Stop Looking for Your Tribe. Start Rebuilding Your Neighborhood.

The scourge of like-minded individuals.

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The phrase crept into my vocabulary slowly and then all at once. It took stepping back and examining this particular arrangement of words to see how repetition had drained it of meaning. But it was the way it made me bristle that forced me to examine it. It surfaced again and again as I was writing about how we've dismantled the infrastructure of human connection. In editing that piece, I had to remove several instances to avoid repetition. In conversations, in marketing copy, in my own words, again and again with ubiquity. The phrase has become so commonplace, so accepted, that it slipped past unexamined.

Like-minded individuals.

Harmless at first glance, aspirational even. But strip away the comforting associations, and it reveals something startlingly perverse.

The phrase appears with religious consistency on my social media feed. In my bubble, wellness centers promise communities of like-minded individuals. Coworking spaces advertise the same. Book clubs, meditation retreats, startup accelerators. The phrase has become the default marketing copy for anyone selling community.

But what are we actually admitting when we use the term like-minded individuals?

The phrase suggests we're seeking people who share our values, our principles, our deeper beliefs about how the world should work. Strip away that aspirational language and the truth emerges. It's nothing more than a polite code for 'people who won't make us uncomfortable.' It's not about shared values at all. It's mere signaling.

The meditation studio isn't looking for people who believe in mindfulness. Sure that would be nice and of course they do find some but if that person doesn’t share their social class, their sure to be non-grata. They're actually looking for people who can afford $40 drop-in classes and won't ask why the teacher training costs more than most people's rent.

This impulse spans much of modern community building. In one frame, you have wellness centers with ice baths and adaptogenic cocktails, pilates studios that feel more like sanctuaries than gyms, and coworking spaces filled with freelancers sharing their latest integration experiences. The conversations carefully orbit around sustainability, emotional resilience, and the virtues of alt milk. None ill-intentioned, of course.

In the other frame, masterminds that blend stoicism with stock tips, CrossFit gyms that double as entrepreneurship networks, and rent-by-the-hour podcasting studios where hosts build their personal brands. Conversations meander from market disruption to dark psychology and longevity hacks. Empire-building and individual excellence.

Different aesthetics.

Different vocabularies.

Same exclusionary principle.

Both building communities of like-minded individuals. Both rooms have convinced themselves they're building authentic community. Both are actually building echo chambers with membership fees.

The perversity isn't just that we're filtering out difference. It's that we've convinced ourselves this filtering is virtuous.

We call it intentional community or curating safe spaces, or the effortlessly cringey, finding my tribe. But strip away the euphemisms, and what we're really doing is ensuring we never have to encounter anyone who might challenge our assumptions.

The phrase itself tells us everything we need to know about how we got here.

Like-minded individuals.

It sounds so reasonable. So thoughtful. So evolved. It suggests we're being intentional about our connections, curating experiences that matter, building something meaningful rather than settling for whatever random collection of humans happens to be nearby.

But buried in those three words is the entire philosophy that's undermining social cohesion in western culture.

Like-minded assumes that shared thinking is the foundation of belonging, that compatibility of opinion creates connection, and that ideological alignment is what bonds people together.

This is exactly backwards.

Community has never been built on shared thinking. It's built on shared space, shared ritual, shared presence. The dive bar doesn't screen for political compatibility. The red sauce spot in the West Village doesn't require an ideological quiz. The dance floor doesn't care what you believe about the SALT tax.

These spaces create belonging not through curation but through proximity. Through the simple act of showing up consistently in the same place, learning to navigate difference rather than eliminate it.

You discover that disagreement doesn't preclude care. That the person whose politics make you wince might be the one who notices when you're struggling. You discover that proximity breeds empathy in ways ideology never could. That connection happens in the spaces between the ideas we’re so certain about, not in the echo chambers that confirm them.

But instead of protecting these spaces, we've created an entire membership industrial complex dedicated to helping us avoid them.

We've built institutions that sort us by ideology, income, and aesthetic preference.

Apps that filter us by compatibility.

AI-powered platforms that curate our social circles.

Organizations that promise community but deliver isolation with better lighting.

The phrase like-minded individuals isn't just bad marketing copy. It's a confession. It’s an admission that we've given up on the messy, complicated work of actually building community and settled for the easier task of finding people who already agree with us.

Which brings us to the real question:

Why do we continue to sort ourselves this way and maintain the delusion that this is safety, that this is progress, that this is preferable to the alternative?

The answer isn't another framework or methodology. It's not a better way to curate community or a more sophisticated approach to finding your people.

The answer is asking different questions entirely.

Instead of: How do we find like-minded individuals?

Ask: How do we create spaces where difference is navigated rather than eliminated?

Instead of: Who shares our values?

Ask: What rituals bring strangers together?

Instead of: How do we find our tribe?

Ask: How do we build our neighborhood?

The infrastructure of human connection isn't broken because we haven't found the right people. It's broken because we've forgotten how to build spaces that work regardless of who shows up.

Stop looking for your tribe. Start rebuilding your neighborhood.

P.S. If this made you think, feel, or argue with yourself, forward it to someone you love. Or hate. Or both.