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Comment by leroy-is-here | Hacker News Reader

Humans are just the total sum of their actions. Actions beget being and so rituals beget a practiced being. Humans practice rituals every day without even thinking about it. Ever sat in your chair and immediately wanted a cold one?

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What you describe sounds more like a habit to me. But even if it were a ritual —something (re-)enacted to imbue meaning to a moment— it's of a different quality than swearing in the head job of an organization that aims to bring humanity to the stars.

There is a difference between what we consider to be the sacred and the profane. Rituals fall into either of these categories as well.

There are rituals with all sorts of meaning, individually and collectively. But if it can work individually then it can certainly work negatively too, such as with addictions. Many habits are rituals with no meaning, which is one of the reasons why people get depressed.

You're describing habits. Plenty of things are habits but not rituals.

We’re going to have to disagree. Habits are merely unformalized rituals. If you examine your day-to-day you may find many rituals you do to prepare your self for the coming moment. Adjusting your volume on your music before a coding session. I obviously don’t know you, but a lot of people like to prepare snacks before watching Youtube. There are a lot of things we think of as habit, but we prepared them literally like a ritual.

Unformalized ritual is an oxymoron. None of those examples are rituals. I mean if you want to call them rituals, go right ahead, but you're using a different definition of the word than everybody else, and the definition you are using is the one everyone else uses for habit.

I guarantee that you do rituals every single day because you prepare for them just like a ritual. A habit? Sure. A ritual, of course.

Ritual does not mean "thing you prepare to do." No one is arguing that rituals are not done regularly, but those specific sorts of things you are describing are not rituals.

A crucial aspect of ritual is preparation. I prepare to drive by adjusting all of my mirrors. A ritual is more than just a habit, it is a preparation for a specific habit. Again, I guarantee you do some kind of ritual in your day-to-day that, once understood, can be formalized for you.

I cannot know what that ritual looks like for you. But do you wanna know how I know you have one? Because I read a lot of old books that told me I had one too. How did someone 1500 years ago who couldn’t have even imagined me know these things about me and be right about them?

> Ever sat in your chair and immediately wanted a cold one?

lol, categorically, no

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