Society: When he reached his early 30s, Ethan Watters took a look around and found he had a devil on both shoulders. One was a responsible, post-war, parental figure, the other, a freewheeling, post-Star Wars, party-loving singleton.
These devils plagued him. One whispered insecurities: When are you going to stop living with your friends? Why aren't you married? Why are you wasting your life? Meanwhile, the other lived it up: Buy a house? Buy that vintage Atari T-shirt on E-bay instead! Wasting your life? How could building a personal hovercraft ever be a waste? And marriage? Dude!
Understandably confused, Watters took a second look around and discovered something more heartening - he wasn't alone as a single, un-mortgaged, early thirtysomething. In fact, he could count 25 friends with similar lifestyles, and every one - Watters included - considered themselves emotionally well-supported, socially active and for the most part, to be living life to the full.
"I had seen something in my life: namely, that after nearly two decades of being single, my friends seemed to form a coherent community," he observed. This community he named his "urban tribe".
Watters proceeds to chart the history and prevalence of these tribes. Thankfully, he avoids the smug self-analysis you might expect under the circumstances and instead adopts a self-deprecating, personal approach. Beginning with the "truly embarrassing amount of freedom" his friends have in comparison to previous generations, he composes a list of reasons why urban tribes might have emerged: "We were not tied down by family . . . we had remarkable freedom in how we pursued romantic relationships . . . we were free from general strife and the thinking of some national movement or other . . ." and, most significantly, "we had the freedom of time".
Lots of time. Whereas, previously, people might have only had a year or two between school or college and marriage, now Watters finds, they could have five, 10, or even 15. So what do people do with all this freedom? Well, they paint each other's houses or move each other's furniture. They care for someone who has fallen ill, and talk each other through break-ups. They develop close bonds with friends, as close as those with family.
"Those who had money loaned it to those who didn't," Watters says of his own group. "Everything we owned was shared, or loaned, or given away".
While all this is admirable, not much of it is breaking news. An urban tribe then, is a group of young people, post-college and pre-marriage, sharing life, laughs, loves and losses. Sound like Friends? It should - Watters admits that at times the TV show so closely resembled his own life he was barely able to watch it. In fact, he uses TV and movies as key signifiers of the "urban tribe" - Seinfeld, Will and Grace, Sex and The City are all full of similar groups. (Hold this book to your ear and you can almost hear Carrie Bradshaw intone its subtitle, "Are Friends the New Family?").
Where Watters comes into his own, however, is when he tracks what other activities people get up to, that "broad middle ground between the altruistic and the ridiculous". These form the comic core of Watters's book, a comedy that perhaps is only partly intentional. Of his own group, he writes: "We started ironic country bands. We planned elaborate costumed trips to Vegas. One friend transformed his apartment into a mini-museum for 1950s airline memorabilia", while another started "a collection of outdated technology".
Elsewhere, he recalls Critical Mass - an ad hoc organisation of cyclists, whose monthly meetings brought thousands onto San Francisco's streets, deliberately clogging rush-hour traffic. Acknowledging that many didn't care or even know what the event was about, he remembers around 100 cyclists "blocking the entrance to the Stockton Street Tunnel, chanting: 'We need a slogan!' "
The tone shifts slightly in the second part of the book, where Watters looks at the pressure of marriage, "civilization's basic unit - its carbon atom - of community", on these urban tribes. If more and more people are functioning as part of large single groups, he asks, is marriage in decline? And are these tribes responsible? Maybe, he concedes, but ultimately most people are simply delaying marriage, rather than rejecting it. And perhaps that delay is no bad thing, if people mature and come to a better understanding of what they want from a partner.
Watters's search for answers as to why he's still single in his 30s is entertaining and highly readable. He occasionally loses the run of his argument, as when he recasts his circle of acquaintances as a sort of networked underground resistance, or overuses the term "tribe" (he appears desperate for it to take hold, smuggling it onto almost every page) - but, in general, he's even-handed and honest. Ultimately, he has no regrets about the time he spent as a member of a "tribe", although he admits: "If I'd known I'd be there for so long . . . I certainly would have taken the time to paint some of my apartments and buy nicer furniture."
If this rings true for you, you may wish to investigate.
• Breffni O'Malley is a freelance journalist