deep thoughts

But of course we are children, big children who need guidance and reminders of how to live. And yet the modern education system denies this. It treats us all as far too rational, reasonable, in control. We are far more desperate than secular modernity recognises. All of us are on the edge of panic and terror pretty much all the time – and religions... See more

That is what rituals are: they are attempts to make vivid to us things we already know, but are likely to have forgotten

We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world,” as Han puts it. “They transform being-in-the-world into a being-at-home. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space.”

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han has understood more than most how modern consumer societies are emptying their souls — tossing out tradition and ritual in the name of the next new thing. “Everything that binds and connects is disappearing. There are hardly any shared values or symbols, no common narratives that unite people,

The American nostalgia for home and family is closely tied to the American domestic cycle and labor pattern whereby a family unit is created for a limited number of years only to unravel as the kids go away to school or for work, or to create their own family units. The idea of losing and then returning home is a powerful and often unrecognized... See more

Rituals can be defined as temporal technologies for housing oneself. They turn being in the world into being at home. Rituals are in time as things are in space. They stabilize life by structuring time. They give us festive spaces, so to speak, spaces we can enter in celebration .

Paradoxically, social media in this sense is antisocial, leading to the disintegration of community through a kind of connected isolation.

Friedrich Nietzsche once said that our happiness consists of the possession of a non-negotiable truth. Today, we no longer have such non-negotiable truths. Instead, we have an over-abundance of information.

In a world that is completely without rituals and wholly profane, all that is left are consumption and the satisfaction of needs. It is Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” in which every want is immediately gratified. The people are kept in good spirits with the help of fun, consumption and entertainment. The state distributes a drug called soma in... See more