Your Neanderthal ancestors didn’t evolve to sit in a cubicle all day, which is why you have back pain and your posture is bad. They did, however, evolve to work together in tribes. We still have tribes today, but not the ones you think.

We are inherently social creatures, descended from tribal ancestors. Often you hear our tribes described as our political parties, religions, sports teams, or nations. These are all wrong. Tribes didn’t live together because they worshiped the same idols, although that was a natural consequence. They lived together out of necessity, to survive. A single Homo sapien can’t kill a woolly mammoth, survive a tiger attack, or keep watch throughout the night and still hunt in the day.

We survived because our brains evolved the ability to cooperate towards a shared goal. As much as you might hate their loud techno music while you’re trying to concentrate, you and your coworker are tied with a bond stronger than any of the others “tribes” due to your shared interest in your outcomes. If the company does well, you prosper. If it goes bankrupt, you’re both out of work and struggling to find food, just like your ancestors if they tried to go alone. By working towards a common goal, you link yourself to your coworkers in the most ancient way possible.

You spend more time at work than you do with your friends, family, or pillow. You don’t spend that time there because you enjoy it, although that hopefully comes as well. You take up arms alongside your fellow coworkers to fight for survival daily, and that time and experience draws you together in a way nothing else can. You form inside jokes in that time, memories of shared experiences, and opinions on various office figures. These all distinguish members of the tribe from those outside of it. If a member is incapable of contributing sufficiently to the tribe, the leaders will remove them quietly. None of this has changed in the past 600,000 years, older than humanity itself. Chimpanzees and wild dogs live and die by their tribes, and so do you.

For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.

-Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book