Bruce Feiler

speaker

802 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard May 2026 last heard 8 Jun

Bruce Feiler’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Good Life Project · Why Rituals Matter More Than You Know, And How to Design Your Own | Bruce Feiler · 8 Jun 2026 podcast

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 10,000 years to come up with this way to handle the group, the kind of mechanism, and 25 years to abandon them, 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 stillbirth.

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

The problem that we're talking about people solving is the craving for human connection.

So there is widespread recognition that we have relinquished a lot of the natural fiber 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.

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.

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