All my life, I’ve felt deeply, instinctively, unsafe in groups. I don’t mean groups like my family, who are my most beloved people on earth. I just mean group life in general.
For a long time, I wondered how this could be - especially since humans are famously social animals, evolved to live in tribes.
But the older I get, the more I suspect that this instinctive wariness has something to do with the strange way we now talk about individualism — as if it were something selfish or suspect.