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Top Ten Tribal Principles

 

 

Here are the Top Ten principles of the Tribal Way in order to live a life endowed with a sense of vitality and well-being.

 

 

 

1.  Foster Close Social Bonds.

Our ancestors grew up in small bands of people who counted on each other for their survival. Contemporary studies on well-being show that what separates very happy people from the rest of us is the strength of their social and romantic relationships.

2.  Be Physically Active.

The daily grind on the African Savanna involved walking great distances in search of food, carrying heavy buckets of water back and forth from the stream to the campsite, fetching firewood, and the occasional fight or flight with a dangerous animal.

3. Eat Healthy

Hunter-Gatherer’s ate a diet consisting of fresh, whole natural foods such as game meats, vegetables, fruits and nuts. There was no processed food to go around back then and consequently they enjoyed a robust health unimaginable by today’s average person.

4. Sleep

Sleep comes in a variety of different ways around the world, especially outside of western culture.  Whether you have to get your sleep all in one go, like taking an afternoon siesta, enjoy polyphasic or even sporadic sleep like some hunter-gather cultures, the important thing is to get plenty of it. While those of us in the West are often sleep deprived, hunter-gatherer’s chief complaint was sleeping too much!

5. Get Out In Nature

A variety of studies have shown the benefits of being immersed in nature range from improved health to a calm mind and better concentration. Our ancestors lived amongst the flora and fauna like a wild animal. Flowers, trees, landscapes, camp-fires, sunsets…soak it all up.

 

 

 

6. Calm Your Mind

According the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging at UCLA the average person thinks 70,000 thoughts per day. Constantly wrapped up in this tornado of worries, thoughts of the future and past is stressful and exhausting. Hunter-Gatherers in contrast lived almost entirely in the present moment and had a remarkable lack of worry or stress.  Hunter-Gather’s are said to be the first meditators, staring at the flames of a burning fire and letting their thoughts drift away. Meditation, Yoga, and relaxation techniques such as slow breathing should be used daily.

7. Less Work, More Leisure

Meaningful work, not too much. That is the key to a happy profession. Hunter-Gather’s spent 20 hours a week or less foraging for food. Most of their day was spent in abundant leisure activity, playing games, singing songs, gossiping with friends and family and taking naps. Figuring out how to accomplish this in our workaholic modern world is the big challenge. If you have any ideas please write them in comments section below!

8. LIve Adventurously!

In the Maasai tribe of Africa, a boy is not considered a man until he has killed his first lion. With a spear….

Can you even fathom the amount of courage this takes? Nietzsche famously said “Whatever does not kill you, makes you stronger”.  The Tribal Way doesn’t recommend you becoming adrenaline junkies, but occasionally pushing your boundaries, taking risks, and exploring new horizons can imbue one with a sense of competence and confidence.

9. Enjoy Art

Tribal societies regularly engaged in community dances and rituals. They sang songs, painted their bodies, wore masks, adorned themselves with jewelry and had a great sense of fashion.

 

10. Explore the Occasional Altered State of Consciousness

The happiest people to ever walk the face of this planet are the Shaman’s of hunter-gatherer societies and the enlightened monks and yogi’s from East.  While the safest way to reach these higher states is through advanced meditation techniques, this also takes the longest. Psychoactive plants such as magic mushrooms, peyote, Kava, and marijuana have a long history of use in tribal societies. The more intense psychedelic trips should be only explored under the supervision of an experienced user as they are in these tribal cultures. If done right and safely, these trips can create a life changing glimpse into the magic of reality. The high doesn’t last however, and that is why we here at the tribal way recommend hardcore meditation so as to be able to achieve these amazing states of mind safely and on command.

 

 

 

 

 

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My Favorite Breakfast – Egg scramble with salmon and veggies

 

 

 

 

Ingredients

 

  • 3 eggs
  • 1/4 Onion
  • Spinach
  • Baby Tomatoes
  • Smoked Salmon
  • Sliced Mushrooms
  • Butter

 

How to Cook

  1. Cut off a slice of butter and place it in a stove top pan, turn heat to medium.
  2. Slice Onion and Mushroom into small pieces and place in pan. Cook for 5 minutes on medium heat.
  3. Crack eggs and place in pan, quickly scramble eggs and cook for 2-3 minutes while stirring occasionally.
  4. Place smoked salmon, spinach and baby tomatoes in pan. Cook for 1 minute while stirring.
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What To Buy at the Grocery Store

You’ve decided you are going to try the paleolithic diet. You’ve read this post and have a general idea of what it is you are supposed to eat, and what it is you are supposed to avoid.  You throw out everything you own that isn’t healthy and you make your way to the grocery storeonly to realize…’wait, what exactly should I buy?’.

Never fear, here is a list of staple items to get..

1st thing: throw out everything not paleo.

Staples to have:

  • Olive Oil
  • Peppers
  • Onions
  • Eggs
  • Zucchini
  • Yellow Squash
  • Spices  – Will take time and some investment. Just buy as recipe’s call for them.
  • Tomatoes – Diced
  • Tomato paste
  • Frozen vegetables
  • Frozen fruits (for smoothies).
  • sweet potatoes
  • Cucumber
  • Spinach
  • Salad mix
  • carrots
  • Salsa
  • guacamole (or avocados)
  • garlic

Moderation staples:  Buy depending on diet needs. Trying to loss weight – buy less fruit  and nuts. Nuts can also start being addicting and too easy to snack on.

  • Fruits: bananas, apples, berries, etc..
  • Nuts – almonds, brazil, walnuts, pecans, macademia
  • Almond Butter
  • Organic Ketchup
  • BBQ Sauce – Bone Suckin’ Sauce (Only paleo ingredients)
  • Almond milk (only if you need to ween off of milk, but optimally don’t buy this).

Meats:

  • FIsh
  • Chicken
  • Steak
  • Pork
  • Game meats or anything else exotic that you feel like diving into

 

 

 

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The Perfect Athletic Build

What is the perfect athletic build? In this post I will outline my thoughts on what the perfect athletic build is..and just as a hint of what’s to come..it’s probably not what you think it is.

 

What does the perfect body for all around athleticism look like?  Is it big and powerful like an Adrian Peterson? Thin and wiry like a triathlete? Or something in between?

How do you even define athleticism?

Let’s start here.

Most would say all around athleticism is the summation of individual athletic traits, such as strength, speed, endurance, agility and coordination.  To find the best athlete one could then test an individual on each of these variables and come up with some numerical output to determine their athleticism. But are we to give equal weight to each variable? How should we determine the relative importance of flexibility and strength? Should they be equal, or is strength more important than flexibility? What about endurance versus top end speed? This kind of analysis is just too messy, and it leads to too much subjectivity.

A more concrete way to find the best athlete would be to have athletes compete against each other in every individual sport in the Olympic Games. By competing in every single event, the athletes would be tested on all facets of athleticism, from pure power in the weight lifting competition to the ultimate endurance in cross country skiing. Now, getting athletes to do this is impossible, but can we imagine what kind of athlete would come out on top in this challenge?

Would it be a large, powerful competitor such as a football player? A smaller, more coordinated gymnast?

Another way to think about who would be the ultimate all around athlete would be the following competition. Imagine that the name of all the Olympic sports were thrown into a hat, and you had to pick out a sport at random. It could be rock climbing, it could be the half pipe in snowboarding or it could be the pole vault.  Without knowing what sport will be chosen, what size athlete would you want to compete in the mystery event?

One way to test this is to find out the average height and weight of a male Olympic Gold medalist.

The assumption here is that by taking the average height and weight, our hypothetical average athlete would be competitive in the widest variety of events, and hence win our challenge.

Thanks to the great website www.sports-reference.com I meticulously searched out the height and weight of every single gold medal winner, in every single individual event from gymnastics and weight lifting, to downhill skiing, speed skating and the luge. Absolutely every event from both the 2010 Winter Olympics and the 2008 Summer games were included.*  I averaged out their height and weight and came up with the following…

The mean height and weight of a male Olympic Gold medalist from the last two Olympics was 5’11.75 inches and 176.4 pounds.

The median height and weight of a male Olympic gold medalist was 6’0, 173 pounds.

I imagine that this is a lot smaller than you were expecting when you were picturing the perfect human athletic specimen. Perhaps you were thinking of someone like Lebron James or even the hulking Brock Lesnar. But how would Lebron or Brock do on a mountain bike? Their huge physiques would be an enormous disadvantage.  To be an all around athlete, carrying around too much mass is a hindrance to endurance activity.

You can’t have it both ways, you cannot be super strong and have super endurance, there is a balancing act between the two. That is why marathon runners weigh 120 pounds and the strongest weightlifters up near 300.

My analysis of the perfect athlete comes dangerously close to the top performer in the sport marketed for producing the world’s greatest athlete. The Decathlon. This year’s gold medalist, and world record holder in the decathlon is Ashton Eaton.

Ashton Eaton, 6’1, 180.8 pounds.

Other athletes within this range include..

Andre Agassi, who is 5’11 and 176 pounds..

 

And Willie Mays, 5’11, 175 pounds.

 

Notice that Eaton, Agassi and Mays all have lean, muscular physiques. They are strong, but not overly powerful, they look like they have a solid amount of functional strength, but still have the endurance to push themselves for hours on end.  In contrast to your average gym go-er with bulging biceps and chicken legs, they are well proportioned, with strong legs, thick cores and toned upper bodies.

Does this kind of build make sense from an evolutionary perspective?

Of course it does. Our ancestors certainly had to be strong in order to carry large game, firewood, buckets of water, and perhaps fight off any rivals.  But endurance mattered as well, sometimes hunts would last for days. That is dozens of hours of non-stop walking and tracking game. Hunter-gatheres had to be strong, but they had to be lean and fit as well.

Is it just a coincidence that the lean muscled body of a hunter-gatherer resembles that of our perfect athlete?

 

 

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*I eliminated team sports (One can’t compete 1 on 1 in soccer). For Sports with built in weight classes, I took the Super-Heavyweights, seeing as they are likely the strongest competitors and more often than not win an absolute division title (although this isn’t always the case…it’s certainly conceivable that a heavyweight or even light heavyweight could beat a superheavyweight), but let’s err on the side of caution here.

 

 

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This is the Tribal Way..

You are a wild animal.

 

You are the product of 3.5 billion years of evolution. You have billions of direct ancestors. All of whom were able to successfully navigate the world, kill their own food and find a partner to bear offspring. In the last few million years your human ancestors were able to hunt wild prey with either their bare hands, or at most, rudimentary tools.  They lived care free and healthy lives.

How does your life compare to your tribal ancestors?

Can you chase down a wild boar with nothing but a spear? Are you lean and fit? Can you walk all day long on your bare feet while carrying a small deer on your back?

This is the tribal way.

Do you sleep well every night? Do you wake up refreshed and joyful as you step outside into the warm morning sun?

Are you having soul melting sex with a healthy, beautiful partner several times a week?

This is the tribal way.

Do you eat a breakfast of ripe, delicious fruits? Does your diet subsist of wild, fresh plants and animals?

Are you perfectly healthy? Are your teeth white straight and shining? Do you have clear skin? Perfect eye sight, and a body that feels energetic?

Do you spend most of the day laughing and playing games with your closest family and friends?

Are you free of stress and worry? Are you present, here and now, with a clear mind? Do you walk around with the lightness of a feather? Do you dance?

This is the tribal way.

As the sun sets, and the full moon lights up the sky. Do you stare up at those beautiful distant stars as you succumb to the vast awesomeness of the universe?

 

Press Play. Dance.

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The Morality of Eating Meat, or Why Vegetarianism is a Disease of Civilization

 

 

This is my 600 word essay I submitted to the New York Times Essay Contest on why eating meat is moral. 

 

ld argue that getting eaten by humans is the greatest thing that has ever happened to the species we consume. There are 19 billion chickens, 1.5 billion cows, and over a billion pigs and goats in the world. The fact that we farm and eat these animals has made their species and ours the five most successful vertebrate species ever to walk on land.

But to do so would miss the point of why eating meat is ethical, or better put-it is not unethical.  Any decision about ethics needs to be wrapped in a framework of an ethical theory that makes rational sense.  Unfortunately, none do.  As philosopher Richard Joyce has effectively argued, morality is a myth. Evolutionary psychology reigns.

If a great white shark has a twin, he will eat his brother in the womb. Is this shark unethical for doing so? In a gene-centered view of evolution, this kind of cannibalism is in the shark’s genetic interests.  Not as self-sufficient as our gill-bearing distant cousins, our biology dictates that we are better served to survive and pass on our genes with help of others. Our innate moral preferences are really just the encoded set of behaviors and emotions that helped our ancestors survive and replicate in the millions of years humanoids roamed the earth in a hunter-gatherer existence. We do not eat our brothers when we are young because we need them to help hunt woolly mammoths when we grow up.

This is not to say that humans can’t have subjective wishes for their own life. Like to be happy and healthy. Or make rational choices to increase our well being with other’s we share society with. But it does mean that there is no objective binding force that requires us to live our lives in such a way. And subsequently, there is no binding force that would require humans to devote their efforts to the emotions of non-human animals who can’t reciprocate in the social contract.

Visit any extant hunter-gatherer society in Africa or the Amazon and you will find the happiest, healthiest, and psychologically well-adjusted people on earth. You will also see they have absolutely no qualms about killing animals.  They innately know that humans in their group are to be loved and respected and other animals are food.  Pygmy children will start hunting small game around the camp as early as age three.

The vast majority of people living in modern society today have never killed a creature larger than an insect.  This discord between modern society and the environment of our evolutionary adaptation has led to a situation where we have become overly sensitized to the cycle of life.  While our ancestors shot wildlife with arrows, the majority of our interactions with animals today comes in form of having pets. In vegetarians, the mechanisms in the human brain designed to feel empathy for fellow tribesman has become misplaced and spilled over to mammals once relegated to things we eat.

From the perspective of raising our own subjective well-being, it is hard to see how this misplaced empathy is anything but a psychological defect.  The meat eater feels plenty of joy while eating a nice cut of steak. The vegetarian, ostensibly feels disgust at this same action. Perhaps one day vegetarianism will be placed alongside heart disease, cancer and the other diseases of civilization.  As Nietzsche famously put it over a century ago, the moralists say little about objective ethics, but revealed much of their own psychology.

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Video of the Happy Tribal Islanders of Tanna

Here is a video I edited from the television show “Meet the Natives” (both the UK and US version).  The premise of the show was to go a remote Island in the South Pacific to meet a bunch of tribal people still living in ignorance of the modern world. The show’s producers would then fly these natives around the U.S and U.K and see what they thought about our modern life.

While they obviously learned a lot about our culture, I think we learned even more from them, and what they had to say about the way we live is FASCINATING.

 

 

Here are just a few of the many things that I love about this video..

0:45  – The infectious excitement of this old man.  “Ehh seoo seoo deooo! Ehh seoo seoo deoo!!”

0:57 – The village has a designated ‘Happy Man’, whose job is to go around and make sure everyone is in a good mood.

1:36 – Their one piece of clothing is called a ‘penis sheath’.

3:05 – Their absolute shock that people in modern times don’t walk around smiling and happy. This is telling, they find it shocking that people aren’t friendly and happy? Like..What is going on here? Just goes to show that their normal day is filled with good cheer.

4:50 – Kuai jokes that he is only helping his friend build a house so that they can drink the psychedelic root Kava afterwards.

6:35 – Tribal man reveals his secret of happiness.

7:10 – After seeing all the wonders of modern technology, their final conclusion is that the English should go back to living a more traditional life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Purpose of Your Life

In this post: You will learn the way of life that would bring you the maximum amount of meaning and purpose imaginable. But I don’t want to give you false hopes, you won’t be be able to achieve it.  Although, ironically, this way of life was the default for the vast majority of human existence.

First let us distinguish between two separate questions.

1.What is the purpose of life; why is there anything living at all?

and..

2. How do you find purpose and meaning in your life?

The first question was answered around 150 years ago when a man named Charles Darwin developed the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. For a mindblowing and lucid account of the purpose of life, especially the purpose of human life check out the chapter “Why are people?” in Richard Dawkins seminal book “The Selfish Gene”.

Since the tag team of Darwin and Dawkins has already handled that question so magically I want to move on to what is a more personal if not more important question.

How do you find purpose and meaning in your life?

When people ask how do they find purpose and meaning in life, they are asking something akin to – what should I do with my life? What could I being doing that would make me excited to get up in the morning? What career path would give me satisfaction at a deep psychological level?

Here is your answer. It will also be the answer to almost every health and happiness question that will come up in your life.

You are designed to do what is needed to survive and replicate your genes. Your body has a built in reward system that gives you the feelings of purpose, meaning, health, and happiness by accomplishing the tasks that increase your ability to survive and replicate.

The problem with finding meaning and purpose in life in modern society is two-fold. 1)We have too many choices about what to do for work that we are caught up in a paradox of choice. 2)The activities that we engage in are hardly recognized by our body as contributing to our survival and replicating value (SRV).

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had no decision to make about what they were going to do for their ‘careers’.  They didn’t have to decide whether they wanted to be insurance salesmen, writers, lawyers, accountants, or strippers. While we often think having a number of options to choose from is a good thing, psychologists have recently shown that when faced with too many choices, people actually get stressed out. See psychologist Barry Schwartz ‘s excellent book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less for an in depth analysis of the topic.

Gonga, a living member of the Hadzabe tribe Africa had this to say about who he was. “Only when I am sleeping, I am not a hunter. I am a hunter all the time I am awake. That is what I am and who I am. I kill animals for meat.”

Hunting (or gathering for women) is the original career choice of human life.  There is a direct connection between the necessity to hunt and the end goal of eating food.  With any other job in modern society the degrees of separation take away from it’s meaning. This is problem number 2. The reward system to motivate us towards actions that are beneficial for our SRV evolved during our days in the African Savannah, not for our complex modern world where the work you do today is far removed from what your body knows to be beneficial for your SRV.

Imagine you are a bank teller. You help people withdraw and deposit money from their accounts. You sit behind a counter, press buttons on a computer.  You don’t particularly enjoy this job, you do this so that you can get paid, so that you can have money to buy food at a market that you can go home and eat.  Although by being a bank teller you are increasing your SRV you body hardly recognizes it as such.

Being a bank teller in order to earn funds to go to the store to buy food with is not as visceral a purpose as hunting. I am hungry, I must find an animal, engage in a life or death battle with it. Kill it, then eat it. I’ll bring it home to the tribe, where the women will be grateful for the danger I have put myself in to bring them this delicious source of protein, and they will sleep with me for it.

We are all searching for a job,  a purpose that replicates hunting and gathering. We just aren’t aware of it.  People often say things like “I want to do something meaningful.” Jobs that are often described as meaningful are jobs that help other people, being a nurse or a teacher, running a non-profit organization.

What could be more meaningful than feeding your hungry tribe? Your family and friends who you have known your entire life? To put food in your hungry belly and theirs? There cannot be a job more meaningful than hunting or gathering.

Imagine a conversation on finding purpose and meaning in life between you and Gonga.

You: “I want to do something exciting,”

Gonga: “What could be more exciting than fighting a wild animal in a game of life or death?”

You: “I want to do something that is intellectually challenging.”

Gonga: “Have you ever learned how to track game? Can you tell where that antelope will be by footprint he left in the dirt?”

You: “I can’t handle the monotony of my job!”

Gonga: “Today we hike into the forests for wild boar, in a few days we will fish by the river, than we will set traps to catch these birds.”

You: “I don’t like my co-workers or my boss.”

Gonga: “I hunt with my friends and cousins. My wife gathers food with her sisters and friends. They will laugh and gossip. “

You: “I spend most of my day sitting in front of a computer screen. Ruining my eyes and getting fat.”

Gonga: “I hike everyday in beautiful nature. I often stare out in the distant horizon, I am lean and muscular.”

You: “Work is stressful. I want to do something different, but I can’t risk losing my paycheck.”

Gonga: “I love to hunt. I don’t even have a word in my vocabulary that corresponds to work.”

….. So now you have your answer. You want your life to be infused with meaning and purpose? Become a hunter-gatherer in a remote tribe in the African bush.

Easier said than done of course.