Good Life Project
Why Rituals Matter More Than You Know, And How to Design Your Own | Bruce Feiler
08 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the significance of rituals in our lives?
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.
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 forever. and very little has replaced them.
Chapter 2: How does homesickness relate to modern life transitions?
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. 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.
I'm Shannon Maldonado, the founder of the Jaui gift shop, which sells handmade artisanal products. I chose Shopify because I thought it was one of the easiest to use devices. Minulla oli tärkeää pohtia kehittymistämme tulevaisuudessa. Kaikki myyntiin tarvittavat työkalut, kuten varaston suunnittelu, ovat kätevästi dashboardissa. Aloita ilmainen kokeilu shopify.com-sivustolla.
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. And this also is not a private problem or feeling. This is something much bigger that's happening. We just maybe been calling it by the wrong name.
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 empty nest to full nest 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 full nest to empty nest when we dropped them off at different sides of the same college campus. And we— I 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 – I knew it right away. I felt homesick in my own home. And my initial instinct was don't tell anybody about this. Like that is not an acceptable word to use in public discourse in this day and age. Like that's what a child feels when they go on their first sleepover or what an adolescent feels the opening days or weeks of sleepaway camp. But that's what I felt.
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Chapter 3: What are the five building blocks of designing a ritual?
My marriage needs to be renegotiated at this point, and my 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, 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 everything. 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 transition guy. 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 lifequakes.
Because some of them are involuntary, like losing a loved one or losing your legs or a downsizing or a pandemic. But some of them are voluntary, like starting over or having children, for example, right? You know, it was joyful, but it was a lifequake, right? Two kids in 32 minutes. The difference... is that this was not a lifequake. 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? We're coming out of the pandemic. There's digital saturation. There's loneliness. We're a 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. I need some call to reconnect with people, at which point I basically stumble into what I think of as the greatest story I've encountered in nearly four decades of doing this kind of work professionally.
Yeah.
So homesickness then.
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 people describe in 30s, 40s, 50s, calling things like empty nest, midlife crisis, just being tired after so many years? How is this different?
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?
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Chapter 4: What is the concept of a celebration recession?
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. 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, 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 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 – 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 do 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, changes what they do. 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's the elemental human act. 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.
And that, I think, is the connection with homesickness. We have this longing for But we're kind of frozen. So that's beat one of the paradox. The second paradox is that the rituals we've used for all of these centuries, we've turned our backs on them. 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.
And no one's having funerals anymore.
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Chapter 5: How can we create new rituals for contemporary challenges?
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 10,000 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.
I want to drop into a number of 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 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. 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.
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.
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Chapter 6: What steps are involved in designing a personal ritual?
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, 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.
This is the kind of thing that organized religion would not have done, the gathering of friends. So she invites people over. And we're going to get together. We'll get to this eventually. These are the things that rituals do. We're going to create sacred space. We're going to 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 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 process. Of things, cancerversaries, soberversaries, daddy-daughter dances, mom proms. I mean, you can go on and on and on of these gotcha ceremonies from 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 Gennep 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 that you can do right now to create these kinds of moments in your own families.
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 um 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 uh 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 it's not one track it's multi-track it's
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Chapter 7: How do rituals help us process grief and change?
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?
And what's great about this story is I'm not wagging my finger and telling you you need to do this. This is what's actually happening. I feel like I'm chronicling this story that is basically hiding in plain sight. That's really – I remember the first person who read this book, my editor was like, yeah, this story has been hiding in plain sight. I mean I wrote five books about religion.
Then I wrote about transitions. I wrote the 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 my job is to cover this story. And I feel, you know, 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? 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 going to not get divorced. You can imagine what happened. She grows up. She 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 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 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. She needs to get her friends around to deal with it collectively.
So she writes a blog post called The Taylor Swift Divorce Party. That she's going to have shake it off cupcakes and we will never, ever, ever get back together napkins or whatever it is. And it goes crazy viral. And I said, well, why is this happening? And she says, because. millennials grew up. We went online into AOL chat rooms, and we started saying, my husband's doing this.
My spouse is doing that. 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 know. I felt... isolated and shamed and I didn't want to do anything. You go sister.
And so there, there is this, there's, 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 haven't divorced, but I don't think my life should be over either. Right.
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Chapter 8: What are the actionable steps to create meaningful connections?
So it's like 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 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 going to do it because I need it.
It's like there's something that's common 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 togetherness or ease a sense of aloneness. There's something I need that ritual seems to solve for.
And 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 going to do, which is empowering.
Yeah.
And one of the reasons—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'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 lifequake. The average length of a lifequake 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, death, that doesn't really describe it because part of it is that every ritual contains every other ritual. So that if you're getting married, you're saying goodbye to an old phase of life.
If you're having certainly a first child, you're saying goodbye. So that's why I've renamed them 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 doulas for the end of life, but also doulas for birth, also doulas for shutting down a company, or doulas for a job loss.
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