Rituals in the modern era: from getting in shape to shaping your life

Bold title uh? Follow me carefully.
One evening, while I was training in the gym, as I’ve been doing for the past 20 years, a girl asked me if she was executing the exercise that her trainer added to her routine correctly: little did she know that experiencing the same scene once again would allow me to finally see and understand one particular pattern I had experienced all my life.

I observed her sitting down and doing the exercise as prescribed, or I shall say “moving her body with the prescribed pattern”, because there was absolutely no intention in the movement; no weight, no struggle, just an effortless movement (bear in mind this wasn’t the “is this movement correct?” phase, it was the actual set).

It occurred to me: for me, a specific movement is to target a muscle group to stress in that specific moment, with tension high enough to cause micro-tears in the tissue that will then super-compensate etc…
For her, everything was still as simple as “if I do this movement, I get what I want”, a ritual: No deeper understanding of why and how, just something to do because someone else said so.
Made me realize just how many times people follow the ritual.

Rituals of the modern era, examples

In the gym

The fitness industry is easy to identify as a rituals machine, where people follow the prescribed rituals blindly, and this same blind faith explains why most people have very few results when following such recommendations:

• In the example above we already explored the ritual of movement, where just moving in a special way with a certain pattern has the expectation of doing the magic
• The training split and exercises are seen as a dogma, focusing on the rite rather than on what they’re actually trying to accomplish: do you really think that if you do the appointed exercise (that maybe you’re also uncomfortable with) rather than another equivalent one your myofibrils have any idea of what’s happening regardless?
• Food is easily identifiable as another ritual that people want to follow: “eat this thing and you’ll lose weight”
  It’s always about the right thing to eat, the magic ingredient, that one thing to make the ritual complete. Making it about the overall energy balance takes another level of consciousness.

What’s fascinating is that these rituals persist despite poor results. The same people who’ve been doing the same routine for years without visible progress continue with unwavering faith. If anything, the lack of results reinforces the ritual: “I must not be doing it correctly enough.”

In beauty and personal care

The beauty industry is the clearest female counterpart to the fitness ritual machine. The flagship example is the multi-step skincare routine:

• Morning and evening sequences of 8–12 products applied in an exact order dictated by influencers or “that one viral dermatologist.” The belief is that the ritual itself (the layering, the waiting times, the specific actives) will transform the skin, not the underlying biology of cell turnover, inflammation, or genetics.
• Results are secondary; adherence is sacred. Women will spend hundreds monthly and continue for years even when their skin looks the same or worse, blaming “not being consistent enough” rather than questioning whether the ritual was ever grounded in their own physiology.

Self-improvement

Very close to the fitness space, there’s the “self improvement” movement, where often you’ll find self-proclaimed gurus that became millionaires starting from nothing, and now they want to make you rich too, for some reason.

• The morning routine industrial complex: wake at 5 AM, meditate, journal, cold shower, exercise. The specific activities matter less than the religious adherence to the sequence. Waking up at crazy hours and taking cold showers won’t change what you accomplish, only what you actually do, does.
  I’ll gladly continue to not be miserable and wake up as late as possible and having steaming hot showers only, thanks.
• Manifestation practices: the exact wording, repetition schedule, and timing are followed like a spell. The universe (or whatever) is expected to deliver once the ritual is completed perfectly; understanding probability, action thresholds, or cognitive bias is irrelevant. The thirst for “just tell me the steps” is identical to the morning-routine industrial complex.

Corporate

• Why is there a dress code for corporate workers, even if it’s always the same people in the same rooms and not making contact with anyone outside the company? Because it has always been done like this. A ritual.
• “It has always been done like this” is also both the most dangerous ritual, that can make companies stagnate and die, and what keeps them going, because otherwise most workers would have no idea what they would need to do.

The Priests

If you’re an involved reader (and let’s be sincere, you are otherwise you wouldn’t have reached this far) you might already have noticed the similarities between the rituals that people need, and where they come from.
Also you’ve already read the title of this chapter, hence it’s now easy to make the comparison between an actual priest and the priest-like figures where the rituals I’m talking about come from.

Every religion needs its intermediaries, let’s start from the first example above, where the parallelism is clear: personal trainers, influencers, and nutritionists are the fitness priests: They perform the rituals publicly, and most importantly they tell you what to do.

In corporate, rituals usually come from:

• The Remote Starship (Straight from HQ, no one knows why)
• The Ancient Sage (A smart employee that built the system, which has long left the company)
• The Overpaid Sage (The process put in place by the consultant/vendor that set up the system)

The parallel to organized religion is striking: most practitioners don’t read the original documents, don’t start from principles, but receive interpreted wisdom from their chosen priests, who themselves may have received it from other priests, each layer adding distortion while maintaining the appearance of authority.

Compliant by Nature

Rituals are important for society at large, usually they have been established in good faith, by someone that understood the root issue and was put in place in order to lower the cognitive effort for everyone else and just let them do the thing.

We are fundamentally built to follow rituals. Most humans just comply. Developing world knowledge from first principles is difficult, cognitively expensive and takes decades. Doing the ritual is safe, cognitively easy and may lead to results even by ignoring the underlying reason why.

Our ancestors survived by compliance. Do what the tribe does. Eat what they eat. Avoid what they avoid. The ones who questioned every instruction, who needed to understand the “why” before acting, often didn’t survive long enough to reproduce. We are the descendants of the compliant.

Very few people drag the world forward, and the majority catches up doing what they did.

But why? 🐧

Rituals are compressed knowledge, and without them society would stall; they are not to be entirely rejected. The problem starts when we stop at execution and never ask what the ritual is trying to produce.

Most people don’t want truth, they want instructions. “Tell me what to do” feels safer than “help me understand.”

That’s why rituals win, even when they fail: they protect you from responsibility. If results don’t come, you can always blame your execution, never the premise.

A good rule is simple: keep the ritual if it still creates the outcome, question it if it doesn’t, replace it when a better principle appears. That shift, from obedience to understanding, is where agency begins. Progress has never been made by the most obedient. It has always been made by the people willing to break the rite, keep the principle, and rebuild from there.