Why Rituals Matter More Than You Know, And How to Design Your Own | Bruce Feiler

0:00Bruce Feiler: 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 and very little has replaced them.

0:43Bruce 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.

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3:59Let yourself run, lift, fail, try, and go. Explore the new Peloton Cross Training Tread Plus at OnePeloton.com. 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.

4:41Even though my circumstances are different, everyone joining us can 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've just maybe been calling it by the wrong name.

5:03Bruce Feiler: 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. And we went from full nest to empty nest and we dropped them off at different sides of the same college campus. And we 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?

5:43Bruce Feiler: 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, you know, the opening days or weeks of sleepaway camp. But that's what I felt. And it wasn't just my children. Like my dad had just died. My mother was aging. I had some conflict with my siblings. My marriage needs to be renegotiated at this point and my friendships need to be remade.

6:22Bruce Feiler: 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 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.

7:07Bruce Feiler: 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 life quake this was a group cake 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 this we're coming out of the pandemic there's digital saturation there's loneliness And we're almost a generation into we've heard about loneliness a lot.

7:48Bruce Feiler: Where are the solutions? There must be something out there. And so that's when I realized, oh, I need a ritual. Like 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. Homesakeness then. Homesakeness. 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 emptiness, midlife crisis, just being tired after so many years?

8:33How is this different?

8:36Bruce Feiler: 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? George Washington complained that a lot of the soldiers fighting during the Revolutionary War experienced homesickness, right? So you have all the – in a lot of ways, America is built on the idea of leaving one home and going to another home. 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?

9:15Bruce Feiler: 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, you know, 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.

10:06Bruce Feiler: 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 anatomical 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.

10:50Bruce Feiler: 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, you know, changes what they do. The group has now this groupquake, 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 is kind of – it's the elemental human act. It's the glue that holds society together.

11:24Bruce Feiler: It's – you know, 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, 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. This one's shocking to me. In 1970, 5 % of Americans were cremated.

12:05Bruce Feiler: Now it's 65 % going to 80%, and only one in four has a ceremony of any county, 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, like, 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.

12:42Bruce Feiler: 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 still birth. 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.

13:14I want to drop into a number of what you the elements of what you just said um but I want to make sure I'm also really clear on what the what the what the dilemma is here because it sounds like what you're describing is sort of a 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.

13:55And 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.

14:14Bruce Feiler: 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, prescripted.

15:10Bruce Feiler: Okay, here are the things you're going to do in the course of your life. This is the script you're going to follow. Dearly beloved, don't do anything. Follow the rules. And nobody wants that anymore. So what's happening is there's this bottom-up, bespoke DIY movement to make your own rituals. Let me try to put some, you know, give you an example of this. Okay. So I talked to a young millennial ritual designer in Brooklyn, actually. And she says she has thousands of coffees with young people. Okay. And they're talking about things in their life that no one ever talked about. Right. I wanted to do a certain work.

15:50Bruce Feiler: I went to college. You and I both wrote books about this. Right. I studied in college for a career. I'm in that five years in that career. It turns out I don't want that career. Now what? 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 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. Okay. This is the kind of thing that organized religion would not have done, you know, the gathering of friends.

16:24And so she invites people over and we're going to get together.

16:28Bruce Feiler: 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.

17:02Bruce Feiler: 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 of things, These cancerversaries, soberversaries, daddy-daughter dances, mom proms. I mean, you can go on and on and on of these gotcha ceremonies for 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.

17:49Bruce Feiler: 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 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.

18:19There'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. And we've outgrown that. Like, it's not that we've individually outgrown that. The way that we live our lives 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 so many different things. And the rituals that we've inherited that have been handed down to us cover four things that, well, at least we know two of them are gonna happen in our lives.

19:02We'll be born and we're gonna die. And, you know, but what about everything else? 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? Am I getting that right? And what's great about this story is I'm not wagging my finger and telling you you need to do this.

19:26Bruce Feiler: 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's been hiding in plain sight. I mean I wrote five books about religion. Then I wrote about transitions. I wrote a 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 – I'll give you an example. My wife, Linda, her favorite chapter in this book is chapter three, the Taylor Swift divorce party.

20:03Bruce Feiler: 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.

20:34Bruce Feiler: 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?

21:09Bruce Feiler: and she says because millennials grew up we went online into aol chat rooms and we started saying my husband's doing this you know my spouse is doing that like am i am i like being 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 is this, 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 have a divorce, but I don't think my life should be over either, right?

21:54Bruce Feiler: To me, the parallel chapter very late in my book is the incredible story of the shame that people felt, women in particular felt, if they had a miscarriage or a stillborn child, right? There's not an organized religion. Judaism, of which I'm a proud member and a big advocate of in a lot of ways, Maimonides, the great thinker, if you die before 31 days, it's as if you never lived, no funeral. The Catholic church, if you were not baptized, you could not be buried in a Catholic graveyard. So for centuries, dads would take these stillborn children to the edge of town in Ireland and then the whole town would go with them.

22:34Bruce Feiler: They would bury them under abandoned churches in what were called eavesdrop burial so that the water coming down the roof would surreptitiously baptize them and they could get to heaven. It was a grandmother in Oregon, I tell this incredible story in my book, who said, we need a ceremony for honoring these women and they swept the country. So it's the bottom-up urge, exactly the question you had of like, what is the feeling we're solving? I feel alone and I don't want to feel alone. And people finding new ways to connect exactly in those moments, as you said, whenever it happens in your life, not on some chart you read in some undergraduate textbook as a freshman.

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25:01in addition to that you know we're living a lot longer these days than a lot of the rituals that were handed down to us accommodated so it's like we we need a lot more i love this idea that this is a bottom-up experience. 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.

25:36We'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. Like, it's like, there's something that's, 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 the 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, which is empowering.

26:11And one of the reasons – so two quick reactions to that beautiful reflection.

26:18Bruce Feiler: 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 having a pre-approved life ritual between 15 and death. That's just not reflective of who we are. My data from life is in the transitions. 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.

26:49Bruce Feiler: 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, right? 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 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, right?

27:23Bruce Feiler: That is also a mournful change, but also something that has the opportunity for rebirth and renewal. So that's the first thing, is that every ritual contains every other ritual, right? The second thing I think we're saying here is kind of what do they do, right? And so rituals – so let's just put a little bit of nomenclature on this. So a ritual is a shared, unnecessary act that makes us feel at home. Okay? So that's my definition. It's an act because it's a doing. It's not a talking. We're actually going to meet and do something. It's shared. It connects us. And there are hundreds of studies that show the power.

28:02Bruce Feiler: You know, our breath will go down. It will calm us in times of change. Our heartbeats will synchronize, et cetera. It's also unnecessary, right? And I think that I kind of love this, right? You don't need to get down on one knee to get engaged. You don't need to wear black to mourn, right? You don't need to circle the bride six times to get married. These are unnecessities that we make necessities by infusing them with collective meaning. Like some of my great tips I heard are people like passing around rings before people get married so everyone touches them so that by the time the couple puts the ring on, they've got the warmth of everybody.

28:39Bruce Feiler: Like that's an example. So – and finally, they make you feel at home. And what is that? That's calm. That's feeling safe. That's feeling protected. We celebrate when it's celebratory. We mourn when it's mournful, but we are going to reconstitute the sense of safety in the flux of change, which is the essence of home wellness as opposed to homesickness. But there's also another thing about them is, before we maybe get into the tips for doing them, is that a lot of people don't want to do them because of the conflict. But a big purpose of them is to resolve the conflict. You and I are getting married.

29:20Bruce Feiler: You want a big wedding. I want a small wedding. You want a preacher, okay? I want my sister-in-law, okay? You want nobody up there, just us celebrating our love. I want all my fraternity brothers, right? So, like, the purpose of it is to get it out. I remember I mentioned my dad earlier when he died in 2021 after a long bout with Parkinson's. I fly home to Savannah. You and I were talking about Georgia before we came on the air here. and my mother says, I don't like this custom of throwing dirt on the coffin. Like I find it barbaric. I don't like the noise. I think we should do long stem yellow roses.

29:55Bruce Feiler: My sister says, the dirt's my favorite part. Long stem yellow roses is completely hallmark and I want nothing to do with it. And I'm the one on the phone with the rabbi doing the negotiating. I'm like, I think I need to call you back. At which point I attempt to kind of middle child my way through a compromise here. And I'm like to my sister, I'm like, she lived with a guy for 65 years, you know? Like, she took care of him. Like, if she wanted to, she ought to be able to have what she had. You want this. So what did we do? We bought three dozen long-stem yellow roses. And we didn't get dirt, but my dad loved to walk on Tavi Island, Georgia.

30:28Bruce Feiler: So we got little bags of sand, and we gave people a choice. And what I later, when I was talking to all these ritual designers, realized is the ritual both surfaced the conflict and resolved the conflict in the course of it giving us a way to kind of think, oh, my dad's not here to solve this problem. But we have to solve it. We are what's left of the group, and the group needs to remake itself anew. Yeah. I mean, that makes so much sense to me. And I love the fact that it serves multiple purposes and often multiple people at the same time. Let's get into the how of this. Let's say somebody's joining us for this conversation and they're in a moment um it's a moment which is maybe really big for them but maybe not so big for other people but for them whatever it is a leaving a coming like what the five five different categories you described above walking through them again okay let's let's don't do this abstractly let's do a real-time ritual design process for you jonathan fields okay so tell me something first thing we need to do is what are we marking here Do you have someone who's sick?

31:38Bruce Feiler: Do you have something to celebrate? Do you have a kid in a milestone? Are you personally in a period of change? Let's pick something in your life that we're going to design a ritual in real time right now. Okay, this is kind of fun because there's something I've been working on for a while now. I have alluded to here and there in conversations, but never actually just outright own that I literally just finished last week. And that is purely for the fun. Without any push or idea that this is something that I would ever publish, I decided a little while back that I want to try my hand at fiction, at writing a novel.

32:10Bruce Feiler: Staffing my fingers in that pandemic way of showing love and thrill. Oh my gosh, so you've been secretly writing a novel. Secretly writing a novel. Every morning, 7.30, 9 a.m. at the coffee shop, I'm just writing, writing, writing, writing, writing. And a week or two ago, I wrote the equivalent of the end. Again, this might end up in a drawer. This is just a really fun, creative thing. so it's not about hey i sold the book or anything like that but to me it was just like i said i wanted to do a thing i had never done it before i had no idea if i could do it it was really juicy and fun i learned so much about the process and and just about myself and and i did it and it's funny because i told a couple of friends and they're like what are you doing now like what are you doing to set like what's the thing you're gonna do to market and i was and i was like i I don't know.

33:02Usually I just move on to the next thing. I'm really terrible at these moments. So this is perfect.

33:07Bruce Feiler: Okay. So what I'm hearing in this is you've kept it private. You've told a couple of people. But now, just the fact that you're sharing this into this microphone and with me and everybody listening to us, it's now going public. Okay? And so we need to mark this threshold moment. Okay. Fantastic. First of all, congratulations. I'm proud of you. Good for you. like a lot of people I have ever put in words in a row I've thought I should do this someday so you're you're inspiring everybody to do the thing to do the thing right okay so we're now going to we're going to figure out we're going to mark the thing okay so we need there are five things that rituals do I'm going to simplify this to through but there are five things that rituals have okay so number one they have boundaries okay we need an opening wow we need to assemble the people into a space.

33:54Bruce Feiler: Okay, so we're going to create the space. So where are we going to do this? Where are we going to have this celebration that your friends and you are craving? We're going to do it in your house. We're going to do it in a public library. We're going to do it at the top of a mountain. I see you, you know, in your social media, like outdoors. You want to go to a beach. Where are we going to do this? It absolutely can be done online. It can be done in person, or it can be done a combination. And so what we need is the first of these things is the is the setting the boundary, drawing the circle, whatever it might be.

34:25Bruce Feiler: And what we need is, I've taken this line, my book opens, as you know, in a group baptism in the Vatican. The Vatican baptism liturgy has welcomed with joy. We're going to welcome people with joy. So what is intrinsic to you to welcome people to this circle? You want to sing a song, you want to hand out flowers, you want to light a candle. I just did this at TED last week to Rituals of Renewal. We took little flameless candles because it was an impersonal conference one. I just did this on LinkedIn. We did in person. We did flameless candles. What are we going to welcome with joy? How are we going to welcome people with joy?

34:59We're going to do... Remember when you were a little kid and you had that little paper you fold into four little things. You kind of move it around. Oh, like a devil. And they pop it open. You get like a mystery message that delights you. We're going to do that.

35:13Bruce Feiler: Okay, good. Okay. So we have a little gesture. Okay? We're going to do that at the beginning. After that, we're going to go to number two. Okay? Okay. So I said we could simplify it. This is all the welcome, but we'll go back to the five just because you teed it up. So the next thing we need is stakes. Why does this matter? Why is this important? Okay? The way I think about this is we're going to define the tension, identify the tension, and define the intention. So we have to put our intention to something. So what is the tension? So how are we going to – we did a family ritual that's described in the conclusion of a time together, as you know.

35:51Bruce Feiler: And I'm like, how are we going to mark my daughter's 20th birthday? We opened in Central Park because we used to drive through Central Park. And everything went wrong. I was so smart. Oh, my God. I was like a ritual expert. I took a blanket with us. It was the end of March, and it was a white blanket. And I put my muddy feet in the middle of it and then a dog. Like everything went wrong. So the stakes there was, okay, because when I was 18, my grandfather came over to my house and said, you're 18, you're going to sign a will. Like it was a rite of passage without a rite of choice. So we had our daughters sign wills.

36:22Bruce Feiler: So how are we going to set the intention of once everybody is inside the circle? Hmm. Tell me more about what you mean, but what I mean is why are we here? And what are we trying to accomplish? If you think back to the double mastectomy, the woman who ran that, she's like, we're not here to judge. We're not here to preach. We're not here to tell. We're just here to listen and to support. So what I think of as a great intention setting moment here would be to say something to the effect of I've just had this moment and I want to celebrate with you. But perhaps all of you have just had a similar moment where you've completed a project.

37:06Bruce Feiler: Oh, I like that. Okay. So that's what I want, some sort of invitation. This is what I've learned from the designers, right? Not telling, an invitation. If you're just here to celebrate my milestone here, that's fine. But if you have a milestone, you can also, you can go around, everybody can say it, or you can play a piece of music and people can think about it. But what you want there is all part of the welcome, is to define the stakes that are before everybody. Yeah, I love that. And I love the notion of saying, you know, like, okay, if you want to just make it about you, that's one way to do it.

37:41But if you invite people in to say, like, what is your version of this? So like, for me, if I wanted to say something like, you know, my intent is really just to honor and acknowledge and savor this completion of this thing that was a big thing for me. And, you know, like, I wonder if you're working on something or you're close to it, or you've just recently completed something yourself that you might also feel like, like, like honoring or celebrating in some way. Does that sound like that? That's fantastic.

38:06Bruce Feiler: And now it reminds me. So let's go to the next one. Because then the next thing you need, we're going to get to the middle. That's all the beginning. Now we're going to get to the middle. What you need in the middle is you need, you know, a lot of the time rituals are great. They solve every problem. You know what? You know what rituals do? It's compromise rehearsal. It forces people to make a piece plan, as we discussed earlier. I call this the force something. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something new, right? Like you need a way. So here's what I did in TED that was great.

38:33Bruce Feiler: and I got this idea from a ritual designer named Megan Sheldon in Vancouver, which happened to be where I was. But I love this and I've now done it and I'm doing it actually at the launch party for a time to gather. And that is I divided everybody up into twos. Pair up with someone that you didn't know before you walked in or at least you're not married to or living with or related to or whatever it might be. And then we passed around little cubes of bitter chocolate. and I said I want you to share with your partner something that's bringing you bitterness right now that you're struggling with like a a difficulty or transition that you're going through that you're having trouble managing and then we passed out this the bitter chocolate and everybody and I made them decide when to eat it and then we passed around sweet chocolate and we said please identify what would be a sweet outcome for this thing that's giving you bitterness right now.

39:32Bruce Feiler: So that's why I jumped into that, because you said you may have something. So there's something about why don't you then a way to offer people if it's, you know, six, eight people, you can do it in the circle. If it's larger, you can break it up and say, go around and share with one other person what something that you've been working on that maybe you haven't, you know, or a new phase that That you're going through. So something there. So tell me something that would work for the middle of this ritual as we expand it to new horizons of all kinds. Yeah, I totally love the chocolate thing because I'm an absolute chocolate being.

40:05There we go. Perfect. It's like, boom, done.

40:09Bruce Feiler: Okay. So then number four here is empathy. We want to be with you or be with one another in this time of change. So if this is a graduation, if this is an 18th birthday, if this is a pregnancy, we may be celebrating. But if this is the loss of a job, a double mastectomy, someone just had the roof of their house taken off with a tornado, whatever it might be, we want to be with people where they are. Okay? Okay? And by the way, when I started my book, Happy Families, my wife said to me, okay, I got it. You're going to bring us a bunch of ideas, but don't bring me abstract ideas. Bring me things people have done.

40:56Bruce Feiler: So everything I'm saying here are things that actual people have done. So what I did in the one I just led that I've been leading in the last few months is we then went to empathy. And what I did at TED was I took these flameless candles and I had these bowls. I met this guy who's a preacher who told me that at new human namings that he puts votives in a bowl and then has people come up and make a wish for the child and then pour the water into the bowl so that all the votives are floating by the end. So, I would like something then to take the thing that people have shared and then maybe turn it into an offering, right?

41:40Bruce Feiler: So, what we did at TED was we then took, we then had these candles and we put them in bowls, we poured water in, and everybody then offered a wish. So you've shared with me that you've just finished this creative project. I then would come to the group and say, okay, my wish for you, Jonathan, is that you have the courage to share it with the world, that you get positive feedback, right? That you You take criticism gently that you go. So we need something now for everybody to then offer support to people around. So tell me something like that that's intrinsic. You could do the candle thing or maybe there's another food involved.

42:19Bruce Feiler: Maybe there's a song. Maybe there's a holding hand. So tell me something we can do to be with everybody and what they've just shared. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Good Life Project is sponsored by Wild Alaskan Company. So there is this moment. The pan's hot, the fish hits it. You get that immediate sizzle that tells you that something good is about to happen. And that sound and that smell, it's just one of those simple grounding things that makes you feel present. I have been having that moment a lot lately. And honestly, it starts way before the pan. It starts with what's actually in the box.

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45:22With the ADT Plus app, you can check in on your home from virtually anywhere. It's about moving through the world with a little less weight on your shoulders. Give yourself that extra layer of protection. Visit ADT.com or call 1-800-ADT-ASAP or just click the link in the show notes. When every second counts, count on ADT. I want to clarify here because is this something that generally, let's say there's eight people that's sitting around my living room, where they would make an offering or something, a wish towards me? Or is this more collective, like we do it to each other?

46:01Bruce Feiler: I'll tell you what happened when I did this at TED. I did two more. The first one, people started coming up one by one, and I asked them to make a wish for the other person that they had spoken to. And then this interesting thing happened halfway through, which is people started coming up together and holding hands as if in a wedding vow, completely spontaneous. This is a reminder that a lot of these rituals, and as you said, I went to rituals in dozens of countries around the world. Group baptism in the Vatican and adolescent filing, tooth filing in Bali, six weddings in a day in Las Vegas, ten funerals in a week in Ireland, sounding cold plunging in Copenhagen, forest bathing in Chile, a placenta ritual in Easter.

46:42Bruce Feiler: I mean, this is what I was doing. And so what there is is a way for everybody to feel involved. I talked to this – I just love this story. The woman who popularized Jumping the Broom, which was an old custom for people outside of church or the law. It was originally white working class people in England and then went to enslaved African in the American South. And it died out after emancipation and it's become repopularized. first because of roots and because this woman named Danita Roundtree Green who wrote a book about it. And she said, I knew it was going to be adopted by black families, but that's not what happened.

47:18Bruce Feiler: At first it was gay families, interfaith families, intergenerational families. And she told me the story of that the couple, she's now done hundreds of these, the couple is sitting there going, you know, we're going to jump the broom at the wedding. Okay. Are we going to jump on one? Are we going to jump on three? Are we going to jump on jump? And then the audience is shouting out, like it becomes a way for everybody to get invested in that moment. So when I see this as it's, that's why I call it empathy, right? It's a way for everybody to hold space, to join in it, right? There's a thing that I'm one designer I know used that I've been adopting and what I've been doing.

47:54Bruce Feiler: Like this is not a scripted show for your entertainment. This is audience participation. So you want a way for everybody. So if everyone's spoken, you can say, everybody pick somebody else in the circle and offer your wish for them, which it will just quickly become general because it will relate to all. So that's what, okay, so what do you want people to do? You want to do a candle? You want to come to the middle and put, you got eight people sitting around. So here's what I want to do. Because it feels better for me for this to be some sort of like shared intention across different people. so I'm going to have a little piece of paper for each person and a pencil not a pen, pencil I'm not sure why but that just feels writer to me and I want them to write one intention for another person in the room without naming them just write an intention that they feel like they would love to wish for anybody in the room and basically put it into a small bowl in the center and then we would each shake it around and each draw one out.

49:01Bruce Feiler: I will just tell you, I'm getting a little emotional hearing this. I want to just tell you a quick story. I was in South Africa attending this traditional bride price negotiation. It had been 17 years, and that was the day it was going to finally finish. Kids were raised, parents had died, and they were going to have a traditional wedding and what they called a white wedding, a back-to-back. and at dawn the family woke up took some from a marula tree took some seeds or fruit and seeds and they turned it into a beer and they poured it as an offering at the base of the tree six months later i was in the andes mountains in chile talking to a mapuche healer from the largest indigenous tribe in um in chile and one of the most revered in south america because they had withstood invader after invader.

49:56Bruce Feiler: And before I met this Mapuche healer to talk to him by ritual, he took a home brew and he poured it at the base of a tree.

50:06As I sit here today, I have no idea how that happens.

50:11Bruce Feiler: There's no internet when this starts, right? This idea, how is it that the same things, it's like beyond Jungian. Look, there is this original human algorithm. And I'm saying this story because what I was going to propose for the last thing was a moment of hope. Okay? We're turning fear into hope. And what I've been doing, inspired by a woman who had a miscarriage and felt shame and wrote the feelings of shame, throwing it into the water, I was going to suggest at the end is that you have people take a, because this is what I did at TED and some others I've done recently, that you take a pebble and you write out a hope for yourself for the future.

50:58Bruce Feiler: And then you take that pebble, walk to the middle of the room and turn it upside down. And as you know, the last funeral, the 10 funerals I went to was of a man who died by suicide in Dublin. And I went to this memorial service in the crematorium. And as the body was being, as the curtain was being closed, the woman, incredible one, her Instagram name is Bold Priestess, she said, conflict. We're here to honor the life of Carl and to deal with our own confusion about how Carl chose to end his life. And I have here a bowl of pebbles, and I invite you to come and take one. Keep it as a memory of, it was where, from where he died.

51:37Bruce Feiler: Keep it as a memory of Carl or return it to nature. And so what I ask people to do is exactly what you just described. And that's why I told that story about the Marula beer. Then everybody goes to the center of the room, takes the stone with someone else's hope, reads it out loud, and then we have created this web of hope. So I love this. So then you could have people. Now, what I did was I flipped it rather than the negative thing. So I like what you – I think you said your hope, your intention, if we use my words, the hope for the future for someone else. And then everybody goes, takes someone else's, reads it out loud.

52:15Bruce Feiler: And by the way, you can do it on the paper. You can do it on something more permanent like a pebble. You could do it on that thing you made at the beginning. And then everybody can take that home, right? You could do it on an origami crane like they have in Hiroshima. But then everybody walks away with this web of hope connected not just to everybody there, but to this larger sense that we've created something special. What is this, Jonathan? It's a shared, unnecessary act that makes you feel at home. That's what we've created in this circle. And you know what? It took us, whatever, six minutes to plan, and I think marginal collective cost, maybe$2.50.

53:02Yeah, I love this. I love the simplicity of it also. You literally, like, these are five things and just go through and figure out what do you want each one of these things to be. And I would imagine also you can kind of, like, map these out in your head and plan for it. And then in the moment, there are going to be times where it unfolds exactly the way you thought and hoped. And then there'll be times where it kind of like goes off the rails a little bit. And there'll be other times where something just profound and transcended that you never saw coming happens. And you're like, this is what was meant to happen, even though I had no idea that that's what, you know, what I really needed in my heart.

53:37Bruce Feiler: I talked to this woman who was a death doula, and she told me that the first meeting that she had with a family, she got there. The person had just died, and she said it was gray murkiness in the air. and she had them put the hands on the body, washed the body. She invited the widow to take the ring off and she said, death is, there's an island of the living and an island of the dead and we're going to push, our job is to push the body in a canoe to go from the body of the living to the body of the dead and we're going to call out, oh, Uncle Bob's there, the dog, to make this connection. And then everybody looks around and realizes that we're what's left of the family.

54:15Bruce Feiler: And then she has the same oil they use to anoint the body, they anoint everybody in the circle. And what she said was every step of the burial, every step of the wedding, every step of the novel, every step of the illness is an opportunity for connection and a little ritual. It's right. Back to this idea, we're going to move from rites of passage to bites of passage. We all need to have a ritual state of mind because the reality is there's the enemies in our pockets every day. And the algorithms that we've outsourced our lives to are algorithms of division. The original human algorithm is an algorithm of connections.

55:00The way I look at this is we have a choice.

55:04Bruce Feiler: It's virtual or ritual. It's URL or IRL. And everyday people are standing up and saying, I want new ways to connect. And so my invitation is if you come on this journey with me, you're going to see some things you cannot believe. You're going to go to these rituals. You're going to go to these gatherings. You're going to meet these people. And you're going to be empowered to say, I can take that existential homesickness that I feel and I can turn it into actual human face-to-face human gatherings, get-togethers, rituals, ceremonies. And we can turn that homesickness into home wellness. Yeah. Love that.

55:40So let's say somebody is joining us for the conversation. and they're nodding along saying, yeah, this feels interesting, this feels right. And they're moving through a transition, empty nest, parents who may be transitioning friendship that needs to be repaired or ending a career chapter, which a lot of people are moving through right now. And they want to design a ritual for the next week. They want something to happen quickly with what they have in their own home, in their own kitchen. what's the very first thing that they should think about doing? Not necessarily the whole framework, which you just laid out so beautifully, but like, it's a first step in here.

56:18Bruce Feiler: The single most important thing you can do. And if you can do only one thing, that thing is do whatever it takes to make you feel at home. And what does that mean? That's safe, that's protected, that's together, okay? That's a sense that you can join with other people. and you can get through this. The three most powerful words in the English language are, you're not alone. You'd be hard-pressed to tell me something after collecting 500 life stories that I have not heard about. Things that are joyful, things that are traumatic, things that are divisive. You are not alone. And the only way to get through it is to get through it with other people.

57:07Bruce Feiler: So the question that you need to identify is what would make you feel safest at this time? That is the purpose of this gathering. Define the tension, focus the intention, and whatever it is that will give you confidence, that's the purpose of what you're doing. And you do not have to ask anyone's permission. I hereby give you permission. and to do it yourself on your own terms. Beautiful. Feels a good place for us to come full circle. I have asked you this before. I'm going to ask you again because some years have passed in this container of Good Life Project. If I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

57:53Bruce Feiler: I think of something that my father said. He was a wise man, and I used to say about my father, he figured out what I think of as the key to life, which is the balance between short-term sacrifice for long-term gain and enjoying yourself along the way. That's the first thing I think is the definition of a good life. But the second thing, in the light of how I've spent the last three years of my life, is the balance between being an individual and being part of a group. I encountered this phrase, which I really appreciate, which is that we all have a we-I axis, where we balance between the we and the I.

58:42Bruce Feiler: And if I was going to define one problem that is under-discussed in the world today, it's that our we-I axes are off-kilter. They're off-balance. Like, I looked it up. The hashtag self-care on Instagram, 21 million uses. The hashtag group care, 18. Like, we don't even have a word for how to tend the groups. So I understand and appreciate and respect and value that caring for yourself, putting yourself first, has value on occasion. But we have let our groups atrophy. and therefore we all feel existentially homesick and alone. So what's the definition of a good life is two axes. On one is the balance between short-term sacrifice and long-term gain.

59:37Bruce Feiler: And the second is being an individual and being a part of not one, but many multiple healthy groups. Thank you. So let's talk about some of the big ahas and actionable takeaways from this conversation. The thing that I'm really sitting with from this conversation is how much of what we call loneliness, especially in the middle years of life, is actually a ritual deficit. It's not that we do not have people. It's that we don't have the ceremonies that tell our people, this matters. I'm in a transition. I need you to witness it with me and maybe be a part of it with me. A few things I want to carry forward with this.

1:00:15Bruce's definition of a ritual is maybe the most portable one that I have encountered. a shared unnecessary act that makes you feel at home. You do not need permission. You do not need a guide or a script or a hundred people. You just need a threshold, a purpose, and at least one other person. The five ritual elements he walked us through, welcoming, setting stakes, showing empathy, creating meaning, and closing with hope. You can build something real with those five moves in an evening, sometimes even in a few minutes, as we just saw. with people you already know using things already available to you.

1:00:52And one final thing, the most powerful words in the English language, according to Bruce, are not necessarily I love you. They're you're not alone. Whatever transition you're moving through right now, find the people who can say that to you in person and build something small enough to actually do specific enough to mean something together. And hey, before you go next week, I'm sitting down with Stanford professor, Tina Selig, to talk about something most of us have completely backwards, how luck actually works, the science behind it, and why most of what we call luck is the result of deliberate actions hiding in plain sight.

1:01:31So if you've ever wondered why some people just seem to catch every break while others keep missing them, this is gonna change the way you see that. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss that or any upcoming episodes. Do me a favor, a seven second favor, share this episode with one other person who needs to hear what they're feeling right now has a name and a remedy and maybe a ritual that really is calling to be created. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers, Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields, editing help by Troy Young, Chris Carter crafted our theme music.

1:02:06And if you have not already, follow us wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss a conversation. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

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