Aug 6, 2025–How much do you let ritual and habit rule your life?
What if you stopped all rituals?
First, let’s define rituals. Familiar ones might include touching the sign for luck while running out of a football locker room, saying your prayers before a meal, or just how you make coffee.
It can be big–how and who you worship. It can be minor–which pant leg do you step into first?
I’m playing with a theory that we all let habit control too much about the way we live.
I understand the practicality of establishing routines. When we are babies, everything, literally, is new. We must figure out that a rubber ball, when dropped, goes to the floor. Then it comes back up. A bowl of oatmeal goes to the floor and stays there.
By the age of oh, say 42 or so, we have figured out how the world works. So we no longer think about it or even notice or care that a key opens a lock or that Ward Cleaver wasn’t real.
So we go through each day on auto-pilot, eating the same menu, spewing the same inanities, off-boarding our life experiences? How many of us scroll the local weather app rather than look out the window?
What if we faced each day as we did when we were a child? What if we eliminated every ritual, compulsion, and superstition?
What if we ate pizza for breakfast and scrambled eggs for dinner?
What if we mixed stripes with plaids?
What if we used the exit doors to enter WalMart?
I came to this epiphany while hanging around kids. Like Thoreau, I’ve learned a lot by watching ants. And chickens.
But kids have always fascinated me. Because they are maniacal learning machines.
Kids hold no assumptions or presumptions. Our 6-year-old jumps out of bed at daybreak and starts doing stuff. There is no groaning, fixing coffee, or running to the bathroom. He just starts building stuff, drawing stuff, asking questions about stuff. In five minutes he has his morning laid out, with requests for exploring, building, drawing, and climbing.
I vaguely remember this stage in my own life. They say living in the future is anxiety; living in the past is depression. Living in the present, is living. Like kids do, by nature.
We, as adults, live by habit. Ritual plays an overly important role. For an obsessive-compulsive, rituals are done to provide comfort and reduce anxiety. Counter-intuitively, the rituals themselves become the anxiety-causing behaviors. We’ve heard of the extreme hand washing routines and illogical phobias. I think we all experience this at some level, such as picking out your lucky shirt to wear to a meeting, or doing the “leave the house and checking that you have your wallet, car keys, and chapstick” macarena dance.
What if we consciously abandoned ritual? Yes, it would cause anxiety at first. But what if we embraced that anxiety? It would either fizzle out, or energize. What if anxiety was a trick designed to prevent you from reaching your true potential?
I am struggling to articulate the concept. I’ve tried this theory out on people in conversation, and have learned that apparently not everyone is as concerned as I. Almost everyone denies they partake in rituals, while describing the very rituals they deny. We as a species are not very self aware.
I don’t know if I have the courage to try this. I’m not even sure it would be possible.