Michael Norton

Do you hug?

Do you bow?

We have all of these across the world, very specific greeting rituals that we use.

But the thing that you see is all cultures have one.

In other words, we've decided that when we meet someone, we do something to signify that we're meeting.

It just varies really widely from place to place.

And even during COVID, you could imagine that during a situation like that, you might say, well, let's just dispense with this thing altogether.

If we can't shake hands or hug, let's just not do anything.

But that's not what we did.

We came up with a brand new one, which was bumping elbows, which did not exist before and really doesn't exist anymore.

Thank you.

But it shows how strong the urge was to engage in some kind of greeting ritual rather than just have nothing there.

That we literally humans invented a new way to greet that they had not used before when pressed.