This is too long a comment, therefore:
You always need to team up (or do something) if you have committed any commits, and the console has different commits. You can only click if it only adds new commits on top of what the console already has. (This is called fast forward.)
It is only you, therefore, the remote control should not have different fixations. But if you pull out a type of rebase or force it without understanding what you are doing, you may have created a delightfully absurd situation of merging a branch into yourself.
So, here's a crash course with one of those commit charts that you learn to hate:
H <- merge / \ you -> GE <- github | | FD \ / C | B | A
This is what the commit history can mean if you worked before C, then someone else (or you are on another computer) added D and E and pressed them, and then you started working with C again and did F and G. You cannot do this move because your local branch knows nothing about D and E or how they relate to history; you only have ABCFG .
But if you first teamed up to create H , now you have a branch with all the commits from both you and github, and github can be updated simply by “moving” its up arrow. You cannot do this work on a remote computer because it involves modifying your files to create merged versions, and the remote machine does not actually have physical copies of your files. (In addition, you would not have a way to resolve conflicts.)
git log --graph --oneline --decorate is a pretty useful presentation that should show you what you merged with. The above chart will exit for example:
* H (master) |\ *| G *| F |* E (origin/master) |* D |/ * C * B * A
git will tell you if there are conflicts after the merge, and git status (which should be done from a religious point of view) will always show conflicting files in scary red. When this happens, git will almost certainly inject conflict markers into these files, and you need to solve the problem and complete the merge. (git will tell you how to end the merge when it tells you about the conflict.)
If the material between the conflict markers was really garbage, your IDE may have messed up and messed up the files. git is pretty solid and should never destroy data (unless you ask for it, of course).