Built to Belong Read online

  There is a better way. And you don’t have to do it alone. You can kick comparison to the curb, cultivate a deep sense of belonging, and grow a genuine community of dynamic human beings online and in person.

  I’ve done it, and I’m going to show you how you can do it too.

  I want you to finish this book feeling vastly different from the person who opened it. I want you to thrive in a community where you are deeply connected to yourself, others, and the opportunities that exist all around you.

  You can carve out a path for your life unlike any other—one brimming with joy, connection, and wholeness. You can fight for others to experience that too.

  You are welcome here. You are built for belonging. You are created for connection.

  You don’t need to spend hours and days and months and years skillfully assembling your mask—creating facades to impress, hiding your scars, camouflaging your exceptionality, and blending in. These modern masks look like virtually curated feeds and perfectly crafted captions. They read like meticulously polished résumés that leave no room for uniqueness—only palatable homogeny in the pursuit of blending in. They are our shields against insecurity and our weapons against letting anyone get too close.

  You don’t have to hustle, struggle, and strive in stifling isolation. You don’t have to carry the weight of the entire world on your shoulders without anyone to help you.

  I am certain that this reality exists because I’ve lived it and witnessed it countless times. Over and over again, through loss, through illness, through uncertainty, I have been carried by my community. My life is a testament to what happens when we set aside our culture of cutthroat competition to seek a better way.

  Now, I’m not going to say that this road is easy. Committing to changing your mindset and the way you operate is going to be hard. Raising your hand to live a life that puts people first and champions camaraderie means rowing against the current.

  However, in order to truly change the way things are, we need to make waves. This doesn’t mean that we should eradicate our natural desire to strive for success, but rather ensure that we never seek the destruction of others in the process.

  When you walk through the valleys of your life, it can be easy to lose sight of the outstretched arms around you. It can be hard to trust, to believe, to see the impact that investing in community can have when you’ve grown used to the isolation.

  Something powerful happens when you open your heart to the pursuit of doing life with others. Suddenly those struggles that you face are a little less daunting. The weight on your shoulders becomes divided across the shoulders of your friends. They carry the burden alongside you, helping you to make it through each day.

  For years and years, I couldn’t see the beauty of the relationships that awaited me on the other side of isolation and loneliness. I couldn’t hear the voices of thousands of others longing for connection in the chaos. I didn’t know that I would one day cofound the Rising Tide Society, a community of entrepreneurs who, just like me, were craving a better, more connected way to live. I didn’t know that our hashtag #communityovercompetition would turn into an international movement.…

  This book is the evolution of six years spent cultivating communities around the globe. We’ve grown from a hashtag on social media to a community that is inspiring people around the world to reject narratives that pull us farther apart in favor of rising together.

  All those years ago, I didn’t know how to overcome my insecurities and kick comparison to the curb. I felt alone. I felt unworthy… and it was destroying me.

  I know that at some point you have felt that way too.

  • Tired of competing and comparing yourself to others.

  • Exhausted from the constant hustle to measure up.

  • Longing for deep relationships in a shallow world.

  This book is my entire heart spilled out onto the page. My learnings from friendships and hardships, from beauty and brokenness. It’s a quest filled with vulnerability and a long lesson in embracing my imperfections in order to live a more deeply rooted life with others.

  As you experience this book, I’m inviting you to change the way things are. I’m asking you to challenge how you feel about yourself and others. I want you to discover that you too were built for belonging. I want you to walk into a room knowing that you are welcome and feeling empowered to create spaces for others to feel welcome too.

  Are you with me?

  CHAPTER TWO

  MODERN TIMES, MODERN PROBLEMS

  Our modern world is a deeply isolating place. It is fair to assume that in picking up this book, you can relate to that… and that a part of you intuitively understands that this isn’t the way it is supposed to be.

  We aren’t supposed to struggle in stifling isolation. We aren’t meant to carry our burdens in life alone. Human beings are created to live together—connected, interdependent, and as a group.

  Our brains are built for belonging. We are wired to experience pleasure when we are socially accepted and to experience pain when we are rejected or are at risk of banishment from the group. That joy you feel when you’re invited to the party and that pain you experience when you see others gathering without you is all by design.

  Why? Our ancestors lived or died based on whether they belonged. It wasn’t about happiness. It was about survival.

  Community is our competitive advantage.

  Our brain has evolved under social pressure to make us highly self-aware of where we fit and whether we belong. Social cognition and emotional intelligence are a distinct part of what makes us uniquely human—a consequence of our evolutionary past meant to ensure the survival of the species.1

  This is no longer the world of early humanity. The way we live, gather, and connect has changed in immeasurable ways. Our neural hardware, however, has not.

  The uncomfortable reality is that our brains are wired to thrive under a set of conditions that no longer exists. Our neural circuitry, built to keep Homo sapiens alive in early human existence, is now navigating unfamiliar territory that is changing at a faster and faster rate. The world our species once knew would be unrecognizable to all of us.

  Think about it: We’ve traded stone tools for cell phones and slow-paced living for the unceasing rush of everyday life. Information was passed down by generations of oral tradition, whereas now a stream of news updates fills our every waking hour. We’ve shifted away from communal living into one-bedroom apartments in glass boxes towering into the sky.

  The hardware hasn’t changed, but the software—the information we’re processing and the outputs required for our “mind machine” to operate in our modern world—is vastly different than it was from the outset.

  It is important to acknowledge that we brought about these sweeping changes ourselves. Human curiosity led to exploration, innovation, and technological advances that shifted the foundations of society and ultimately changed the way we live and work today.

  Technological and economic shifts redefined the household, from generational to nuclear, with more and more people living alone. Human beings went from living in tribal communities where everyone knew everyone to apartment buildings with twice as many people but where we don’t even know the person next door.

  We used to know the farmer that picked our produce and the family that raised our meat. We would meander through aisles, holding eye contact and occasional conversations, on weekly trips to the market. Now we sit in darkened corners of our homes late at night, illuminated only by the glow of our screens. We choose groceries from an app and peek out of the window as it is delivered to our front porch. No contact needed. The only “connection” required is a strong Wi-Fi signal.

  The structural points of interaction that humans relied upon for thousands of years, gone in a matter of decades.

  Simultaneously, we’ve mastered the ability to out-innovate generations before us. Desiring a better life, we have created digital devices that cater to our every need. With pr
oprietary algorithms designed to keep us scrolling and content catered to our individual liking, the world has slowly started to revolve around us.

  Every piece of content is tailored to our liking based on previous data we’ve both intentionally and inadvertently provided. Each suggestion is made with our unique brand of interests in mind. Our social platforms know whether we are conservative or liberal or whether we even care about politics at all. Silicon Valley data analysts know what videos will keep us scrolling longer, so they shift algorithms to increase user retention, thereby driving ad revenues higher and making investors richer. We are too entertained to notice or perhaps too dependent to care.

  We don’t need to go out into the world searching for happiness when it is hand-delivered to us on a digital platter, right?

  This isn’t how it has to be. Scrolling in isolation isn’t what our brains were built for.

  When we look to regions of the world where human beings live longer than anywhere else, we see a uniting set of factors that contributes to their longevity. Eating well and physical activity alone are not enough to sustain us far beyond the median age of survival. It is a sense of belonging and connection to a community that, in combination with a healthy lifestyle, fuels the world’s longest-lived people.

  In Japan, Okinawans cultivate “moais”—devoted groups of five friends who commit to one another for life. In Italy, Sardinians center their lives around meals shared, often with wine and always with an emphasis on gathering as a family. The world’s longest-lived people prioritize connection and have cultivated healthy lifestyles built upon a foundation of belonging.2

  Additionally, across 148 studies performed on more than 300,000 participants, researchers further revealed that greater social connection is associated with a 50 percent reduced risk of dying prematurely.3 Building relationships and being a part of a community plays a significant role in our physical health as well.

  We understand the benefits of cultivating community and belonging—we know, without needing to see facts and figures, that these tenets are important for our well-being. So, understanding their importance, we try to instill these values from a young age, and yet our competitive culture finds a way to push us in a different direction.

  Modernization led us away from the collectivistic ethos that we were created for. We moved away from pursuing communal societies into valuing radically self-centered ones. As a result, the undercurrent of the culture we consume promotes ideologies of scarcity, exclusion, comparison, tearing others down, and winning at all costs.

  If we read between the lines in the guidebook to chasing after success, we can almost make out the mantra “every person for themselves.”

  Just think back to your childhood. When we are young, we learn about taking turns, sharing, getting along, encouraging others, and being kind; however, as we grow older, a slight shift occurs and “winning” becomes more of a priority. We are no longer measured based on our merit as human beings but against metrics that serve to quantify our contributions and abilities.

  Grades are given, and academic achievement becomes a gateway to a better future. The harder you study, the better you rank, the more of a chance you have at landing a spot in the next stage of schooling.

  Sports teams go from giving everyone a chance to play to requiring players to try out just to make the team. Those who make the cut must still strive practice after practice to stay off the bench.

  Cliques form. Classrooms where everyone once felt welcome transform to the mean girls table in the lunchroom. Lines are drawn, and groups are recategorized accordingly.

  These early measurements of success, highly based on intelligence, popularity, and physical strength, are ingrained within us as key tenets to strive for. We are compared against our peers and ranked based on how we measure up. Whether directly or indirectly, we are encouraged from a very young age to see our worth and value not in contributions to the collective, but rather in individual performance.

  Be the smartest.

  Be the strongest.

  Be the most popular.

  In a culture that glorifies achievement, children are taught to be the best rather than their best. Slowly, we are pitted against one another as competitors rather than collaborators, as a threat instead of a friend, and in the long run we all suffer for it.

  The values of individual performance and competition become more important than the building up of our colleagues and friends. Instead of sharing and collaborating, supporting and inviting, we learn to be suspicious of others, to distrust, and to guard our ideas and ourselves from the community around us. Envy and jealousy are normalized as #goals as we are reminded, almost daily, of who we are competing against.

  Mindsets driven by fear and scarcity leave us feeling more and more isolated. We become disillusioned by the everyday grind that has us working harder than ever before but remain detached from what our hearts crave: true community and connection.

  These internal narratives slowly weave their way into our daily interactions from these childhood experiences. As adults we long for belonging and simultaneously believe we are unworthy of it. We live our lives in the shallows just close enough to see the safety of the shore without wading out into the deep end.

  When we are happy, we fear letting anyone come too close. When we are hurt, we choose to run rather than reconcile. We dodge eye contact and are more comfortable sending a text than making a phone call.

  We sum up a person’s entire existence into a profile photograph and one hundred and forty characters. Rather than truly get to know someone, we create mental checklists of requirements and read through résumés. We swipe left and right to categorize our potential partners—a lifetime of connection determined by instantaneous judgment in less time than it takes to have a conversation.

  And in our pursuit of success, we’ve become increasingly self-centered and out for ourselves. We rank individual achievement above collective advancement. Have we forgotten the ancestors whose shoulders we now stand on—the soldiers and suffragists, the civil rights warriors and pioneers of progression, the ones who sacrificed their lives for the betterment of the whole? Have we become so focused on ourselves that we fail to see our responsibility to one another?

  In our efforts to make our personal lives as convenient, efficient, and pleasurable as possible, I fear that we have forgotten what it means to truly care for one another. We have stopped listening and started shouting, trying to be the loudest rather than seeking to hear all perspectives. We choose defensiveness over receptiveness. Kindness is perceived as weakness, and compassion becomes a trait only to be manipulated for the benefit of another. We run as hard and as fast as we can into our separate corners—polarized without purpose, fighting over controversial ideologies rather than fighting for human lives.

  We have lost sight of the fact that we belong to one another. We built our modern world not on the basis of belonging, but with a focus on individual autonomy, personal power, and guided by worldly measures of success.

  The unraveling of human connection threatens the well-being of every single one of us. Somewhere along the way we went too far off course. We unintentionally created vulnerabilities in our cultural infrastructure and personal outlooks that enabled a monster of loneliness to creep in and set up camp even in spaces that objectively were constructed to cultivate social connection.

  Even with all our knowledge about how people need other people, our modern world is aching for connection in unprecedented ways.

  Societal institutions that once served as the intersections of human connection are rapidly eroding. There is a decline in religious affiliation, even among those who were once raised in religious families. The number of adults attending club meetings has dropped significantly. Fewer families are eating dinners together. More and more people are living alone.4

  Human beings, yearning for connection, turn to online platforms to fill the voids traditionally filled by physical interaction. Modern people set out to find
community online without understanding that the platforms created to connect them are also required to generate a profit. This creates a unique problem.

  Think about it like this:

  We hold devices in our hands that cater to our every need—replacing daily interactions with human beings for digital ones that are algorithmically tailored to keep us scrolling. So, we scroll… and scroll… and scroll, unaware that every notification has been tailored to trigger a dopamine release that keeps us coming back for more.

  To fill the void that loneliness leaves in our hearts, we confuse consumption with connection. We observe, we lurk, we double tap and drop emojis into the comment sections of other human beings who are also yearning for connection. Then once again, we scroll… and scroll… and scroll.

  With time, comparison becomes an ugly monster that grows bigger with the career accomplishments, alluring beach vacations, perfect family photos, and a thousand other highlight-reel-worthy announcements that we consume on any given day. We see others as having what we want, feeding jealousy and a longing for bigger, better, and different.

  What is even worse is that we often begin to see others as a threat. We’re excluded or left out, or we’re not as smart, as capable, as successful, as the person next door. And so, we claw our way to the top, believing we are on our own to get there and that there isn’t enough room for all of us.

  Slowly, we become addicted to the very thing that is killing us, our mental well-being suffers, and the battle for connection is lost. The loneliness that follows can be deadly. Unlike the loss of oxygen, which would overtake us rapidly, isolation, and its damaging effects on our well-being, takes its toll slowly.

  Our intention, of course, is to expand our friendships rather than lose them. But we are breathing superficial air.

  When we use online platforms to consume rather than communicate, we lose our ability to connect with others and our insecurities push us further and further apart. Then we end up curating our realities to impress our friends and hiding the pain that lies behind the screen. Even our vulnerability is filtered just enough so that it generates applause and empathy without revealing too much of the truth.