Why Rituals Matter More Than You Know, And How to Design Your Own | Bruce Feiler

There is a particular kind of loneliness that hits in the middle of a full life. Not because you are isolated. Because the relationships that used to hold you steady are all being renegotiated at once. Your kids have left. A parent has died. A marriage needs new terms. A friendship has frayed. And the cultural rituals that once helped people move through moments like this are mostly gone. Bruce Feiler has spent the last three years traveling to 26 countries, attending over 100 ceremonies, and interviewing hundreds of people to understand what happens when we stop gathering in intentional ways. He's a seven-time New York Times bestselling author and the creator of the LifeQuakes framework. His new book, A Time to Gather https://amzn.to/4onfWMN, makes the case that we are living through both a celebration recession and a ritual renaissance at the same time. In this conversation, Bruce and Jonathan explore what it actually means to feel homesick in your own home, why the four traditional life rituals no longer match the lives most of us are actually living, and what it looks like to design a ritual from scratch when the ones you inherited don't fit. What you'll explore in this conversation: Why 5,000 Civil War soldiers were officially diagnosed as dying of homesickness, and what that history reveals about the longing you feel nowThe five building blocks of any ritual, from drawing the circle to creating a web of hope, and how to use them to mark a moment that mattersWhy Bruce calls this a celebration recession: what we stopped doing, when, and what's quietly replacing itThe live ritual Bruce helps Jonathan design in real time, walking through every step from welcome to closeWhy rituals are not just for grief and weddings, and the new ceremonies people are creating for divorce, mastectomies, miscarriages, sobriety, and career endings If you have ever felt the ground shift under you and not known how to steady yourself with the people you love most, this is the conversation for it. You can find Bruce at: Website https://www.brucefeiler.com/ | Instagram https://www.instagram.com/brucefeiler/ | Episode Transcript https://www.goodlifeproject.com/podcast/ritual-midlife-transition-bruce-feiler Next week, we're sharing our conversation with Stanford professor Tina Seelig to talk about something most of us have completely backwards: how luck actually works, and why most of what we call luck is the result of deliberate actions hiding in plain sight. If you have ever wondered why some people seem to catch every break while others keep missing them, this is going to change the way you see that. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes! Check out our offerings & partners: Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel https://jonathanfields.substack.com/aboutVisit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes https://www.goodlifeproject.com/sponsors/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  A ritual is a shared unnecessary act that makes us feel at home. It's the glue that holds society together. I've started calling it the original human algorithm. It's a mechanism by which the group tends itself.

• 0:13Jonathan Fields?

  So there's a particular kind of loneliness that tends to hit in the middle of a full life, not because you're isolated, but because the relationships that used to hold you steady, they're just all being renegotiated, often all at once. The kids have left, a parent has passed, a marriage needs new terms. We need ways to process these moments, rituals. And yet, the very rituals that help people move through moments like this for 10,000 years have largely vanished and very little has replaced them. Bruce Feiler is a seven-time New York Times bestselling author. In this conversation, he walks us through why rituals matter and how to design your own rituals for the moments that no existing ceremony really knows how to hold anymore.

• 0:57Jonathan Fields?

  I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project. And the place I want to start with Bruce is a feeling that he described that I never heard named quite the way that he names it before. We'll jump right in after this short break.

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• 2:48Jonathan Fields?

  You and I have talked a number of times over the years. You spent about three years or so visiting, if I remember correctly, 26 different countries, participating in 100 or something different ceremonies. But I want to start a little bit closer to home. In the introduction of A Time Together, you write about walking through your own front door after dropping your daughters off at college and feeling, I think these are kind of your words, homesick in your own home. And it's like I knew exactly what you meant. Even though my circumstances are different, everyone joining us is going to have a different circumstance. What is the thing that you discovered in those first few weeks that made you realize, oh, this is the feeling,

• 3:33Jonathan Fields?

  and this also is not a private problem or feeling. This is something much bigger that's happening. We've just maybe been calling it by the wrong name.

• 3:43Speaker 00

  Well, I appreciate this question, and this is where it started for me. I mean, to sort of go back a little bit, my wife Linda and I went from emptiness to fullness in 32 minutes 21 years ago when we became the parent of identical twin daughters. And 18 years later, we had the inverse happen. We went from fullness to emptiness when we dropped them off at different sides of the same college campus. And we drove back to Brooklyn Heights where we live. And I walked through the front door, as you say, and I felt... And it was so distinct, Jonathan. Like, this was the feeling. Like, I wasn't searching for the right word, right? You know, I'm that kind of person. Like, what am I feeling? I knew it right away. I felt homesick in my own home.

• 4:28Speaker 00

  And my initial instinct was, don't tell anybody about this. Like, that is not an acceptable word to use in in public discourse, you know, in this day and age. Like, that's what a child feels when they go on their first sleepover, or what an adolescent feels, you know, the opening days or weeks of of of sleepaway camp. But that's what I felt. And it wasn't just my children. Like, my dad had just died. My mother was aging. There had had some conflict with my siblings. My marriage needs to be renegotiated at this point, and my, you know, friendships need to be remade. And my initial thought was, oh, I'm ready for this. I mean, you and I met six years ago, as I recall, when I published Life is in the Transitions.

• 5:11Speaker 00

  And I have spent most of the last decade collecting and analyzing life stories of now 500 Americans all across the country, every circumstance and walk of life. And I wrote a book on this topic called Life is in the Transitions. I gave a TED Talk. I teach a TED course. I'm like, oh, I'm the, like, transition guy. Like, I should be ready for this moment. And what I realized was that those events that I had spent so much of my life thinking and talking about, I call them life quakes, because some of them are involuntary, like losing a loved one, or losing your legs, or downsizing, or a pandemic. But some of them are voluntary, like starting over, having children, for example, right? You know, it was joyful, but it was a life quake, right?

• 5:55Speaker 00

  Two kids in 32 minutes. The difference is that this was not a life quake. This was a group quake, if you will. Like, it felt like all the relationships in my life had been frayed and needed to be remade, right? And so that is the thing that I began to hear, that everybody had this kind of craving or longing, right? This, we're coming out of the pandemic. There's digital saturation. There's loneliness. We're, you know, we're almost a generation into, we've heard about loneliness a lot. Where are the solutions? There must be something out there. And so that's when I realized, oh, I need a ritual. Like, I need some call to reconnect with people.

• 6:39Speaker 00

  At which point, I basically stumbled into what I think of as like the greatest story I've encountered in nearly four decades of doing this kind of work professionally.

• 6:48Jonathan Fields?

  Homesickness, then.

• 6:50Speaker 00

  Homesickness.

• 6:52Jonathan Fields?

  It's an interesting word for what you just described. Because when you talk about homesickness as a sort of a condition, you're not using it in the way that most of us would use it or have thought about using it. How is it different than what things, what people describe in 30s, 40s, 50s, calling things like emptiness, midlife crisis, just being tired after so many years? How is this different?

• 7:15Speaker 00

  So I think there's two ways of answering this question. Let me start with the second first, which is that it turns out, actually, like, I kind of love this idea of geeking out on this with you, that homesickness actually has a huge and long history. Like, the term was essentially coined in the 18th century. Right? George Washington complained that a lot of the soldiers, you know, fighting during the Revolutionary War, experienced homesickness, right? So you have all the, you know, in a lot of ways, America is built on the idea of leaving one home and going to another home. It becomes a medical condition, actually. In the 19th century, 5,000 people in the Civil War were diagnosed as having died of homesickness, right? So it turns out there is this robust history.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  The difference is, so then what happens, of course, is then transportation arises. And homesickness evolves in the 20th century from a place associated with physical places to an idea associated kind of with a time, right? So I remember when we did this little ritual, you know, we'll obviously get to this in a second, but we did this ritual when we took our girls, the night before we took them to college. And it turned out that they were more upset about the end of their childhood than they were about the idea of entering their young adulthood. And I think that's what we felt and a lot of parents feel about, oh, kind of more upset

• 8:39Speaker 00

  about the end of the everyday kind of parenting dynamic as opposed to unease. And so the reason, to now get to the other question you asked me, the reason that mine went to ritual was...

• 8:56Speaker 00

  Ritual is, there's this sort of paradox at the heart of this whole project, right? And the first element of it is that ritual works. Like, it's one of the few things that we know holds groups, families, together. We have 300,000 years of evidence. The first thing that humans did before we were anatomically human was get together and bury our dead and mark that passage. So for thousands of years, for thousands of centuries, whenever there's been an instability in the group, the group turns to ritual. What I mean by instability? Someone comes into the group, a baby, or a wedding. Someone leaves the group, like a coming of age, like a death. Someone moves, gets sick, you know, changes what they do.

• 9:40Speaker 00

  The group has now, this group quake, as I was just calling it, it has this source of instability. I remember when my dad died in 2021, there was this sense of, oh, right, he performed a lot of roles in this group, and the group now needs to reassign those roles in a lot of ways. And that's what the ritual does. It is kind of, it's the elemental human act. It's the glue that holds society together. It's, you know, I've started calling it the original human algorithm. It's a mechanism by which the group tends itself. And that, I think, is the connection with homesickness. We have this longing, but we're kind of frozen. So that's beat one of, of the paradox.

• 10:21Speaker 00

  The second paradox is that the rituals we've used for all of these centuries, we've turned our backs on them, right? So no one's holding birth rituals or coming of age rituals. In 1960, 90% of American adults got married. Right now, fewer than 50% are married. In 19, and no one's having funerals anymore. Like, this was shocking to me. In 1970, 5% of Americans were cremated. Now it's 65% going to 80%, and only one in four has a ceremony of any kind, and only one in five is buried. Only a third of us are buried anymore. So we're not even having, we're in what I call a celebration recession. So we are not using, it took us 10, 10,000 years to come up with this, like, way to handle the group, the kind of mechanism, and 25 years to abandon them.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  Which leads to then the third side of this paradox, which is at the same time, everyday people are saying, I want new ways and new excuses to connect that maybe my organized group never had. So some are new names like celebrations of life or a commitment ceremony. Some are, you could argue, silly like promposals or gender reveals. But a lot of them are profound and there are things that people listening to us have experienced, you and I have experienced, that organized religion never honored like not just marriage, but divorce, not just fertility, but infertility, not just birth, but still birth. So there is this renaissance of new ways of gathering. I think it's the greatest untold story in the world right now, where people are pushing back against digital saturation and division.

• 11:49Speaker 00

  And now we have an AI and saying, I want to connect and I'm just going to do it on my own terms.

• 11:54Jonathan Fields?

  I want to drop into a number of what the elements of what you just said. But I want to make sure I'm also really clear on what the dilemma is here. Because it sounds like what you're describing is sort of a, an experience of relational dislocation. The relationships that used to anchor us are getting renegotiated at the same time, like everything all at the same time. And the feeling that it produces is us just being wildly unmoored. You could say homesickness. Even when you're sitting in your own kitchen, you could describe it as just feeling like you're, I mean, to me, it feels like there's no ground beneath my feet anymore.

• 12:35Jonathan Fields?

  And then you invite us to say, well, there's this thing called ritual. And these things have been around from time immemorial. And they speak to this feeling in a really powerful way. But maybe the rituals that got us here aren't the ones that are going to get us there.

• 12:54Speaker 00

  The problem that we're talking about people solving is the craving for human connection. Okay, so there is widespread recognition that we have relinquished a lot of the natural fiber of fabric, and frankly, human calendar of how we connect to corporations, algorithms, whatever you want to call us. People feel that and they have felt that for a long time. And so what's happening is we're letting go, or we've abandoned the old ways of doing this. I used to talk about this when I wrote my book, The Secrets of Happy Families. Like, the old rules no longer apply, but the new rules haven't been written.

• 13:37Speaker 00

  And what's interesting, and I think frankly inspiring, about what's happening is, the old rules were top-down, institutionally mandated, hierarchical, you could argue patriarchal, pre-scripted, "Okay, here are the things you're going to do in the course of your life. This is the script you're going to follow. Dear, beloved, don't do anything, follow the rules." And that, nobody wants that anymore. So what's happening is, there's this bottom-up bespoke DIY movement to make your own rituals. Let me try to put some, you know, give you an example of this. Yeah. Okay, so I talked to a young millennial ritual designer in Brooklyn, actually, and

• 14:17Speaker 00

  she says she has thousands of coffees with young people, okay? And they're talking about things in their life that no one ever talked about, right? "I wanted to do a certain work. I went to..." You and I both wrote books about this, right? "I studied in college for a career. I'm in like, five years in my career. Turns out, I don't want that career. Now what? Okay, I want to be in a relationship, but I've never experienced love and I'm scared of it. My pet just died, okay? I'm having, you know, I'm drinking too much and I want to go sober, but I don't want to join this group. I want..." So whatever it is, and she tells me about this ritual that she does, a friend of hers who has a double mastectomy, okay?

• 14:57Speaker 00

  This is the kind of thing that organized religion would not have done, you know, the gathering of friends. So she invites people over, and "we're gonna get together, we'll get to this eventually, you know, these are the things that rituals do. We're gonna create sacred space, we're gonna show empathy. Everybody brings comfortable clothing because it involves lots of pipes and drains, right? When you have these kinds of surgeries, I'm speaking here as a cancer survivor myself." And she says to me that the fundamental thing that she's listening for...

• 15:30Speaker 00

  Is the deepest fear and the highest hope. And the purpose of the gathering, and you can call it what you want, you can call it a ritual, a gathering, a ceremony, a celebration. She's listening for the deepest fear and the highest hope. And the purpose of the gathering is to turn the fear into hope. And what she said is, my generation, we want these gatherings, we want them when we want them, we don't need our parents' permission, and we don't need our institutions to approve them, we're just going to do them because it's what we are experiencing. And that's this renaissance of things, cancer versaries, sober versaries, daddy-daughter dances, mom proms, I mean, you can go on and on and on of these gotcha ceremonies for

• 16:12Speaker 00

  when you adopt a child, adoption reunion families for people who gave up their children, all of these occasions, and in the new nonlinear lives that we live, we crave these much more frequently than when Arnold van Gennepf invented the phrase rites of passage in 1909. People are saying, I want it now, and I want it on my terms, but they're scared. And so what I'm trying to offer in this book is kind of a simple blueprint for how, you know, I think of it as a kind of a blueprint for humans together, a set of things you can do right now to create these kinds of moments in your own families.

• 16:47Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, I mean, what you're describing is really interesting because, you know, I think if we think about the rituals that many of us have experienced in our lives, if we look back over time, you kind of define them as like the big four, right? You know, there's one for birth, there's one for reaching adulthood, there's one for partnership or marriage, and there's one for death, right? And those are based on life happening, unfolding in a fairly certain way. And we've, we've outgrown that, like, it's not that we've individually outgrown that, the way that we live our lives have, has just changed dramatically, you know? So instead of, you know, saying, well, we need these four rituals to mark the sort of like four major parts of life, you're kind of saying, life is now much more complicated,

• 17:30Jonathan Fields?

  it's not one track, it's multi-track, it's so many different things. And the rituals that we've inherited, that have been handed down to us, cover four things that, that, well, you know, at least we know two of them are going to happen in our lives, we'll be born and we're going to die. And, you know, but what about everything else? And what about often the sadness or the loss or the fear or the angst that goes along with all of these different moments in a really complex life now? What about rituals for them? Am I getting that right?

• 18:01Speaker 00

  What's great about this story is I'm not, I'm not wagging my finger and telling you you need to do this. This is what's actually happening. Like, I feel like I'm chronicling this story that, that is basically hiding in plain sight, right? That, that's really, I remember the first person who read this book, my editor was like, yeah, this story's been hiding in plain sight. I mean, I wrote five books about religion. Then I wrote about transitions. I wrote, I wrote New York Times column for a decade on families. I'm a little, and I wrote a book called Secrets of Happy Families. I'm a little shamefaced that I didn't really put this together. I feel like this is, my job is to cover this story. And I feel, you know, I'll give you, I'll give you an example. My wife, Linda, her favorite chapter in this book is chapter three, the Taylor Swift divorce party. Okay. So what's the story?

• 18:44Speaker 00

  The story is a woman on Long Island. She's born, her parents got divorced and both sets of her grandparents got divorced. She's like, her one thing in life was she was gonna not get divorced. You can imagine what happened. She grows up, she has, gets married, she has two children, she gets divorced. Her husband takes half their belongings, the other half she gives away. She walks back in after coming back from, from, you know, Goodwill or wherever it was, and she realizes, oh my God, I got two kids. I don't have sheets to sleep on. I don't have towels to shower with. My, my toothbrush holder had four holes. It's now got only three toothbrushes in it. Every time I walk into the bathroom, I think, I'm a loser for getting divorced. I need a registry. I didn't need it when I got married. So she starts the world's first divorce registry. It totally goes crazy. And then she realizes, you know what? It's more than just a registry.

• 19:30Speaker 00

  She needs to get her friends around to put, to deal with it collectively. So she writes a blog post called the Taylor Swift divorce party, that she's gonna have shake it off cupcakes and you, we will never, ever, ever get back together napkins or whatever, whatever it is. And it goes crazy viral. And I said, well, why is this happening? And she says, because.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  Millennials grew up, we went online into AOL chatrooms, and we started saying, "My husband's doing this. You know, my spouse is doing that." Like, "Am I, am I like being, am I making this up?" And other women would say, "No, that's happening to me." And then older women would say, "Oh yeah, that happened to me, but I didn't, I felt isolated and shamed, and I didn't want to do anything. You go, sister." And so, there is this, it's an odd thing that going on the internet, which is something, of course, that is, we all, you know, malign a lot, in some ways created, empowered, women in particular, to get over the shame of having, she's like, "I'm not celebrating that I have divorce, but I don't think my life should be over either."

• 20:34Speaker 00

  Right? To me, the parallel chapter very late in my book is the incredible story of the shame that people felt, women in particular felt, if they had a miscarriage or a stillborn child. Right? There's not an organized religion. Like Judaism, which I am a proud member and a big advocate of in a lot of ways, Maimonides, the great original thinker, if you, the great thinker, if you die before 31 days, it's as if you never lived, no funeral. The Catholic Church, if you were not baptized, you did not, you could not be buried in a Catholic graveyard. So for centuries, dads would take these stillborn children to the edge of town in Ireland, and then buried, the whole town would go with them. They would bury them under abandoned churches in what were called eavesdrop burial,

• 21:19Speaker 00

  so that the water coming down the roof would surreptitiously baptize them, and they could get to heaven. Like, it was a grandmother in Oregon, I tell this incredible story in my book, who said, "We need a ceremony for honoring these women," and this swept the country. So, it's, it's the bottom-up urge, that exactly the question you had of like, "What is the feeling we're solving?" "I feel alone, and I don't want to feel alone." And people finding new ways to connect, exactly in those moments, as you said, whenever it happens in your life, not on some chart you read in some undergraduate textbook as a freshman.

• 21:53Jonathan Fields?

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• 23:21Jonathan Fields?

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• 24:05Jonathan Fields?

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• 25:24Jonathan Fields?

  In addition to that, you know, we're living a lot longer these days. And a lot of the rituals that were handed down to us accommodated. So it's like we, we need a lot more. I love this idea that this is a bottom-up experience. Like there's a renaissance happening where we're not waiting around to figure out what is the right ritual for this. We're basically saying, I'm going to just make what I need to help me through this particular moment in time. If it doesn't exist, then it's about to exist. We're not waiting for institutions to deem this is the thing to do. We're not waiting for, you know, like dogma that's been passed on for generations to tell us this is how we do this thing. We're kind of saying, this is different. I don't see a real obvious thing that everyone does when this happens. I'm gonna do it because I need like it's like there's something that's that's common

• 26:08Jonathan Fields?

  in all of us that says like in these moments, there's something missing that I need right now in this moment, whether it's to serve a purpose of closure or gathering or the togetherness or ease a sense of aloneness. There's something I need that ritual seems to solve for and that what you're describing is people are not waiting for somebody else to tell them what to do. They're saying like, this is what I'm gonna do, which is which is empowering.

• 26:33Speaker 00

  And one of the reasons, so, so, two quick reactions to that beautiful reflection. Yes, we live twice as long. And by the way, if you don't choose not to get married or have children, as a lot of people do, then you're not, it means you're not having a pre-approved life ritual between, you know, between 15 and death, like that, that's just not reflective of who we are. You know, my data from life is in the transitions. We, we go through a disruptor every 12 to 18 months, and one in 10 of those is a life quake. The average length of a life quake is five years. That means we're spending half of our lives in transition, and we need these kinds of celebrations. So, part of the problem that we have, and part of what I'm trying to do in a time to gather is, first of all, rebrand this. So, birth, coming of age, marriage, that that doesn't really describe it, because

• 27:15Speaker 00

  part of it is, is that every ritual contains every other ritual. Right? So that if you're getting married, you're sort of mourn, you know, you're saying goodbye to an old phase of life. If you're having, you know, certainly a first child, you're saying goodbye. So, that's why I've renamed them as, as welcoming, becoming, loving, mourning, and what I call the fifth ritual, the missing ritual, renewing, for anything that we're renewing. I mean, I know people hiring a duelist for the end of life, but also duelist for birth, also duelist for shutting down a company, or duelist for a job loss, right? That is also a mournful change, but also something that has the opportunity for, for, for, for rebirth and renewal. So that's the first thing, is that every ritual contains every other ritual, right? The second

• 27:57Speaker 00

  thing I think worth saying here is, it's kind of what do they do, right? And so, rituals, so let's just, let's just put a little bit of, of nomenclature on this. So, a ritual is a shared, unnecessary act that makes us feel at home. Okay? So that's my definition. It's an act because we're, it's a doing. It's not a talking. We're actually gonna meet, do something. It's shared, it connects us, and there are hundreds of studies that show the power, you know, our breath will go down, it will calm us in times of change, our heartbeats will synchronize, etc.

• 28:32Speaker 00

  It's also unnecessary, right? And I think that I kind of love this, right? You don't need to get down on one knee to get engaged. You don't need to wear black to mourn, right? You don't need to circle the bride six times to get married. These are unnecessities that we make necessities by infusing them with collective meaning. Like, some of my great tips I heard are people like passing around rings before people get married, so everyone touches them so that by the time that the couple puts the ring on, they've got the warmth of everybody. Like, that's an example. So, and finally, they make you feel at home. And what is that? That's calm, that's feeling safe, that's feeling protected. We celebrate when it's celebratory, we mourn when it's mournful,

• 29:12Speaker 00

  but we are going to reconstitute the sense of safety in the flux of change, which is the essence of home wellness as opposed to homesickness. But there's also another thing about them is, before we maybe get into the, you know, tips for doing them, is that a lot of people don't want to do them because of the conflict, but their, a big purpose of them is to resolve the conflict. You get the, you and I are getting married. You want a big wedding. I want a small wedding. You want a preacher, okay? I want my sister-in-law, okay? You want nobody up there, just us celebrating our love. I want all my fraternity brothers, right? So, like, the purpose of it is to get it out. I remember, I mentioned my dad earlier, when he died in 2021,

• 29:58Speaker 00

  after a long bout with Parkinson's.

• 30:02Speaker 00

  I fly home to Savannah. You and I were talking about Georgia before we came on the air here. And my mother says, "I don't like this custom of throwing dirt on the coffin. Like, I find it barbaric. I don't like the noise. I think we should do long-stemmed yellow roses." My sister says, "The dirt's my favorite part. Long-stemmed yellow roses is completely hallmark, and I want nothing to do with it." And I'm, I'm the one on the phone with the rabbi doing the negotiating. I'm like, "I think I need to call you back." At which point, I attempt to kind of middle child my way through a compromise here. And I'm like, to my sister, I'm like, I'm like, "She lived with a guy for 65 years, you know? Like, she took care of him. Like, if she wants, she ought to be able to have what she have. You want this, so what do we do? We bought three dozen yellow, long-stemmed yellow roses.

• 30:47Speaker 00

  And we didn't get dirt, but my dad loved to walk on Tavi Island, Georgia. So, we got little bags of sand, and we gave people the choice." And what I, what I later...

• 30:57Speaker 00

  When I was talking to all these ritual designers realized is the ritual both surfaced the conflict and resolved the conflict in the course of it, giving us a way to kind of think, oh, my dad's not here to solve this problem. He's, you know, but we have to solve it. We are what's left of the group and the group needs to remake itself anew.

• 31:19Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, I mean, that makes so much sense to me. And I love the fact that it serves multiple purposes and often multiple people at the same time. Let's get into the how of this. Let's say somebody's joining us for this conversation and they're in a moment. It's a moment which is maybe really big for them, but maybe not so big for other people. But for them, whatever it is, a leaving, a coming, like, well, the five, five different categories you described above, walk you through them again?

• 31:45Speaker 00

  Okay, let's, let's don't do this abstractly. Let's do a real time ritual design process for you, Jonathan Fields. Okay, so tell me something, first thing we need to do is, what are we, what are we marking here? Do you have someone who's sick? Do you have something to celebrate? Do you have a kid in a milestone? Are you personally in a period of change? Let's pick something in your life that we're going to design a ritual in real time right now.

• 32:07Jonathan Fields?

  Okay, this is kind of fun because there's something I've been working on for a while now. I have alluded to here and there in conversations, but never actually just outright owned that I literally just finished last week. And that is purely for the fun, without any like push or like, like idea that this is something that I would ever publish. I decided a little while back that I want to try my hand at fiction, at writing a novel.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  Stapping my fingers in that, you know, in that, in that pandemic way of showing glow and thrill. Oh, my gosh. So you've been secretly writing a novel?

• 32:40Jonathan Fields?

  Secretly writing a novel every morning, 7:30, 9:00 AM at the coffee shop. I'm just writing, writing, writing, writing, writing. And a week or two ago, you know, Um, I, I, I, I wrote the like the equivalent of the end. Again, this might end up in a drawer. This is just a really fun creative thing. So it's not about, hey, I sold a book or anything like that. But to me, it was just like, I said I wanted to do a thing. I'd never done it before. I had no idea if I could do it. It was really juicy and fun. I learned so much about the process and, and just about myself. And, and I did it. And it's funny because I told a couple of friends. And they're like, what are you doing now? Like, what are you doing to set like, what's the thing you're gonna do to market?

• 33:20Jonathan Fields?

  And I was, and I was like, I don't know. Like, I usually I just move on to the next thing. I'm really terrible at, at like these moments. So this is perfect.

• 33:29Speaker 00

  Okay. So what I'm hearing in this is you've kept it private. You've told a couple of people. But now, just the fact that you're sharing this into this microphone and with me and everybody listening to us, it's now going public. Okay. And so we need to mark this threshold moment. Okay. Fantastic. First of all, congratulations. I'm proud of you. Good for you. Like a lot of people I have ever put in words in a row. I've thought I should do this someday. So you're, you're inspiring everybody to do the thing, to do the thing, right? Okay. So we're now gonna, we're gonna figure out, we're gonna mark the thing. Okay. So we need, there, there are five things that rituals do. I'm going to simplify this to through, but there are five things that rituals have. Okay. So number one, they have boundaries. Okay.

• 34:10Speaker 00

  We need an opening. Wow. We need to assemble the people into a space. Okay. So we're gonna create the space. So where are we gonna do this? Where are we gonna have this, um, this celebration that your friends and you are craving? We're gonna do it in your house. We're gonna do it in a public library. We're gonna do it at the top of a mountain. I see you, you know, in your social media, like outdoors. You want to go to a beach. Where are we gonna do this? It absolutely can be done online. It can be done in person, or it can be done a combination. And so what we need is the, the, the first of these things is the, is the, um, is the setting the boundary, drawing the circle, whatever it might be. And what we need is, I, I've taken this line, my, my book opens, as you know,

• 34:51Speaker 00

  in a group baptism in the Vatican. This Vatican baptism, the liturgy has welcome with joy. We're gonna welcome people with joy. So What is intrinsic to you to welcome people to this circle? You want to sing a song, you want to hand out flowers, you want to light a candle? I just did this at TED last week, two rituals of renewal. We took little flameless candles because it was an impersonal conference one. I just did this on LinkedIn. We did impersonal, we did flameless candles. What are we going to welcome with joy? How are we going to welcome people with joy?

• 35:21Jonathan Fields?

  We're gonna do, remember when you were a little kid and you had that little paper? You fold it into four little things, you kind of move it around.

• 35:28Speaker 00

  Oh, like a devil's call?

• 35:29Jonathan Fields?

  It's like a, it's like, oh, it's called like, and they pop it open. You get like a mystery message like that delights you. We're gonna do that.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  Okay, good. Okay, so we have a little gesture. Okay, we're gonna do that at the beginning. After that, we're gonna go to number two. Okay?

• 35:42Jonathan Fields?

  Okay.

• 35:42Speaker 00

  So I said we could simplify it. This is all the welcome, but we'll, we'll go back to the five just because we, you teed it up. And so the next thing we need is stakes. Why does this matter? Why is this important? Okay, the way I think about this is we're going to define the tension, identify the tension and define the intentions. We have to put our intention to something. So what is the tension? So how are we going to? We did a family ritual that's described in the conclusion of A Time Together, as you know. And I'm like, how are we going to mark my daughter's 20th birthday? We opened in Central Park because we used to drive through Central Park. And everything went wrong. I was so smart. Oh, my God, I was like a ritual expert. I took a blanket with us.

• 36:26Speaker 00

  It was the end of March and it was a white blanket. And I put my muddy feet in the middle of it and then a dog, like everything went wrong. So the stakes there was, okay, because when I was 18, my grandfather came over to my house and said, you're 18, you're going to sign a will. Like it was a rite of passage without a rite of choice. So we had our daughters sign wills. Like we, so how, how are we going to set the intention of, once everybody is inside the circle?

• 36:51Jonathan Fields?

  Hmm.

• 36:54Jonathan Fields?

  Tell me more about what you mean state.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  What I mean is, why are we here? And what are we trying to accomplish? Think back to double mastectomy. The woman who ran that, she's like, we're not here to judge. We're not here to preach. We're not here to tell. You know, we're just here to listen and to support. So what I think of as a great intention setting moment here would be to say something to the effect of, I've just had this moment and I want to celebrate with you. But perhaps all of you have just had a similar moment where you've completed a project.

• 37:28Jonathan Fields?

  Oh, I like that.

• 37:29Speaker 00

  Okay, so that's what I want. Some sort of invitation. This is what I've learned from the designers, right? Not telling, an invitation. If you're just here to celebrate my milestone here, that's fine. But if you have a milestone, you can also, you can go around, everybody can say it. Or you can, you know, play a piece of music and people can think about it. But what you want there is all part of the welcome is to define the stakes that are before everybody.

• 37:58Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, I love that. And I love the notion of saying, you know, like, okay, if you want to just make it about you, that's one way to do it. But if you invite people in to say like, what is your version of this? So like for me, if I wanted to say something like, you know, my intent is really just to honor and acknowledge and savor this completion of this thing that was a big thing for me. And, you know, like, I wonder if you're working on something or you're close to it, or you've just recently completed something yourself that you might also feel like honoring or celebrating in some way. Does that something that work?

• 38:28Speaker 00

  And now it reminds me, so let's go to the next one. Because then the next thing you need, we're going to get to the middle. That's all the beginning. Now we're going to get to the middle. What you need in the middle is you need, you know, a lot of the time rituals are great. They solve every problem. You know what? You know what rituals do? It's compromise rehearsal. It forces people to make a peace plan. As we discussed earlier, right? I call this the force something, something old, something new, something borrowed, something new, right? Like you need a way. So here's what I did in TED that was great. And I got this idea from a ritual designer named Megan Sheldon in Vancouver, which happened to be where I was. But I love this and I've now done it. And I'm doing it actually at the launch party for a time together. And that is I divided everybody up into twos.

• 39:10Speaker 00

  Pair up with someone that you don't, that you didn't know before you walked in, or you know, you're at least you're not married to, or living with, or related to, or whatever it might be. And then we passed around little cubes of bitter chocolate. And I said, I want you to share with your partner something that's bringing you bitterness right now, that you're struggling with, like a difficulty or transition that you're going through, that you're having trouble managing. And then we passed out this, the bitter chocolate and everybody, and I made them decide when to eat it. And then we passed around sweet chocolate. And we said, please identify what would be a sweet outcome for this thing that's giving you bitterness right now.

• 39:54Speaker 00

  So that's why I jumped into that, because you said you may have something. So there's something about, why don't you, then a way to offer people, if it's, you know, six, eight people, you can do it in the circle. If it's larger, you can break it up and say, go around and share with one other person what, something that you've been working on that maybe you haven't, you know, or a new phase that you're, that you're going through. So something there. So tell me something that would work for the middle of this ritual, as we expand it to new horizons of all kinds.

• 40:24Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, I totally love the chocolate thing, because I'm an absolute chocolate thing.

• 40:27Speaker 00

  There we go.

• 40:28Jonathan Fields?

  It's like, boom, done.

• 40:31Speaker 00

  Okay, so then, number four here is empathy. We want to be with you, or be with one another in this time of change. So if this is a graduation, if this is an 18th birthday, if this is a pregnant, we may be celebrating. But if this is the loss of a job, a double mastectomy, someone just had the roof of their house taken off with a tornado, whatever it might be, we want to be with people where they are, okay? And By the way, when I started, when I started my book Happy Families, my wife said to me,

• 41:13Speaker 00

  "Okay, I got it. You're going to bring us a bunch of ideas, but don't bring me abstract ideas. Bring me things people have done." So everything I'm saying here are things that actual people have done. So what I did in the one I just led that I've been leading in the last few months is we then went to empathy. And I took, what I did at TED was I took these flameless candles and I had these bowls. I met this guy who's a preacher who told me that at new human n명s, that he puts votives in a bowl and then has people come up and make a wish for the child and then pour the water into the bowl so that all the votives are floating by the end. So I would like something then to take the

• 41:57Speaker 00

  thing that people have shared and then maybe turn it into an offering, right? So what we did at TED was we then took, we had these candles and we put them in bowls, we poured water in, and everybody then offered a wish. So you've shared with me that you've just finished this creative project. I then would come to the group and say, "Okay, my wish for you, Jonathan, is that you have the courage to share it with the world, that you get positive feedback, right? That you take criticism gently, that you go..." So we need something now for everybody to then offer support to people around. So tell me something like that that's intrinsic. You could do the candle thing, or maybe there's another food involved,

• 42:40Speaker 00

  maybe there's a song, maybe there's a holding hand, maybe there... So tell me something we can do to be with everybody and what they've just shared.

• 42:50Jonathan Fields?

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• 43:32Jonathan Fields?

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• 44:16Jonathan Fields?

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• 45:31Jonathan Fields?

  I want to clarify here because is this something that generally, let's say there's eight people that's sitting around my living room, where they would make an offering or something, a wish towards me? Or is this more collective? Like we do it to each other?

• 45:48Speaker 00

  I like the, I'll tell you, I'll tell you what happened when I did this at TED. I did two in a row. The first one, people started coming up one by one, and I asked them to make a wish for the other person that they had spoken to.

• 46:00Jonathan Fields?

  Okay.

• 46:01Speaker 00

  And then this interesting thing happened halfway through, which is people started coming up together and holding hands as if in a wedding vow, completely spontaneous. This is a reminder that a lot of these rituals, and as you said, I went to rituals in dozens of countries around the world. Group baptism in the Vatican, and adolescent filing, tooth filing in Bali, six weddings in a day in Las Vegas, ten funerals in a week in Ireland, sauna and cold plunging in Copenhagen, forest bathing in Chile, a placenta ritual in Easter. This is what I was doing. And then, so there, what there is, is a way for everybody to feel involved. I talked to this, I just love this story. The woman who popularized jumping

• 46:43Speaker 00

  the broom, which was an old custom for people outside of church or the law, it was originally white, working class people in England, and then went to enslaved African in the American South, and it died out after emancipation, and it's become repopularized. First because of roots, and because this woman named Danita Rontree-Green, who wrote a book about it. And she said, I knew it was going to be adopted by black families, but that's not what happened. At first, it was gay families, interfaith families, intergenerational families. And she told me this story of that the couple, she's now done hundreds of these, the couple is sitting there going, you know, we're gonna jump the broom at the wedding, okay? Are we gonna jump on one? Are we gonna jump on three? Are we gonna jump on jump? And then the audience

• 47:24Speaker 00

  is shouting out, like it becomes a way for everybody to get invested in that moment. So when I see this as, it's, that's why I call it empathy, right? It's a way for everybody to hold space, to join in it, right? There's a thing that one designer I know used that I've been adopting, what I've been doing. Like, this is not a scripted show for entertainment. This is audience participation. So you want a way for everybody, so if everyone's spoken, you can say, everybody pick somebody else in the circle, and offer your wish for them.

• 47:56Speaker 00

  Which it will just quickly become general because it will relate to all. So that's what, okay, so, okay, so let's, so what do you want people to do? You want to, you want to do candle? You want to come to the middle and put, you got eight people sitting around.

• 48:07Jonathan Fields?

  So here's what I want to do. Because it feels better for me for this to be some sort of like shared intention across different people. So I'm gonna have a little piece of paper for each person and a pencil, not a pen, pencil, I'm not sure why, but that just feels writer to me. And I want them to write one intention for another person in the room without naming them, just write an intention that they feel like they would love to wish for anybody in the room and basically put it into a small bowl in the center and then we would each like shake it around and each draw one out.

• 48:49Speaker 00

  I will just tell you, I'm getting a little emotional hearing this. I want to just tell you a quick story. I was in South Africa attending this traditional bride price negotiation. It'd been 17 years. And that was the day it was going to finally finish. Kids were raised, parents had died, and they were going to have a traditional wedding and what they called a white wedding, back to back. And at dawn, the family woke up, took some, from a marula tree, took some seeds or fruit and seeds, and they turned it into a beer and they poured it as an offering at the base of the tree. Six months later, I was in the Andes Mountains in Chile,

• 49:30Speaker 00

  talking to a Mapuche healer from the largest indigenous tribe in Chile and one of the most revered in South America because they had withstood invader after invader. And before I met this Mapuche healer to talk to him by ritual, he took a home brew and he poured it at the base of a tree.

• 49:54Speaker 00

  As I sit here today, I have no idea how that happens. There's no internet when this starts, right? This idea, how is it that the same things? It's like beyond Jungian, look at the same, there is this original human algorithm. And I'm saying this story because when I'm about, what I was going to propose for the last thing was a moment of hope. Okay? We're turning fear into hope. And what I've been doing, inspired by a woman who had a miscarriage and felt shame and wrote how the feelings of shame, throwing it into the water. I was going to suggest at the end is that you have people take up, because this is

• 50:37Speaker 00

  what I did at TED and some others I've done recently, that you take a pebble and you write out a hope for yourself for the future. And then you take that pebble, walk to the middle of the room and turn it upside down. And as you know, the last funeral, the 10 funerals I went to was of a man who died by suicide in Dublin. And I went to this memorial service in the crematorium. And as the body was being, as the curtain was being closed, the woman, incredible one, her Instagram name is @boldpriestess, she said, "Conflict. We're here to honor the life of Carl and to deal with our own confusion about how Carl chose to end his life. And I have here a bowl of pebbles, and I invite you to come and take one.

• 51:22Speaker 00

  Keep it as a memory of, from where he died. Keep it as a memory of Carl or return it to nature." And so what I asked people to do is exactly what you just described, and that's why I told that story about the Marula beer. Then everybody goes to the center of the room, takes the stone with someone else's hope, reads it out loud, and then we have created this web of hope. So I love this. So then you could have people, now, what I did was I flipped it, rather than the negative thing. So I like, I think you said your hope, your intention, if we use my words, the hope for the future for someone else. Yeah. And then everybody goes, takes someone else's, reads it out loud.

• 52:04Speaker 00

  And by the way, you can do it on the paper, you can do it on something more permanent like a pebble, you could do it on that thing you made at the beginning. And then everybody can take that home, right? You could do it on a, you know, origami crane, like they have in Hiroshima.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  But then everybody walks away with this web of hope, connected not just to everybody there, but to this larger sense that we've created something special. What is this, Jonathan? It's a shared, unnecessary act that makes you feel at home. That's what we've created in this circle. And you know what? It took us, whatever, six minutes to plan, and I think marginal collective cost, maybe $2.50.

• 52:50Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah. I love this. I love the simplicity of it also. There's a, you know, like you literally like these are five things and just go through and figure out what do you want each one of these things to be. And I would imagine also, you can kind of like map these out in your head and plan for it. And then in the moment, there are going to be times where it unfolds exactly the way you thought and hoped, and then there'll be times where it kind of like goes off the rails a little bit. And there'll be other times where something just profound and transcended that you never saw coming happens and you're like, this is what was meant to happen, even though I had no idea that that's what, you know, what I really needed in my heart.

• 53:24Speaker 00

  I talked to this woman who was a death doula, and she told me that the first meeting that she had with a family, she got there, the person had just died, and she saw this gray murkiness in the air. She had them put their hands on the body, washed the body, she invited the widow to take the ring off. And she said, death is, there's an island of the living and an island of the dead. And we're going to push, our job is to push the body in a canoe, to go from the body of the living to the body of the dead. And we're going to call out, oh, Uncle Bob's there, you know, the dog, to make this connection. And then everybody looks around and realizes that we're what's left of the family. And then she has, they, the same oil they used to anoint the body, they anoint everybody in the circle.

• 54:09Speaker 00

  And what she said was, Every step of the burial, every step of the wedding, every step of the novel, every step of the illness is an opportunity for connection and a little ritual. It's right. It's back to this idea. We're going to move from rites of passage to bites of passage. We're going to, we all need to have a ritual state of mind because the reality is there's the enemies in our pockets every day. And it's come, the algorithms that we've outsourced our lives to are algorithms of division. The original human algorithm is an algorithm of connections. The way I look at this is, you know, we have a choice.

• 54:52Speaker 00

  Okay, it's virtual or ritual. It's URL or IRL. And everyday people are standing up and saying, I want new ways to connect. And so my invitation is if you come on this journey with me, you're going to see some things you cannot believe. You're going to go to these rituals. You're going to go to these gatherings. You're going to meet these people and you're going to be empowered to say, I can take that existential homesickness that I feel, and I can turn it into actual human, face to face, human gatherings, get togethers, rituals, ceremonies. And we can turn that homesickness into home wellness.

• 55:27Jonathan Fields?

  Yeah, love that. So let's say somebody's joining us for the conversation. They're nodding along saying, yeah, this feels, this feels interesting. It feels right. And they're moving through a transition, empty nest, parents who may be transitioning, friendship that needs to be repaired or ending a career chapter, which a lot of people are moving through right now.

• 55:47Speaker 00

  Bingo.

• 55:47Jonathan Fields?

  And they want to design a ritual for the next week. Like they're just, they want something to happen quickly with what they have, you know, in their own home, in their own kitchen. What's the very first thing that they should think about doing? Not necessarily the whole framework, which you just laid out so beautifully. But like, it's the first step in here.

• 56:06Speaker 00

  The single most important thing you can do. And if you can do only one thing, that thing is do whatever it takes to make you feel at home. And what does that mean? That's safe, that's protected, that's together. Okay, that's a sense that you can join with other people and you can get through this. Okay, the three most powerful words in the English language are you're not alone. You'd be hard pressed to tell me something after collecting 500 life stories that I have not heard about. Things that are joyful, things that are traumatic, things that are divisive. Okay, you are not alone.

• 56:50Speaker 00

  And the only way to get through it is to get through it with other people. So the question that you need to identify is what would make you feel safest at this time? That is the purpose of this gathering. To find the tension, focus the intention, and whatever it is that will give you confidence, that's the purpose of what you're doing, and you do not have to ask anyone's permission.

• 57:21Jonathan Fields?

  Hmm.

• 57:22Speaker 00

  I hereby give you permission and to do it yourself on your own terms.

• 57:29Jonathan Fields?

  Beautiful. Feels a good place for us to come full circle. I have asked you this before, I'm gonna ask you again because some years have passed in this container of Good Life Project. If I offer up the phrase "to live a good life," what comes up?

• 57:41Speaker 00

  I think of something that my father said. He was a wise man, and I used to say about my father, "He figured out what I think of as the key to life," which is the balance between short-term sacrifice for a long-term gain and enjoying yourself along the way. That's the first thing, I think, is the definition of a good life. But the second thing, in the light of how I've spent the last three years of my life, is the balance between being an individual and being part of a group. I encountered this phrase, which I really appreciate, which is that we all have a "we, I" axis.

• 58:26Speaker 00

  Where we balance between the we and the I. And if I was going to define one problem that is under discussed in the world today, it's that our we, I axes are off kilter. They're off balance. Like, I looked it up. The hashtag self-care on Instagram, 21 million uses. The hashtag group care, 18. Like, we don't even have a word for how to tend the groups. So I understand and appreciate and respect and value that caring for yourself, putting yourself first, has value on occasion, but we have let our groups atrophy.

• 59:11Speaker 00

  And therefore, we all feel existentially homesick and alone. So what's the definition of a good life is two axes. On one is the balance between short-term sacrifice and long-term gain. And the second is being an individual and being a part of not one, but many, multiple healthy groups.

• 59:33Jonathan Fields?

  Thank you. So let's talk about some of the big ahas and actionable takeaways from this conversation. The thing that I'm really sitting with from this conversation is how much of what we call loneliness, especially in the middle years of life, is actually a ritual deficit. It's not that we do not have people, it's that we don't have the ceremonies that tell our people, this matters, I'm in a transition, I need you to witness it with me and maybe be a part of it with me. A few things I want to carry forward with this. Bruce's definition of a ritual is maybe the most portable one that I have encountered. A shared, unnecessary act that makes you feel at home. You do not need permission, you do not need a guide or a script or a hundred people, you

• 1:00:18Jonathan Fields?

  just need a threshold, a purpose, and at least one other person.

• 1:00:23Jonathan Fields?

  The five ritual elements he walked us through, welcoming, setting stakes, showing empathy, creating meaning, and closing with hope. You can build something real with those five moves in an evening, sometimes even in a few minutes, as we just saw, with people you already know, using things already available to you. And one final thing. The most powerful words in the English language, according to Bruce, are not necessarily "I love you." They're "You're not alone." Whatever transition you're moving through right now, find the people who can say that to you in person and build something small enough to actually do, specific enough to mean something, together. And hey, before you go, next week, I'm sitting down with Stanford professor Tina Seelig

• 1:01:06Jonathan Fields?

  to talk about something most of us have completely backwards: how luck actually works, the science behind it, and why most of what we call luck is the result of deliberate actions hiding in plain sight. So if you've ever wondered why some people just seem to catch every break while others keep missing them, this is going to change the way you see that. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss that or any upcoming episodes. And do me a favor, a seven-second favor, share this episode with one other person who needs to hear what they're feeling right now has a name and a remedy, and maybe a ritual that really is calling to be created. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields.

• 1:01:50Jonathan Fields?

  Editing help by Troy Young. Chris Carter crafted our theme music. And if you have not already, follow us wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss a conversation. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

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