Bruce Feiler

And what does the data show?

And how long have humans been doing this?

And what I've come to realize is

we are being pulled apart, right?

We are facing, you know, de-civilization in a lot of ways.

And so to me, the most important thing that we need right now is to develop a ritual state of mind, right?

And a hundred years ago, when this ritual sort of became a thing that people talked about, they talked about the big four life rituals, right?

Those were birth and coming of age and marriage and then death, right?

But if you don't get married and have children, as many people don't, you can go most of your life without a kind of pre-approved life rituals.

And I learned this from my kids in a lot of ways.

When they left home and went to college, when they're home, like, we need to lurch at every opportunity to connect and be together.

And so I can't say, well, sorry, the textbook written 100 years ago says this is not a ritual.

We need any moment.

We need to embrace any opportunity to connect.

So right now, at the end of this project and sort of now that I'm offering a time to gather into the world, I'll say anything that –

gives you a sense of belonging and meaning and purpose and connection, that's a ritual in my book, and I'm much less concerned with where I started.

Yeah, and I think that that's a really important question.

We tend to think that religion created ritual, but in fact, it's the other way around.

We have evidence going back 300,000 years in cave paintings all over this planet that the first essential human act was gathering people together to honor the dead.

And we would begin to do these rituals of mating, of mourning, of renewing, of kind of remaking the group.