Tribal Origins
01Who we are
What we stand for
Our mission
We use anthropology, psychology and technology to help people through the hard parts of a life, and back into real community.
Our vision
Nobody should go through a death, a divorce or a burnout with nothing to hold onto.
Every hard passage should come with a form you can follow and people who show up.
What we value
Tap a value to see what it means.
What we're working toward
1
Launch Ritual OS
On 11/01/2026, with everything live from day one: practices matched to what each member is going through, The Hearthline, The Firekeepers and help in a crisis.
2
Launch Kithmark OS
On 11/01/2026, starting in the USA, so anyone can understand a hard relationship and get help with it.
3
Rebuild small circles
Connecting members with real practitioners and with each other on The Watering Hole.
4
Publish what we learn
About our own apps, including results that don't flatter us.
02The apps
Why our apps are called OS
OS means operating system. On a phone, it's the layer underneath that runs everything else. You have one too.
Call it the software of the soul. It came preinstalled, it's very old, and nobody gave you the manual.
Runs your inner life
Ritual OS
Practices matched to you, from traditions that have handled this before.
See how Ritual OS worksRuns your relationships
Kithmark OS
The family you were born into, the friends you chose, and everyone in between.
See how Kithmark OS worksBoth apps are built on the same research and held to the same values.
03The name
What the name means
Wired does two jobs in that name, and both of them are literal. Pick a word.
The first is hardwired. You did not choose most of what your brain does. The alarm that fires before you have consciously registered a threat, the pull toward people who look and sound like you, the way a loss lands in your body before it reaches your vocabulary. That equipment was assembled over a very long time, for conditions that no longer apply, and it did not come with an update.
Ancient animal, modern wiring, no manual.
That is the whole thesis in three words, and everything else on this site is a consequence of it.
04The problem
The mismatch
Biologists call it evolutionary mismatch. A creature built for one environment ends up living in another. Three of those gaps matter most to us.
05A definition
What we mean by ritual
A set sequence of actions, done the same way each time, that carries meaning beyond what the actions physically do.
What it is
- Repetition
- A fixed form
- Meaning attached to the form
What it isn't
- Religion
- Belief
- Mysticism
Ordinary examples
06The mechanism
Why this reduces stress
Stress is a prediction problem. A ritual is a small, deliberate island of certainty. Walk through it one step at a time.
Start with what stress actually is. Not a feeling, in the first instance. A prediction problem. The body runs a threat response when it cannot forecast what happens next, and it keeps running it until the uncertainty resolves. That is efficient over a short horizon and expensive over a long one, which is why the weeks that grind people down are the uncertain ones rather than the difficult ones.
07The other half
Why this bonds people
Doing the same thing, at the same time, with other people, does something you can measure.
In sync
Move, sing, breathe together.
People feel closer, cooperate more afterward and tolerate more discomfort.
Shared hardship
Go through something hard together.
People act more generously toward their group, and more so the harder it was.
What was lost
Not the ceremony.
The room full of people who show up for it. That's why Ritual OS connects you with practitioners and with each other.
08Honest limits
What the evidence does not say
We'd rather you hear this from us than find it later.
09Why us
Why we started this
Two people arrived from opposite directions at the same gap. There was an enormous amount to read, and nothing to do.
Somebody has written about your exact situation. Nobody has told you what to do about it on a Tuesday in the third month.
The gap
Every culture that lasted built forms for the hard parts of a life. They're documented and studied. What's missing is anyone whose job it is to get the right one to the right person at the right week.
The job
Not to be wise about it. To carry it.
10What we built
Why we built two apps
One gives a hard passage a form. The other works on the people around you.
The Wired Ape is the diagnosis. Ritual OS is the practice.
The problem isn't a shortage of information. It's delivery: knowing where you are, which practices fit, and handing you the practices that fit instead of a library to search.
It isn't therapy. Where a professional is the right answer, it says so rather than keeping you.
See how Ritual OS works11Our rules
What we do, and what we do not
Five rules we hold ourselves to. Open any of them.
Sources
Hobson, Schroeder, Risen, Xygalatas and Inzlicht (2018). The psychology of rituals: an integrative review and process-based framework. Personality and Social Psychology Review 22(3), 260 to 284.
Tarr, Launay, Cohen and Dunbar (2015). Synchrony and exertion during dance independently raise pain threshold and encourage social bonding. Biology Letters 11(10).
Xygalatas and colleagues (2013). Extreme rituals promote prosociality. Psychological Science 24(8), 1602 to 1605.
Konvalinka and colleagues (2011). Synchronized arousal between performers and related spectators in a fire-walking ritual. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108(20), 8514 to 8519.
Last reviewed 10/10/2026.
The Tribe
Two humans, two cats.
The people who built this, and the two who keep them honest.
Co-founder · Chief Human Officer
Sarah McCord Jamwal
Goes to the source, and the source is usually science.
Co-founder · CEO
Vishwinder Singh Jamwal
Builds the systems behind Ritual OS and Kithmark.
Co-Chief Emotional Officer
Noodle
Velvety. Goofy and graceful in the same breath.
Co-Chief Emotional Officer
Splotchy
Silky. Still. The kind of cool that isn't performed.
Hover over a photo, or tap it, to read more.
Why there are two cats on this page
We didn't evolve alone. Wolves were living alongside human hunter-gatherers long before anyone farmed, and by about 11,000 years ago dogs had already spread across much of the world. Cats came in with agriculture. Wildcats in the Near East moved into the first grain stores for the mice, and people let them stay. On Cyprus, someone was buried about 9,500 years ago with a cat beside them.
That's a long time to share a life with another species, and it changed both sides. When a dog and its person look at each other, oxytocin rises in both of them, the same hormone that bonds parents to infants. The animals learned to read us. We learned to be steadied by them.
Now the circle has thinned. In 2023 the US Surgeon General called loneliness an epidemic, with about half of American adults reporting it, and we don't expect that to reverse soon. For a lot of people the most reliable presence at home has four legs. The research on pets and loneliness is mixed, and a cat is no substitute for people. But a creature that's glad you came home is one of the oldest kinds of company there is.
So Noodle and Splotchy are on the team. Mostly they sleep.
Everything we study points to the same wound: the ancient animal, lost in a world it was never made for. Noodle and Splotchy looked at that research, blinked once, and went back to sleep in a patch of sun. Co-Chief Emotional Officers. Obviously.