How do you keep up to 150 Humans bonding together?

Gossip.

According to Yuval Noah Harari, gossiping is what makes it possible for larger numbers of Humans to stick together than other ape groups.

To keep even larger numbers together we resort to myths and stories to believe in together:

‘Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another.’*

Harari doesn’t differentiate between myths which have an initiating event and those which do not, but when he mentions stories he highlights something crucial to Human life:

‘As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that we have never seen, touched, or smelled.’*

Who wants to live in an unimaginative now that we have been intoxicated by the possibility of life getting bigger and better: a story we’re gossiping every day.

Who are we becoming when we pursue and live out our stories?
What about stories which allow us to love the stranger?
How do we become creatures which make all of life thrive?
Which stories will we pursue alone and together?
Where will the stories we participate in take us as a species in the two hundred or five hundred years?
Where will our evolutionary journey (which is one we hold in our own hands because of the stories we have lived) take us next?

(*From Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.)