Originally published on substack: https://eliqian.substack.com/camaraderie

This tweet is an exaggeration, but only barely:

https://twitter.com/DrifterShoots/status/1515095665831026689?s=20

You yourself probably remember waking up during that time and just feeling different. I'd like to propose a new term—camaraderie at scale—to describe these moments.

This got me thinking—when has camaraderie occurred at scale before, and what made those moments so special? How can we engineer more of them into our lives?

Some notable ones in recent memory: Linsanity, 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Some notable ones (or so I'm told) that I'm too young to remember: 9/11, Sosa vs. McGwire, the Moon landing.

Camaraderie at scale is extremely powerful. Few things in the world can mobilize and unite entire nations, or in some instances, the whole planet. I spent some time researching and reliving past moments in an effort to document the factors that made them so special.

Side quest: origins of camaraderie

It's worth exploring the word camaraderie and its closely related comrade. Comrade has origins in French, Italian, and Spanish words that all mean something along the lines of “one who shares the same room.”

I really like this definition because it conveys a sense of being in something together. A comrade is someone sympathetic to your cause—bound by an ideology, but not necessarily similar or connected in any other way.

Camaraderie is about some connection that brings together otherwise disparate people. I think the key concept behind this is identity, and how moments can change who we identify as.

Micro-identities & micro-communities

Everyone has an identity—a label they give themselves that connects them to a concept, group, or ideology. Most people have multiple identities. You might identify as a student, but also as a writer, a person who loves to cook, and a Taylor Swift fan. Most people also have layers of identity. I identify as Chinese, but also Asian American. I love basketball, but also the 76ers, and I’m a big fan of Tyrese Maxey.

Labels and identities are very influential. They dictate what tribes we belong to, whose ideas we support, and how we perceive others. And for most of our lives, we are stuck in various “micro-identities”—extremely niche labels with limited membership.

You don’t identify with your high-level identities, such as “human” or “woman” as often as your lower-leve...

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