Established rituals are a cornerstone of any successful culture.
Behaviors that go beyond habits, the things we do without question. Prayers before bedtime. Church on Sunday. Meals around the dinner table. Town meetings. Holidays that flow with the seasons. Just to list a few "traditional" ones.
Compare these with the rituals we perform today: social-media swiping, watching algorithmically selected videos, "the daily hate". Using an app to order and pay for coffee.
I remember when kids rebelled against the strait-laced rituals of the 50s and 80s. (Behaviors, like fashions, seem to follow a 30 year cycle.) We felt like: why should we live like this? We never chose this. We may have been born into a family sitcom but there are so many more options now; now, we can change the channel!
And we had a point. Why go along with the mob, when the mob might go to church one day, and lynch the next?
But it doesn't feel like we've chosen today's rituals, either. We don't really choose to pick up our phone in the morning just to turn off the alarm, just to check email, and messages, just to flick through hours of social media feeds. But if we don't have anything else to do, we can stay in our beds, phone-swiping for ages. The only thing we "choose" is to go on, screen after screen.
A distant friend of mine posted on Facebook the other day that he'd just lost three hours to Instagram Reels. "Maybe it's time to delete the app," he wrote.
Maybe. But then why post about it instead of deleting it?
I watch people swiping away on the train. Guys with hoodies. Women with amazing nails. Suited professionals, unemployed bums.
All the same: the slouched posture. The zombie stare. The phone akimbo, as if it's almost too heavy, while the thumb smears it once per second, just long enough for a flicker of motion from a video. Occasionally they back-track. Something grabbed their attention before they realized it grabbed their attention and they put on the brakes, like rubber-necking at an accident you just passed at 70 mph. Three seconds or so later they realize, no, they weren't really interested in that after all. At least not as much as they might be interested in the next thing.
Criticizing social media addicts feels a little too easy. It's certainly not unique or groundbreaking--just about every content creator out there has come to realize this is a problem, that maybe we haven't built the world we wanted after all. And here I am making fun of people with their phones, as if I haven't lost more hours than I care to acknowledge to doomscrolling.
The funny thing is, most of the good stuff that has come my way over the past decade has come via social media. My current job was posted on Facebook. The idea for my new career came from a Youtube video. My class reunion and a bunch of other fun real-life social stuff would never have happened if I hadn't been swiping away, at least a little.
So I have to wonder at the premise of my criticism. Sure, there's lots of mindless social-media phone flicking going on. But there's also a hell of a lot of comments piling up under those videos. People giving enough of a crap about them to think up a response, compose and share it--and then return for an (often) heated defense of their take.
Say what you want about the toxicity of the comments sections. They represent, at least, a level of engagement coming from somewhere, even if I don't see it from my fellow commuters.
But do they represent choice? And, to the extent that we engage with them again and again, (in a habit which quickly becomes a ritual), do they foster behavior which contributes to peaceful, harmonious thriving?
Here's a question about motivation and attention: what am I trying to do when I play the piano? or write a story?
Both are performative acts. Both call for an audience. Look at this! I could educate you, or entertain you, or at least stir some kind of emotional response if you'd just Pay Attention!
What right do I have to make fun of Tik-Tok thots when I'm over here tapping away at keyboards, seeking the same currency?
In my heart-of-hearts, and at least right now, after the last seven years of work I've been through, I would argue to any therapist sufficiently paid to listen that the practice of my two chosen hobbies is less performative and more therapeutic (if we're being generous) or masturbatory (if we're not) in that what I really want for the foreseeable future is as much silence and solitude as I can acquire and afford, and that I absolutely am not writing stories or playing music for attention. I love the habits of music and writing for their flow states, for the way they allow me, for a short time, to know my own mind without the constant external stimulation that chips away at and dismantles my sense-of-self to the point that, after a long day of work, it feels like I'm waking into a body that's been wrecked, drained and destroyed by a nightmare that can only be recalled in fragments. There is nothing inherently more noble in my creative habits then there is in playing a sport or a video game, or at least nothing more productive. I'm not performing either activity at the elite level that would merit an audience. Rather, I'm enjoying the activity for the fun of it.
The ritual of ranking.
When I play some video-game and finish in the bottom 60% of players, I get the feeling that, hey, that's pretty good for me. I had a kind-of fun time at it, more or less, and at least I didn't spend a ton of money.
But yeah, it does sting a bit to be below average. At a video game. And have it out, like this is something I'm meant to be practicing.
That's another big change that's hit in the past 20 years: the ritual of ranking. Anything we do now, we've got to be told just where we rate at it. We have these computers that can track our "metrics", don't you see? And if we're not the best in the world at it, what's the point?
Because everyone has access to everything, all of the time. (cue: Bo Burnham's quarantine-era hit.)
I may have spent a year practicing Bach's Overture in the French Style, but you, with the same 16 hours of daily conscious attention you've always had as a human being, have no reason to pay fourteen minutes of that attention to my rendition when Grigory Sokolov's is just a click away. And I, as a hobbyist with a few hours a week available for practice, could never claim to offer enough precision and virtuosity to request that you watch me pound away on the electric piano I picked up for free at the dump, when you could watch Daniil Trifonov channeling his otherworldly energies into a concert grand.
And that's fine with me, because I don't particularly want an audience, right now. (Ahem. But please keep reading...)
For someone who does want an audience, though. Well, the pressure to deliver must be immense. If you can't get to #1 through straightforward excellence in something, you've got to carve out a niche. So: don't worry about offering the most technically dazzling performance. Play the most emotional one. Or play on a piano where the hammers have been replaced with... hammers. Or perform on an iceberg. Or throw on a sexy dress. Do what it takes to put another hashtag there and claw your way up the algorithm.
I'm struggling to come to a conclusion here. What's my point?
That I'm almost 50 and I'm tired. And that a big part of this tired is constant over-stimulation. And despite being tired and over-stimulated, I keep clicking on things that I know are engineered to profit off the tiny bit of attention I have left, to the detriment of maintaining a meaningful life.
I've quit drinking and smoking but I can't quit clicking.
There's an extra-sinister twist here. Technology used to represent freedom and opportunity.
There are real miracles on offer. Growing up, I couldn't afford to listen to a professional performance of a piano piece I was working on. A CD cost four hours' labor at a weekend job; CD players themselves were out of reach.
Today, a music student can watch a dozen performances of the same piece, in HD video, in the palm of his hand.
Would the same bounty have made me practice harder? Or would I just have given up sooner, discouraged by such a vast harvest of competition?
Impossible to say.
Even now, I feel the pull of putting on a couple of Youtube videos. You know, as a reward for sitting still and writing for the past couple of hours. But it's not even 9 AM yet; I know that I could lose the rest of the morning to spectation, and a good portion of the afternoon as well.
The future will belong to people who can regulate their own dopamine.
That's what ritual used to do for us. Those silly things that didn't make much sense, that we didn't feel like doing, but we did them anyway. We put down our toys and came to the dinner table. We went to church and had conversations with our neighbors. We said a prayer before bed and, in doing so, organized our thoughts. Our parents said it was for God and Family, but that was just part of it. Really, it was to order our brains, to regulate who we were, to give us the strength to make our own choices. Instead of pretending to make our own choices, while doing what some marketing-driven algorithm selected for us.
Without good ritual, there's no opportunity to slow down and know our own thoughts. You're left fighting like hell to find them on your own.
Unless otherwise stated, images are the work of the author, sometimes assisted by a bucket of algorithms he keeps under his desk. Feel free to copy, remix and share images from this post according to the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike 4.0 International license.
Camera divider and signature illustration by 