold whatever property they had in the south, and moved back home to the small town in which Steph, her family, and her father had grown up. This I did not understand: If anything, the harsh Boston-area weather would only become harder to deal with as you age, I thought. But they explained that missed seeing friends and family as often as they could if they were just there. And they’ve stuck it out, to my surprise, barely leaving the area now, even to escape to warmer weather mid-winter.

Steph and I were always on a different trajectory than her homebound parents had been. Thanks to our love of Europe, we visited more and more frequently over 20 years, with and without the kids, and always planned, vaguely, to split our time between a place there and a place in the United States. In more recent years, this plan shifted, unexpectedly, to Mexico when post-COVID travel conditions turned a one-time trip into a more permanent situation. Now, what was once vague could materialize as reality: We have a place in Mexico City and could split our time between here and there right now if that was a priority.

But we haven’t, and now I’m wondering how that would work. Or whether it can work at all. And I have the experience of Stephanie’s parents to blame: We, too, have friends and family, here in Pennsylvania and back in the Boston area. We have favorite places, things we do here daily and weekly, the little traditions that we’d miss if we were gone. Conversely, we have a similar experience in our neighborhood in Mexico City: We have friends, favorite places, and things we do daily and weekly, little traditions that we miss when we’re gone.

We have two tribes, and the draw of both is strong. And this is suddenly real. And a problem.

We bought our tiny apartment there in 2022 and spent most of that year flying back and forth to Mexico City at great expense, so we resolved to travel there fewer times in 2023, saving money on airfare while staying longer each time. For 2024, we had vague ideas about extending the time we were there further, and so our coming trip—we fly there Saturday—is for five weeks, the longest continuous time we’ve spent outside the country so far.

This sounded like a spectacular idea when we booked this trip back in October, and a step towards this future we’d long envisioned. But now I’m not so sure. I want to spend more time in Mexico City. But I also don’t want to be gone from here for so long. In discussing this with my wife, she told me she was struggling with the same issue. And now all I can think about is Steph’s parents.

This coming trip won’t be horrible: We will escape the worst part of winter here, and our kids are coming out for a week, so I’m looking forward to that. I can’t wait to see our friends there again and visit our favorite places, eat our favorite foods, and have new adventures. But I’m going to miss our friends, family, and traditions here in Pennsylvania. Five weeks feels like an eternity.

I guess I’m no more mature than my football-loving friends. That makes sense, they’re part of my tribe too. But these bonds that bring us together can hurt too. And I’m not sure how to rectify this.