🌀 The Ceremony of Everything

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Scroll through your feed on any day. Someone is celebrating their "6-month jobversary." Someone else is posting about their cat's second birthday. There's a kindergarten graduation. A gender reveal. A "finally Friday" reel. A carousel captioned: "Can't believe it's already been three years since this day."

Every Tuesday is someone's most important Tuesday.

At some point, perhaps between the fourth "new era" post this week and a stranger's half-birthday, a question arises: does any of this still truly mean anything?

And beneath it, something more bizarre: What occurs to life if we cease?

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In the highlands of Sulawesi, Indonesia, the Toraja people maintain a unique relationship with ceremony. When someone dies, they do not organise a funeral immediately. The body is embalmed and kept in the family home under the same roof as the living. Until the funeral rites are completed, the person is not considered truly dead; they are simply called "the one who is sick" or "the one who is asleep."

This wait can last years.

The family is not procrastinating; they are preparing because, when the ceremony finally occurs, the Rambu Solo, it must be done correctly. The body can stay at home for months or even years before burial. Families wait for the right moment and gather the financial and logistical support necessary to conduct the full ceremony. Most Torajans spend their entire lives saving for their funeral. Hundreds of guests attend, and the ceremony can last five days. Buffaloes are slaughtered, and the whole community comes together.

The Rambu Solo is not just another celebration. It is a rarity, marked by the community's full participation and years of eager anticipation.

Meaning here isn't given; it is earned through being indispensable.

Back in the 1960s, British anthropologist Victor Turner highlighted that the true power of rituals lies not in the decorations or guest list, but in the meaningful change they symbolize in social status. Building on van Gennep's ideas, Turner explained that rites of passage temporarily lift individuals out of their social roles as they cross a threshold, marking a transformation that has already taken place.

He described this state as liminality: the moment of being "betwixt and between."

Later on, Turner brought in a new term for today's leisure activities: liminoid. Unlike liminal events, liminoid experiences are brief and don't alter social status; they’re just temporary moments of transition, kind of like a form of "play." These experiences are similar to rites, often involving candles and meaningful elements. But afterwards, everything stays the same, and you remain who you are, and nothing really changes.

This is where most celebration now lives: simulating the weight of thresholds without any actual threshold.

French philosopher Guy Debord first pointed out this pattern in 1967. He observed how post-industrial culture shifted our priorities from just possessing to showcasing. Now, "having' is about gaining instant recognition and purpose through appearances. It’s no longer just about reaching milestones; instead, we focus on the content of these milestones. So, turning 30 isn't just a birthday; it's a whole aesthetic experience.

When appearing becomes the point, the moment itself starts to hollow out.

In September 2020, a family in Yucaipa, California, used a smoke-generating pyrotechnic device to reveal their baby's gender during a photo shoot. This incident led to the El Dorado Fire, which burned 22,744 acres across San Bernardino and Riverside counties, resulted in the death of one firefighter, and destroyed 20 buildings.

That's the edge case. However, the logic applies throughout. Preschool graduations now include caps and gowns. Etsy offers "I survived 100 days at my new job" frames. "Birthday months" are standard, not just a day or weekend, but a whole calendar month claimed in one person's honour.

Here's what makes this really interesting: Robin Dunbar's research suggests that we can only maintain about 5 truly close friendships at a time, even though we know the names of up to 1,500 people. We spend roughly 40% of our social time with these core 5 friends, and an additional 20% with about 10 more. It highlights how our social world is both deeper and wider than it might seem!

But the average Instagram account reaches hundreds. Which means most celebrations are now held for people who, cognitively and biologically, cannot fully understand why they should care.

The audience grew. The ability to truly witness someone didn't.

📜 Quote: "Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation." — Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967)

📊 Study: Research shows that humans can sustain about 150 meaningful relationships but only five truly close ones. We are cognitively designed for a small circle. Social media gives us a stadium.

🎨 Artifact: The "birthday month" isn't just a single day or a weekend, but a whole 30-day stretch on the calendar. An overly grand ceremony that eventually merges into mere background noise.

🤔 Prompt: When was the last time something truly felt sacred to you, not because you declared it so, but because it was rare?

What is the most ridiculously over-hyped thing you've come across on your feed recently?

The underlying fear is genuine: if we cease declaring everything important, will life seem hollow? Will we disappear from one another’s notice?

Maybe. But consider the Toraja answer to one ceremony, an entire lifetime of significance behind it. Or Turner's: a ritual only carries meaning if something actually changed on the other side of it.

The problem isn't celebrating. It's the inflation. When everything is declared sacred, you haven't made everything sacred. You've made the word sacred meaningless.

The most memorable moments in your life probably won't require a smoke device or a countdown reel. They'll simply be too genuine to be captured in a caption.

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