Why We're All Quietly Falling Apart
Modern life skipped the most important part of being human—and our souls are paying the price
In the wake of COVID-19, mental health experts rushed to emphasize the importance of daily routines. Structure, they told us, would help us cope. Regular sleep schedules, consistent work hours, predictable patterns—these would buffer us against uncertainty and stress.
But what if routine isn't enough? What if we've been missing something deeper?
Recent research suggests that the disappearance of traditional rituals may be contributing to rising anxiety and stress levels. Studies show that the routine nature and predictability of rituals help reduce psychological distress. Yet in our streamlined modern world, we've quietly eliminated most of these stabilizing practices.
We live in an age with no real thresholds.
We change jobs, end relationships, move cities, have children, lose parents. But the transitions often happen silently. No marker. No ritual. No witness.
We scroll past birthdays. Celebrate weddings on Instagram. Graduations, promotions, miscarriages, retirements—all blurred into the churn of the everyday.
In older cultures, even mundane transitions had ceremonies. Crossing into adulthood. Mourning a death. Beginning a new role. There was a before. A crossing. And an after.
Today, we mostly skip the crossing. We move straight from one phase to another without metabolizing the change. Without honoring what's being left behind or naming what's to come.
But the psyche notices.
It lingers in the in-between. It aches for completion, for acknowledgment. And when we don't give it a threshold to cross, it creates its own through the restlessness that keeps us up at night, the anxiety that surfaces at unexpected moments.
Ritual is not about tradition for tradition's sake. It's about integration. A way to say: something ended, something else is beginning.
In that sense, rituals are technologies. Like all good ones, they take us from one state to another. From what was, into what is becoming.
They were tools, designed by culture, to manage transformation. Embedded with meaning—not just symbolic, but functional. They helped us cross the inner and outer thresholds of life with presence and intention.
Consider how, in the corporate world, we invest heavily in change management. We plan meticulously when a new system is introduced or when an organizational restructure is underway. We anticipate resistance, communicate clearly, provide support. We know that change needs tending to.
Yet in our personal lives, we often skip that care. We move through endings and beginnings without ceremony, without structure, without acknowledgment. There is no change management for the soul.
Ritual was society's version of change management for the human spirit. A way to mark the shift. To metabolize transition. To remind us that change, when done well, asks for attention, presence, and meaning.
In the march toward modernity, especially in the age of science, rituals became obsolete. Dismissed as irrational. Brushed off as old-world fluff. We streamlined everything. We optimized the soul out of it.
And now, something's missing. We feel the gap. We invent new rituals like scrolling before bed, that end-of-day glass of wine, but they are often just gestures. They lack weight or meaning. They're more like habits than ceremonies.
But perhaps that's why we're seeing a return to ritual. Not out of nostalgia, but because something in us remembers. The young professional who lights a candle before difficult conversations. The parent who creates a bedtime ritual that feels sacred. The friend who insists on marking your divorce with more than just drinks—who creates space for grief and celebration in the same evening.
These aren't throwbacks to an earlier time. They're innovations. New technologies of transition for an age that forgot how to cross thresholds.
The question isn't whether rituals are relevant. The question is what we lose without them and what kind of world we might create if we remembered how to witness our own becoming.
What if we treated our transitions with the same care we give to organizational change? What if we stopped optimizing our way through life and started metabolizing it instead?
The thresholds are still there. We just need to learn how to cross them again.
Yes, I resonate with this deeply.