Calling Home from Mars

Junger ends the book with the practical question: what can a modern society do to give its members the tribal conditions humans evolved within. His suggestions are modest, partial, and culturally awkward. None of them solve the problem completely. Together they reduce it.

One: small fixed groups doing meaningful shared work. Whatever your domain, find or create the unit of about ten people whose presence in your life is daily and whose well-being you take responsibility for. The unit is the building block; the society's strange weightlessness comes from most people never belonging to one.

Two: rituals of return. When someone has been deployed, divorced, fired, bereaved, ill — has been away from the group for any reason — design an actual ritual that marks their reentry. Modern society has almost no return rituals. The veteran comes home to a quiet house. The bereaved widow returns to work and is given a card. Tribal societies marked these transitions explicitly because the explicit marking is what the returning person needs.

Three: shared difficulty. People bond through proximity in difficulty. Not manufactured difficulty (corporate retreats with trust falls) but real difficulty — building something hard, taking care of someone vulnerable, weathering a season. The bond produced is the asset most adults are starving for and the modern lifestyle systematically prevents.

The book closes with the reminder that humans are not failing to be modern; modernity is failing to provide what humans need. The solutions are individual and local, and they're available to anyone willing to make tribal conditions a deliberate design parameter of their own life.

His proposals are deliberately modest, partial, and culturally awkward, and he is candid that none of them fully solve the problem, though together they reduce it. The first is to build small, fixed groups doing meaningful shared work — find or create a unit of roughly ten people whose presence in your life is daily and for whose well-being you take genuine responsibility, since that unit is the basic building block of belonging. The second is to restore rituals of inclusion, especially homecoming ceremonies that formally reintegrate returning veterans into the community rather than leaving them to reenter alone. The third is to narrow the divisions — between rich and poor, between us and them — that fracture social cohesion and tell people they are not really in this together. And the fourth is to treat returning veterans as community members with something valuable to contribute rather than as damaged victims to be managed. Underneath all of them lies the book's enduring claim: belonging and being needed are not luxuries but human necessities, and a society that neglects them, however affluent, leaves its members quietly unwell.