Who Would Go to War With You?

That's finding the tribe, the fellow people, the fellow humans, the true ones, the real ones that are willing to go to war with you, that are willing to have your back.

Sebastian Junger, whose work I love, he writes about the brotherhood that is forged in war.

And this is not a justification for the act of war, but it's a statement around The bonds that are built when you know that you unequivocally have someone's back and that they unequivocally have yours.

And that's something that is such a profound measure of brotherhood.

that it's hard to underestimate its importance.

And it's why I think, of course, there's so many horrors that are the cause of PTSD in terms of experiences that people have encountered at war.

But I think one of the great contributions to PTSD is also that coming back home to the mundane of Walmart and day-to-day living and no longer feeling that sense of purpose and connection to those who truly have your back.

And we're living, unfortunately, in an age where people treat relationships as disposable, where we have swipe right and swipe left culture, where people are something on a screen that can be disposed of.

where a text can easily go unanswered, where plans can easily be flaked on.

And that shit just drives me crazy.

I feel like we have lost the golden age of integrity where your word was your bond.

You used to be in another generation that if you said you were gonna do something, it was as good as done.

Your handshake was your contract.

And unfortunately, in this day and age, we no longer know what's real.

Literally, we don't know what's real in terms of so much of the news that we consume.

So many of the images are no longer based in reality.

They are created based on our psychographic profile, based on the psychology of the algorithm and what we have demonstrated to put our attention on.

And there is a war on our attention.

There is a war on our ability to discern what is for us and what is not for us.

And I would also argue who is for us and who is not for us.

The greatest wealth that we have, my friends, is our health and the people we get to share the experience of this life with.

And too many people treat that time, that precious time, that one moment, finite resource that all of us have as disposable.

You make plans, they flake, they ghost.

And I'm here to say, that we get to be a warrior in our discernment around who is for us and who is not for us, who chooses us and who does not choose us.

And sometimes that is hard to deal with, hard to process, but that is not based on what someone says.