🌀 Meetings as Modern Rituals

You glance at your calendar. You see three meetings scheduled before lunch. The 10 a.m. "sync" has no set agenda. The 11 a.m. "check-in" will repeat the topics from last week. During these meetings, you'll nod along, keep your microphone muted, and discreetly respond to emails while someone shares their screen.

Here's the strange part: you already know nothing will be decided. So why do you go?

The average worker spends 392 hours per year in meetings, equivalent to more than 16 full workdays. Yet only 37% of those meetings actually result in a decision. We've built entire calendars around gatherings that produce almost nothing tangible.

This isn't incompetence. It's something older. What if the meeting isn't really about productivity at all?

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The Dogon people of Mali build structures called toguna, low-roofed meeting houses where village elders gather to discuss community matters. The roof hangs so low that no one can stand up. This isn't poor architecture. It's a deliberate design. If you try to dominate, to tower over others, you'll hit your head. The building itself enforces equality and patience.

Across the continent, the Tswana people of Botswana practice the kgotla, an open-air assembly at which any community member may speak before the chief decides. There's no time limit. Discussion continues until consensus emerges. The point isn't speed. It is legitimacy through participation.

The sociologist Randall Collins studied what happens when people interact face-to-face. He argued that shared focus and shared emotion produce “interaction ritual chains” that generate emotional energy, a sense of confidence, belonging, and moral alignment that individuals cannot obtain on their own. What matters most is not the content of the discussion but the co-presence that enables this energy.

This helps explain a puzzling feature of modern meetings. We complain they're unproductive, yet we keep scheduling them. Perhaps we're not seeking productivity. We're seeking proof that we belong somewhere.

The sociologist Erving Goffman revolutionized how we understand face-to-face interaction. In his 1967 work Interaction Ritual, he argued that whenever humans gather, they perform elaborate rituals to maintain "face”, the image they project to others.

Every meeting is a stage. We manage impressions. We time our contributions. We perform engagement even when we're bored. Goffman observed that these micro-rituals feel exhausting precisely because they require constant attention: reading cues, avoiding embarrassment, protecting others' dignity.

This is why video calls drain us differently than in-person meetings. Researchers at Stanford developed the Zoom Exhaustion and Fatigue Scale, which identifies five dimensions of video-call fatigue: general, social, emotional, visual, and motivational. The "mirror effect", constantly seeing yourself on screen, creates what they call "mirror anxiety." You're performing for others while simultaneously watching yourself perform.

Collins believed rituals serve society through shared experience. Goffman believed rituals serve individuals by helping us navigate the treacherous waters of social judgment. Both are right. The meeting achieves both purposes, even if it accomplishes nothing else.

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Companies know meetings feel broken. Shopify deleted 12,000 recurring meetings in a single calendar purge. Atlassian's research found that 77% of workers frequently attend meetings that end with one decision: to schedule another meeting. An MIT study found that companies with three meeting-free days per week experienced a 71% increase in productivity.

Yet we can't quite quit. When researchers surveyed workers at 76 major companies, something strange emerged: even as productivity rose without meetings, employees reported missing the connection. Meetings are inefficient, but isolation is worse.

The stand-up meeting offers a revealing compromise. Borrowed from agile software development, these gatherings force brevity through physical discomfort. You talk faster when your legs hurt. It's the toguna principle, with ergonomic chairs removed; architecture shapes behaviour.

Meanwhile, Slack's "huddle" feature and voice notes represent attempts to capture collective presence without full ritual commitment. These tools suggest that we seek the feeling of togetherness without the performance burden of face work.

📜 Quote: "In the midst of an assembly, we become capable of feelings and conduct of which we are incapable when left to our individual resources." —Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912)

📊 Study: Research from Austria's Graz University of Technology (2024) found that brainwave activity indicated signs of exhaustion and difficulty focusing just 15 minutes into virtual classes, and participants' heart rates slowed, indicating cognitive overload.

🎨 Artifact: The "this meeting could have been an email" meme is now so ubiquitous that it appears on coffee mugs and laptop stickers. Its popularity reveals a collective awareness that we're trapped in rituals we can't escape.

😂 Meme: "My favorite productivity hack is pretending I have a hard stop in 30 minutes."

🤔 Prompt: What's the last meeting you attended that made you feel genuinely connected, not productive, but connected? What made it different?

We want to hear about your meeting rituals, the weird ones. The standing meeting that nobody can explain. The check-in has been happening since 2019, the phrase everyone says, but nobody means. Hit reply and share. The strangest examples might appear in a future issue.

The meeting persists because humans must periodically confirm their membership in the group. It's expensive, inefficient, and often pointless, which is precisely how rituals work. The Dogon don't build low ceilings because they're practical. They make them because the constraint itself creates meaning.

Your 10 a.m. sync might not produce decisions. However, it creates a more complex measure: evidence that you still belong. That's not nothing.

Maybe the question isn't "why do we still have meetings?" It's "what would we lose if we stopped gathering entirely?"

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