Collective Effervescence: Why Strangers Become Family at Festivals, Football Matches, and Everything In Between
My son came back from Download Festival last week absolutely buzzing.
It was his first festival without me, just him and his mates, and he couldn't stop talking about the atmosphere. How welcoming everyone was. How a field full of strangers somehow turned into a field full of mates within about a day. He's twenty now, and watching him come home lit up like that, slightly sunburnt, slightly deaf, completely happy, was one of those moments I'll keep.
At the same time, Boston has been full of Scotland fans.
If you've missed it, the Tartan Army has more or less taken over the city for the World Cup. Fifty thousand of them, by some estimates. Bars running dry. Statues all over Boston wearing traffic cones, because apparently that's a decades-old tradition that the locals decided Boston deserved too. Boston and Glasgow have become sister cities off the back of it. A Boston local told a reporter, completely straight-faced, "I think we should keep them." Nine months from now there will reportedly be a small wave of ginger babies with a faint trace of Scottish charm about them, and the memes about it are very funny.
Two completely different events, a music festival and a football tournament, and the same thing happening at both. Strangers becoming, briefly, a kind of family.
I don't think that's a coincidence, and I don't think it's really about football or music either. There's a name for what happens in moments like this, collective effervescence, a term from sociology for the particular kind of energy that builds when a large group of people share the same emotion at the same time. It's the same mechanism whether you're in a stadium, a field at Download, or, for that matter, somewhere far older and quieter, gathered round a fire. We are, it turns out, built for this. Built to come together, to feel something at the same time as the people around us, and to walk away feeling more connected rather than less.
Which makes me think the version of humans we see on the news, the angry, suspicious, divided version, might not actually be our default setting. It might just be what happens when people are frightened, or told a story about who the enemy is, or kept apart long enough to forget what the alternative feels like. Given half a chance, in a field, in a bar, on a street corner with a traffic cone, we apparently default to warmth.
I think about this a lot in relation to Finlay, too. He doesn't have his dad around, and for a long time I've felt that building his sense of what family and connection and trust look like is, fairly or not, mostly on me. Watching him come home from a field full of strangers talking about how looked after he felt by people he'd never met, that told me something landed. Not because I did anything in that moment. Because somewhere along the way, he learned that people, in the main, are good, and worth trusting, and worth gathering with.
That's the whole point of what I'm trying to build here, if I'm honest. Not a wellness brand. Just somewhere that field-and-fire feeling can happen on a smaller, quieter, more regular scale than once every World Cup.
We are, underneath everything, built to love each other. Boston just got a very loud, very kilted reminder of it.
Kirsten x
