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A few years ago, after my wife, Linda, and I dropped our twin daughters off at college, I walked through our front door and felt homesick in my own home. And it wasn’t just my children. All my relationships felt asunder. I had just lost my dad, was losing my mom, my marriage needed to be renegotiated, and my friendships needed to be remade.
I was hardly alone: Everyone I know was craving connection and feeling like we’ve abandoned our loved ones for our screens.
I went looking for solutions and found a startling story hiding in plain sight: the renaissance of ritual.
A generation into the loneliness epidemic, Americans are devising astonishing new ways to gather in real life. Fed up with isolation, polarization, and digital saturation, people are flocking to rituals — collective, voluntary activities that bring us together for shared purpose. Every day, from Boomers to Gen Z, people are reimagining how to mark life, love, health, and family — and forging thriving communities in the process.
This groundswell of collective meaning-making may be our best shot to counter the divisive algorithms and artificial intimacies of Big Tech. And every person, regardless of background, can join in.
The Ritual Renaissance
Rituals are the glue that holds society together. We have 300,000 years of evidence that when humans go through collective transitions, they hold joint celebrations, from baby namings to weddings to funerals. Yet today, we’ve abandoned many of these rituals. Can this threat to society be reversed?
To find out, I spent the last three years attending—and joining in—life rituals in 16 countries on six continents: a mass baptism in the Vatican, an adolescent tooth filing in Bali, forest bathing in Chile, six weddings in Las Vegas, and ten funerals in Ireland. I also interviewed a hundred top ritual designers and read more than 500 academic studies on how rituals calm us when we’re stressed, synchronize our heartbeats when we’re scared, and align us to others when we celebrate or mourn together.
Alongside the recession in traditional life rituals, I discovered an equally remarkable recovery in nontraditional life rituals. A small sampling hints at the breadth: chemo bells, NICU graduations, cancerversaries, soberversaries, trauma release ceremonies, gotcha day ceremonies, end-of-life doulas, end-of-company doulas, daddy-daughter dances, mom proms, scream clubs, silent retreats.
Many of these new rituals involve hidden family pain. Missy Holliday, an Ohio nurse who lost her sister, DeeDee, in a car accident, was so horrified by the impersonal way doctors handled DeeDee’s organ donation that she invented a ritual called an honor walk to help families find purpose in a wrenching time. As loved ones push the deceased toward the operating room, accompanied by a favorite song, hospital workers silently line the hallways holding flameless candles. Today, all 50 donor support groups in the U.S. hold honor walks, which have 250 million views on YouTube.
Still more involve inventive ways to be together in nature, including forest bathing, a type of immersive outdoor shared experience that began in Japan, has spread to at least 70 other countries and has benefits ranging from increasing energy and immunity to decreasing anxiety and depression, all chronicled in 143 peer-reviewed papers covering 300 million people.
A Blueprint of Human Togetherness
My goal through all this research was to identify simple things that everyone can do to create gatherings that succeed — a blueprint of human togetherness. The most important step is to give yourself permission to tend the groups you’re in. “Simply by virtue of being a human being, one is an authority on creating ritual,” writes the West African spiritual leader Malidoma Patrice Somé.
Once that confidence is secured, successful ritual gatherings need three things to succeed: an opening wow, a peace plan, and a moment of hope.
An Opening Wow. Rituals need sacred space. Games have fields, circuses have rings, plays have stages. Rituals, like relationships, need boundaries: fire, water, candles, crystals. Once people enter the group, your goal is to define your tension, then identify your intention. If the gathering is joyful, your purpose might be to celebrate and dance; if it’s sorrowful, mourn or grieve. At rituals of renewal I led recently at TED and LinkedIn, I handed out candles and asked guests what brought them to this gathering.
A peace plan. Rituals need compromise. All rituals create conflict—one person wants a big wedding, another wants a small one; one person wants to grieve under the covers with the cat, another wants a massive wake. A big function of the ritual is to modulate that conflict. At the risk of being unromantic, rituals are about compromise rehearsal. You need a peace plan. To do that, you need what I call the four somethings: something old, something new, something borrowed, something you. The most successful rituals balance tradition with progress, adaptation with personalization.
A moment of hope. Finally, rituals need to leave everyone with a sense of hope. Just as psychologists have shown that you can’t achieve your highest well-being without identifying your “best possible self,” a ritual manifests our “best possible selves.” One millennial ritual designer told me about a mastectomy ritual she led for a friend. “I’m always listening for two things,” the designer said. “The highest hope and the biggest fear. The purpose of the ritual is to turn fear into hope.” In the rituals I’ve been leading, I asked people to write their hope for the future on a stone, then turn it upside down in the middle of the circle. Everyone then claims someone else’s stone, reads the hope out loud, then takes home the wish. This way, we’ve created a web of hope for the future.
The ritual renaissance has become a global force because it bridges the religious, the irreligious, and the “I’m not religious but spiritual”; it spans old and young; it crosses genders. But mostly it provides the roadmap to counter the divisive algorithms and artificial intimacies that lives in our pockets every day.
Increasingly, we face a choice: It’s virtual or ritual, URL or IRL.
Ritual may not be our last hope, but it may be our best hope.
Choose ritual. The way home.
