We just watched a crowd turn itself into a boat. Norway’s Viking Row is barely a year old, and it works for one reason: It gives every person in the stands a way in.

The Viking Row belongs to a larger, stranger family. If athletes’ pregame rituals are private machines for control, the ones a crowd builds together are public machines for belonging. And a crowd has more than one way in.

Myth and ritual sit at either end. A myth is a story a crowd shares and keeps retelling, a goat at Wrigley or a birthright sold to New York. A ritual is a thing a crowd does in unison and keeps repeating, a song in the stands or an octopus on the ice. Superstition lives in the space between them, a belief that some small act bends the outcome, story and gesture fused into one. The three blur constantly, and they still aren’t the same thing.

What ties them together is how they move. They get passed around, from one crowd to the next and from one country to another. And they get passed down, from parents to kids who inherit a grief or a chant they had no hand in starting. Some arrived fully formed. Most didn’t. A few were borrowed, a few were accidents the stands refused to let die. All of them are ways of refusing to watch from the outside.

The Curse Everyone Agrees To

Begin with a goat. In 1945, a tavern owner named William Sianis arrived at Wrigley Field for a World Series game with a ticket for himself and a ticket for his pet goat, Murphy. The goat, by all accounts, smelled, and Sianis was asked to remove it. Insulted, he declared that the Chicago Cubs would never win another World Series. They didn’t win one for the next seventy-one years, a championship drought stretching to 108 years total, and an entire fanbase organized its grief around a bad-tempered man and his odorous goat (USA Today, ESPN). When the Cubs finally won in 2016, fans insisted they weren’t just winning a trophy. They were lifting a hex.

The Cubs weren’t alone in their cursedness. Across the country, the Boston Red Sox spent eighty-six years convinced they’d doomed themselves by selling Babe Ruth, “the Bambino,” to the New York Yankees in 1919. The curse didn’t actually exist in the public mind for most of those decades. It was largely invented by the Boston sportswriter Dan Shaughnessy, whose 1990 book, Curse of the Bambino, gave the drought a name and a villain. The idea caught because the fans needed it to. As one historian put it, the curse “gives the fanbase another identity and a unifying aspect to rally around” (ESPN). Boston broke it in 2004 with one of the greatest comebacks in sports history, against, fittingly, the Yankees.

This is the first secret of the communal myth: it doesn’t need to be true. It only needs to be shared. The curse is a way for thousands of strangers to feel the same thing at the same time, to convert decades of random misfortune into a single coherent narrative with a beginning and, eventually, a cathartic end. It is the purest kind of passing down, a grief handed to kids who weren’t alive when it started.

Rituals Made from Nothing

The same impulse runs through the rituals fans invent out of thin air. Consider baseball’s rally cap, a superstition that hardened into a ritual: the act of flipping your hat inside out or backward to summon a late-inning comeback. There’s no mechanism here, no theory of how a turned cap moves a baseball. Its origin is genuinely murky. Some trace it to the 1945 Detroit Tigers, but the version we know didn’t take hold until Mets fans started flipping their caps inside out at Shea Stadium in the mid-1980s. It got seared into the national memory during the frantic Game 6 comeback of the 1986 World Series (Wikipedia). The rally cap survives on decades of fans insisting they’ve seen it work too many times to stop now.

Superstition with a Body Count

And then there’s the gloriously morbid logic of NASCAR, where superstition has a body count. Green cars are bad luck, a belief traced to the 1920 death of Indianapolis 500 champion Gaston Chevrolet in a crash while driving one. And peanut shells are banned outright from the pits, supposedly because shells were found in the wreckage of fatal 1937 crashes, even though contemporary reports never actually mentioned them (Sports Illustrated, NASCAR Hall of Fame). The facts barely matter. The taboo persists because in a sport where the worst can genuinely happen, forbidding a rumored talisman of bad luck feels like armor.

The Songs a Crowd Borrows

Some of the most powerful crowd rituals are not gestures at all. They are songs, and the strange part is how few of them were ever written for the terraces. They were borrowed from somewhere else entirely and made sacred by repetition.

Before every home match at Anfield, tens of thousands of Liverpool supporters raise their scarves and sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” The song has been sung by fans for so many decades that it’s been literally carved into the stadium, with the words sitting in wrought iron over the Shankly Gates. But the song is a show tune from the 1945 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel, written to comfort a grieving woman on stage. It reached the Kop only because a local band, Gerry and the Pacemakers, took it to number one in 1963, and fans who sang along to the day’s hit records simply never stopped (Liverpool FC, FIFA). It has since traveled to Celtic, Borussia Dortmund, Feyenoord, and clubs as far away as Tokyo. A song of consolation turned into a wall of sound unifying football fans. It’s a notoriously difficult melody too, wide and slow and unforgiving without a band behind you, which makes a full Kop carrying it in unison all the more improbable.

Across London, West Ham fans sing something even stranger. “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” began as a number in a 1918 Broadway revue, a wistful little waltz about dreams that rise and burst. A working-class club in East London adopted it, and today machines around the stadium pump thousands of real soap bubbles into the air while grown adults sing about fragile hope drifting away (West Ham United, FourFourTwo). It should be ridiculous. Instead, it is one of the most moving sights in English football, a whole crowd agreeing to believe in bubbles.

How a Ritual Travels

The strangest thing about these crowd rituals is how they travel, leaping from one fanbase to another. In Detroit, the tradition of throwing an octopus onto the ice was born on April 15, 1952, when two fish-market-owning brothers, Pete and Jerry Cusimano, hurled a cephalopod from the stands, its eight tentacles representing the eight wins then needed for a Stanley Cup. The Red Wings swept to the title that night, and seventy years later, fans are still flinging octopuses. The team has even created a building-sized octopus mascot named “Al.” This ritual proved so infectious that it spawned imitators. When the Nashville Predators wanted their own totem, they began throwing catfish (NHL, VICE).

Iceland’s mesmerizing “Viking Thunderclap,” the slow, building, synchronized clap punctuated by a guttural “HUH” that stunned the world at Euro 2016, wasn’t drawn from ancient Scandinavian heritage at all. Icelandic supporters appear to have adapted it from existing European fan culture. The Scottish football club Motherwell is often cited as one influence. Iceland may have picked up the chant after a 2014 match against Motherwell, then carried it home and made it their own (SPORF, InnerDrive).

The Poznań traveled even further. It began with supporters of the Polish club Lech Poznań, who turned their backs to the pitch, linked arms, and bounced in unison. When six thousand of them did it inside Manchester City’s stadium in 2010, the home fans were baffled at first, then hooked, and made it their own (Manchester City, The Independent). From there, it kept jumping. Charlotte FC opens every home match with it; Western Sydney’s supporters claimed it for the eightieth minute, and by 2025 the band Oasis had whole concert crowds doing it between songs. A dance from one Polish terrace had become a global reflex.

The Accidents That Stuck

Some of the most enduring rituals were never planned at all. They were accidents the crowd refused to let die. On December 26, 1993, in sub-zero cold at Lambeau Field, Green Bay safety LeRoy Butler scooped up a lateral and scored, then, on pure impulse, launched himself into the arms of the fans behind the end zone. “He stuck to the wall like Velcro,” teammate Robert Brooks marveled. The “Lambeau Leap” was born in that instant, popularized by Brooks the following season, and is still performed more than thirty years later (ESPN, Packers.com).

A continent away, Cristiano Ronaldo did something similar by accident. After a goal at a 2013 friendly in Miami, he leapt, spun in the air, landed in a wide stance, and shouted “Sí,” Spanish for “yes.” He hadn’t planned to repeat it. The crowd’s roar of “Siuuu” decided otherwise, and the yelp became the most imitated celebration on Earth, copied by athletes in every sport and kids in every schoolyard (ESPN).

Calculated Rituals

Most of these rituals were accidents or borrowings. In Los Angeles, one was engineered on purpose, and the fans built it into the architecture. LAFC’s supporters section is called the 3252, named for the exact number of standing spots in the North End behind the goal. Add up the digits, and you get twelve, the number that the sport of soccer reserves for the fans themselves, considering them to be the twelfth player on an eleven-man team (MLSsoccer.com, The 3252).

Everything about the section is designed for participation. Capos stand on raised platforms and lead the chants by hand. Drummers hold the whole end on one beat, and flags move down the rows so even a first-timer gets a turn waving one. The signature chant, “Jump for LAFC,” was borrowed from supporters in Australia, who had borrowed it themselves from South America and Europe, and it has since bounced back out to clubs as far away as the Norwegian First Division. After every win, the players walk to the North End, take a megaphone, and lead a slow call-and-response with the crowd until the two sides are singing as one voice. Even the club’s co-owner, Will Ferrell, has been known to grab the megaphone and start the chant himself.

Beautiful Nonsense

These traditions endure because they do something the scoreboard can’t. They bind a crowd into a congregation. They turn private hope into a shared language of belief. In the most affectionate sense, this is beautiful nonsense, and that is exactly why it lasts.

Athletes tighten their laces in the same order before every match, reaching for control. A Norwegian crowd pulls imaginary oars in unison, reaching for each other. Cursed fans wait decades for release. The faithful raise borrowed songs over the beat of a drum.

Underneath all of it runs one instinct, older than any tradition it produces.

We are never satisfied to watch the story from the outside.

We always want a way in.

A fan chant is barely a year old, and proof of how fast spectators become participants when a ritual is simple enough to join in a second.

Imagine you’re standing on a cold beach in Northern Europe, more than a thousand years ago. There’s fog on the water, and you can’t see far. Then you hear it. A low drumbeat, slow and steady, and under it the sound of many rowers pulling on something heavy and calling out on the beat. The sound gets louder. The fog doesn’t lift, but the rhythm keeps coming, closer and closer, until you understand what’s underneath it. Oars. A lot of them. The Vikings are almost ashore, and they want you to hear them coming.

Now, stand in a football stadium in New Jersey this summer. You’ll hear nearly the same thing.

Thousands of Norwegians are packed shoulder to shoulder in the stands, leaning back and forward in unison, pulling invisible oars through imaginary water while a drum keeps time. They chant one word, over and over. Ro. Row. From across the stadium, it looks like a single living machine, a longship made of people, hauling itself toward the final whistle.

It’s called the Viking Row, and the surprising part is how new it is. This isn’t an old tradition carried down from the fjords. In its current World Cup form, it’s barely a year old.

I’ve been following Norway through this tournament partly out of bloodline, partly because the whole thing lines up with everything I’ve been writing about participation. The row is the cleanest example I’ve seen in a long time of how little a ritual needs in order to work, as long as it hands everyone an oar.

What It Actually Is

The mechanic is almost insultingly simple. You sit close to the people around you, move your arms back and forth to a drumbeat, and chant ro, the Norwegian word for row, until the sound swells into a roar. That’s the whole thing. No equipment, nothing to memorize. You sit down, take an imaginary oar, and you’re part of the crew (The Local, NPR).

It even comes with a soundtrack. The row rides on a track called Vikingblod, “Viking Blood,” which reportedly climbed to No. 1 on Spotify in Norway during the run (FourFourTwo). So the gesture has a pulse behind it, a tempo anyone can fall into on the first try.

Who Started It, And Where

Here’s the twist. This very Viking thing didn’t come down from the Viking age. It came from a guy. Ole Frøystad, a supporter from Sunnmøre and a coordinator with Oljeberget, Norway’s official supporters’ group, put it together in 2025 to give the team a distinct identity for its first World Cup since 1998 (The Local, FourFourTwo). One fan with one idea, a year before the rest of the world started copying it.

The meaning he reached for is one of Norway’s oldest and most available stories. He’s tied the row back to Viking crews taking in their sails and pulling out the oars to reach shore right before battle. A nation of 5.6 million, back on the biggest stage after 28 years in the wilderness, rowing itself into a fight. Whether that’s airtight history matters less than how instantly it reads. You get it in a second, the way you understood the fog.

There’s a split underneath all of this, and it’s the bridge to the other rituals I’ve been writing about. The athlete’s ritual is usually a private machine for control. The lucky socks, the pregame meal eaten in the same order, the breath held before a penalty kick, small spells one person casts to feel steadier inside a moment they can’t command.

The fan’s ritual runs the other way. It’s a public machine for belonging. It takes the lone spectator and folds them into something bigger and more synchronized than the self.

That’s what the row does. It doesn’t ask Norwegian fans to cheer louder or believe harder. It hands them a job. They sit, take the oar, pull in time with the people beside them, and in a few seconds, a crowd stops being a crowd and becomes a crew.

Simplicity Wins Participation

Here’s what I find genuinely instructive about it, with my strategist hat on. Most attempts to manufacture fan culture die of complexity. They need a chant with specific lyrics, or a card display, or an app, or a guy with a megaphone telling everyone what to do. The Viking Row needs none of that. It needs a body and a neighbor.

That’s the whole design lesson. A participatory ritual doesn’t scale because it’s clever. It scales because the barrier to joining is almost zero. A nine-year-old can do it. So can a grandmother who has never watched a match. A stranger two rows over is fully inside the ritual one second after deciding to try. It works at the scale of a stadium and at the scale of four friends on an escalator, which means it can be as big or as small as the moment needs it to be.

Built To Be Shared

The other reason it traveled is that it was, almost by accident, built for the feed.

Think about what a phone camera loves. Motion, rhythm, a crowd moving as one, a clean repeatable gesture, a myth you recognize on sight, a one-word name. The row has all of it. It’s multi-sensory in a way that survives compression. You see the bodies, you hear the drum, and the tempo carries even through a muted screen. It reads in three seconds, and it begs to be copied.

So it jumped the stadium walls. There’s a clip of Norwegian fans in Viking helmets rowing up an escalator in a Boston train station, dead serious, perfectly in time. There’s another of them filling the red steps of Times Square (NPR). Every one of those clips is an instruction manual. Watch it once, and you already know how to do it, which makes each video a recruiting poster. The ritual is the content and the call to action at the same time.

Then it climbed somewhere stranger. On the floor of Norway’s parliament, the speaker, Masud Gharahkhani, brought lawmakers to order with his gavel and led them through the row, a salute he described as coming from the heart of the country’s democracy (NPR). A fan’s idea from the year before had become a national gesture, then a global one, in a matter of weeks.

On Brand

Part of why it caught on so fast is that it never felt like an invention. It dropped into a Viking identity that Norway had already built around this team. The 2026 kit carries a typeface drawn from Elder Futhark, the old Norse runic alphabet, so Haaland’s and Ødegaard’s names run down their backs in runes (Footy Headlines). Before the tournament, the federation shot a campaign called “The Vikings Are Coming,” players in full Viking dress beside real longships.

So the symbol was already sitting there, fully loaded. The fans just picked it up and turned it into something you do with your body. That’s the line between a gimmick and a ritual that feels true. A gimmick sits on top of an identity. This one grew straight out of it.

A ritual doesn’t always earn its power by being old. Sometimes it earns it by feeling instantly remembered.

The Drum Beats Back

Then came the moment that turned a fan ritual into a shared one. After Norway beat Senegal 3-2 to reach the knockout round, the players didn’t wave and jog down the tunnel. They walked over and sat down on the grass in front of the supporters’ end. Ødegaard picked up a drum and set the beat. Haaland led the team in rowing along with the stands, the whole squad pulling imaginary oars in the dirt while the crowd pulled back (ESPN, Reuters). Haaland said afterward that Ødegaard had asked him before kickoff whether they should join in if they won. So it wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing. Ødegaard had imagined it before kickoff, a handshake between the pitch and the people who came to watch.

Now the ritual runs both directions. The fans row for the players. The players drum for the fans. It stopped belonging to either side, which is usually the moment a piece of culture quits being a trend and starts being a tradition.

A Way In

Strip away the runes and the drum and the chart-topping track, and here’s what’s left. The Viking Row hands everyone in the building, and everyone watching the clip, a simple physical way to stop being a spectator. That’s why it belongs in any honest conversation about participation. The rowing itself is almost beside the point.

A country waited 28 years to get back to this stage. When it finally arrived, its fans didn’t settle for wearing the flag and singing the anthem. They sat down together, grabbed imaginary oars, and built themselves a boat. For ninety minutes at a time, a scattered fanbase becomes one crew, all facing the same way, all pulling.

Go back to the fog. What made that sound on the water so frightening was the unity inside it. Every oar pulling in time. One boat, one purpose, before the keel ever touched sand. That’s what these fans have found a thousand years later, in a stadium parking lot in New Jersey. They’re not cheering from the shore. They’re rowing the boat. And the genius of it is that anyone, from any seat or any screen, can pick up an oar and climb in.

Row on, Norway.

I’ve slapped hands and bumped fists at the start of a roll more times than I can count. Every grappler has. You reach out, slap palms, tap knuckles, and the round begins. The gesture is older than anyone in the room, and it carries a single meaning. We’re both ready. The whole point is the agreement, made with your hands, that the two of you are about to start.

Combat sports are full of these openings, the bow that begins a judo match, the ceremony a Muay Thai fighter performs before the bell. None of them moves the fight. What they do is mark the seam between the room you were standing in and the contest you’re about to enter. Cross that seam, and you stop being a person who trains. You become a participant in this exact match, right now.

Of course, martial arts aren’t the only sports that love a good pre-match routine.

Crossing the Seam Alone

Rafael Nadal crosses the same seam alone, and he does it with water bottles. Watch him in the ninety seconds before a tennis point, and you’re watching a man hold off chaos with his bare hands. He picks the back of his shorts. He tucks the hair behind one ear, then the other. He wipes his nose, wipes it again, touches both shoulders. And before any of that, back at the changeover chair, he sets down two drink bottles like a surgeon laying out instruments. Labels turned to face the baseline. One nudged a fraction behind the other. Both angled toward the court he’s about to fight on. Move them, and something in him goes quietly wrong.

My wife loves tennis, so we’ve seen a lot of Nadal on our television, and my wife and kids can narrate his routine out loud the way some people narrate a nature documentary. The bottles, the ears, all of it, but mostly the long sequence before each serve that ends with a tug at the back of his shorts. A man who does that on international television, that many times, across that many years, is doing it on purpose. There’s a reason, and it isn’t the one most people reach for.

People call it superstition, and Nadal has heard that ten thousand times. He rejects it flatly. A superstition stops the moment it stops paying off, and he keeps arranging those bottles whether he wins or loses. He calls the whole routine a way of placing himself in a match (USA Today For The Win). That phrase is doing a lot of work. He’s walking himself through a door, and the contest waits on the other side of it.

Engineers of Attention

Swimmer Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian in history, ran a pre-race routine with the tolerances of a Swiss movement. The same breakfast every morning of competition: eggs, oatmeal, energy shakes. The same warm-up, lap for lap, eight hundred of swim, six hundred of kick, four hundred of pull, two hundred of drill, then a burst of race-pace twenty-fives to wake the fast-twitch fibers. The same music, the same order of stretches, each one checked off. On the blocks, he pulled his right earbud when officials called the swimmers up, the left only when they read his name, and he always mounted from the left side (SwimSwam). None of it shaved a hundredth off the clock. What it did was make him Phelps. By the time he stepped onto the block, the race was just the next item on a list he’d started hours earlier, and he was already inside it.

That’s the magic hiding inside all of this. The routine looks like a cage and works like a key. Make a hundred small choices in advance, which sock, which earbud, how the bottles sit, and you free up the one thing that can’t be rehearsed: The performance. Sports psychologists have a plain name for the mechanism: ritual. Rituals minimize distractions and keep an athlete task-focused, says Dr. Bradley Cardinal of Oregon State University, and they take the edge off anxiety while building confidence (Deutsche Welle).

And that part transcends sport. A ritual leaves the act itself untouched and works on the performer instead. The serve is the same serve. The high note is the same high note. The takedown is the same takedown. The fouetté is the same fouetté. What moves is the person arriving to do it, carried from one state into another. That’s the participation function of ritual, and it doesn’t stop at the edge of the field. A stage asks for the same crossing. So does a hard conversation you’ve been putting off or a deal you’re eager to negotiate. The small repeated act is how you arrive as the version of yourself that the moment is about to require.

Private Certainties

The record books are full of these private certainties. Wade Boggs, the Hall of Fame third baseman, ate chicken before every single game and took batting practice at 5:17 on the dot. The nickname “Chicken Man” stuck, and so did five batting titles, so it’s hard to say the routine cost him anything (Sporting News). Michael Jordan wore his past into every game, keeping the powder-blue shorts from his 1982 national-championship team at North Carolina under his Bulls uniform for his whole career. He had the Bulls shorts cut longer to hide them and almost by accident started the baggy-shorts era (Sporting News). Serena Williams kept the same unwashed socks going through a tournament, and when she lost, she’d sometimes blame herself for breaking the pattern rather than the opponent across the net (Evening Standard).

Even Tiger Woods, the most clinical competitor of his era, carried one rule into every final round: a red shirt. He says his mother thinks red is his power color, he tested well in it during college, and he never stopped (Sportskeeda). Red fused so completely to who he was that he eventually built an apparel brand on it, Sun Day Red. Usain Bolt ran the opposite ritual. Where his rivals coiled tighter in the blocks, he mugged for the cameras and threw his lightning-bolt pose, a practiced looseness that became the most copied gesture in the history of the track (Liam Sandford). The looseness did for Bolt exactly what the rigidity did for the others. Wound tight or shaken loose, every one of them was crossing the same seam.

Borrowed From the Ancestors

Repeat a certainty across enough bodies and enough years, and it hardens individual habit into something nobody owns alone. Push the idea that far, and the ritual stops belonging to the athlete. It belongs to the ancestors. The salt a sumo wrestler hurls into the ring is Shinto purification, cleansing the dohyō before two bodies meet on sacred ground. The thunderous shiko stomp drives out evil spirits. The “power water” passed from the last victor to the next competitor carries winning energy down the bracket, and only wrestlers of the top two divisions earn the right to throw the salt at all (SumoSumoSumo, Martialhive). Nothing in sport carries more of this weight than the Haka, the Māori war dance the New Zealand All Blacks have performed before matches for more than 130 years, first on a tour of Britain in 1888. The classic “Ka Mate” was composed around 1820 by the chief Te Rauparaha to mark his escape from death. In 2005, the team added the fiercer “Kapa o Pango,” whose closing throat-cutting gesture has drawn awe and controversy in equal measure, and in 2014, New Zealand law formally recognized “Ka Mate” as a national treasure (BBC, The Independent).

The Pacific Islands answer with their own. Tonga’s Sipi Tau, Samoa’s Siva Tau, Fiji’s Cibi, and Bole. When two of these teams face off and perform at the same time, inches apart, then embrace, the whistle hasn’t blown, and you’re already watching two tribes recognize each other (WalesOnline).

The Cost of Admission

Nadal’s bottles and the All Blacks’ war dance run on a shared instinct: Before you can play, you have to arrive. The contest itself can’t be controlled, so you build a small place beside it that you can control. And you cross from one into the other along a path you’ve walked a thousand times. The bottle gets set down straight. The hands slap, the knuckles touch. The seam closes behind you. You stopped preparing for the match a moment ago. Now you’re in it, your whole self, and you’re ready.

A rally beard is a ritual no one designed and no one owns. The only brand that ever found a place inside it got there by waiting for the right moment.

By October of 2013, Fenway Park was full of beards that never grew on anyone’s face. Foam ones, knit ones, ones held on with a loop of elastic. The men on the field had the real thing, thick and unkempt, and when a Red Sox player hit a home run, his teammates would grab the beard and pull it like a bell rope. A city that had spent that spring grieving was tugging on the same beard, in the stands and from the couch, and somehow it helped.

The rally beard is one of the purest rituals I know of. One that no one designed and no one owns. It is worth tracing, because the way it formed reveals the core mechanics of participation itself, and the narrow, honest role a brand can play inside it.

It Did Not Start in Baseball

The tradition traces back to the New York Islanders, who grew beards through their Stanley Cup runs in the early 1980s. I grew up watching that team, and here is the strange part: I can still see Bob Nystrom’s overtime goal in 1980, the backhand that started the dynasty. I have no memory of the beards at all. It turns out there was almost nothing to remember. The scruff was thin, and nobody had even coined the phrase “playoff beard” yet.

Ask those players how it began, and you get a shrug. Maybe it came from two Swedes on the Islanders roster who had watched Björn Borg refuse to shave at Wimbledon. Maybe it was superstition that hardened after a couple of wins. Nystrom, who could barely grow one, later said it was simply something that happened.

That vagueness is so important. A ritual rarely has a clean founding moment, because no one is in charge of starting one. It accretes. Players stopped shaving, won, kept not shaving, and a coincidence slowly stiffened into a tradition the league itself never wrote down. Nobody started it on purpose. It grew on repetition and belief.

How It Crossed Over and Found the Fans

For about thirty years, it stayed mostly a hockey thing, spreading rink to rink. But eventually it migrated into the stands, where fans began skipping the razor along with their teams. Then baseball got hold of it and made it loud. In 2010, the San Francisco Giants rode a closer named Brian Wilson, whose jet black beard, dyed darker than nature ever intended, became the face of their title run. “Fear the Beard” went up on signs and shirts around the ballpark, and the crowd started arriving in beards of their own, real where they could manage it and fake where they could not.

I am not a baseball fan. I still watched this become a thing, which tells you how far it traveled. And the part that traveled is the part that matters. When a fan glues on a beard and yells across a stadium with forty thousand others doing the same, meaning changes hands. They are carrying the ritual now, putting their own face into it. And a thing you carry is a thing that belongs to you.

That move, from watching the beard to wearing the beard, is the transformative one. A ritual only turns powerful when people on the outside begin to participate of their own volition.

The 2013 Red Sox and a City That Needed a Symbol

The version most people remember came three years later. The 2013 Red Sox had finished dead last the season before. They were not supposed to be interesting. Then, in April, two bombs went off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, and the season took on a whole new meaning.

The beards were already growing, almost by accident, started by a few veterans in spring training. As the team won, the beards stayed, and then the city reached for them. Boston Strong was the phrase everyone repeated after the bombing, but the phrase is hard to see. The beards gave it a face.

They did not fix anything, and no one pretended they could. What they gave a shaken city was a shared symbol, communal and a little ridiculous, that anyone could put on. The team that looked like a band of lumberjacks kept winning, the fans grew and faked beards alongside them, and the whole thing belonged to the city by the time the Red Sox won the World Series that fall. The beard had carried meaning all season that no marketing plan could ever have assigned to it.

Where a Brand Finally Fit, and How

Here is the part that should interest anyone who works on brands. No company built the rally beard. No company could have. It’s a phenomenon made of superstition, grief, camaraderie, and a city’s need, and none of those fit in a media plan.

And yet one brand did find a real place inside it by waiting for the single moment that was honestly its own. After the victory parade, David Ortiz and Shane Victorino went to the headquarters of Gillette, the razor company that has been based in Boston for more than a century, and shaved the beards off. Gillette gave a hundred thousand dollars to the fund supporting the bombing victims and turned the shave into a moment for the city rather than for itself.

Think about how easily that could have gone wrong.

A razor brand has every reason to resent a beard, and every temptation to force its way in early. To sponsor the beard or slap its logo on Dollar Beard Night and claim a movement it had nothing to do with. Gillette did none of that. It stayed out of the part that was sacred, and it stepped in at the razor, the one place it actually belonged. The ritual was the city’s. The shave could be Gillette’s. Because the brand held back everywhere else, what it did add, a public ending and real money for the victims, came across as a gift to the city. The restraint is what made the gift possible.

What It Teaches

The rally beard is pure participation. The meaning was made by the people taking part, players and fans together, and it grew precisely because no one controlled it. That is also why no brand will ever manufacture a ritual this powerful at this scale. You cannot schedule grief, or the moment a stranger decides to glue on a beard and belong to something.

What a brand can do is what Gillette did. It can pay attention to a ritual already forming and resist the urge to colonize it. A brand does not earn its way in by naming a growing trend or sponsoring it. It earns its way in by finding the single moment where its help is honest and useful, and arriving there late enough that it never feels like theft.

Earn a place. Do not claim one. Do that, and you can give the ritual something it could not have given itself.

That is the difference between forcing and fostering. A city full of fake beards understood it better than most marketing departments ever will.

For a while now, this series has been circling the concept of ritual from different angles. The more I looked at the types of engagement that actually last, the more ritual kept surfacing as the most valuable position any brand could hold. Ritual over reach, if you want it in three words.

So I started examining what ritual really is. I worked to separate it from the things that wear its shape without doing its work, the habits and the compulsions, and what kept surfacing was that ritual is where identity, belonging, and deeper connection live. It is a behavior a person repeats because it has become part of who they are.

Put that way, the appeal to a brand is obvious. A position rooted in someone’s identity is one no campaign can rent, and no competitor can dislodge. Of course, a brand would want to live there.

That is exactly the problem. The same property that makes ritual the most valuable position a brand can hold is the one that makes it impossible to manufacture.

What Ritual Actually Requires

Ritual is repeated behavior that carries meaning beyond its function. The morning coffee makes coffee, but it also marks the beginning of the day. The mat slap before martial arts training acknowledges a shared agreement between training partners. The Sunday family dinner reaffirms a bond that the food alone could not affirm. Repetition is the architecture. Meaning is the load it carries.

In another essay in this series, I have described what separates ritual from other things that resemble it: the habits and the compulsions that share the architecture of repetition without doing the same work. The three properties that separate ritual from these pretenders are sensory texture, intentional meaning, and identity formation. The body engages. The meaning is felt. The practice becomes part of how the person describes who they are.

For the brand, the properties that matter most are the second and the third. Because those are the two that cannot be granted from outside.

A brand can offer sensory texture. The weight of the cup. The smell of the bean. The pour cadence of the kettle. The temperature of the water. These are real design decisions, and the brand can make them, or at least shape them. They are necessary, but they are not enough.

A brand cannot grant or create intentional meaning. Meaning is what the human brings to the practice. The brand can supply the medium, but the meaning is the participant’s contribution. The coffee company can design the best mug in the world. It cannot decide what the cup means to the person who wakes up at five forty-five and pours into it the same way every morning. That meaning is a private agreement between the practitioner and the practice.

A brand cannot grant or create identity formation. Identity emerges from the participant over time. Every iteration of the practice, performed with attention, becomes a little more part of who the practitioner is. The brand can be present in that process. It cannot drive it. Identity is something a human discovers about themselves by doing the practice again, with intention, until the practice becomes part of who they are.

This is why brands cannot build rituals. Two of the three properties that constitute ritual live inside the participant. The brand can supply the texture and the form. The meaning and the identity have to come from the human who is making the practice their own.

Where the Big Argument Lands

This is also where the larger thesis of this whole project lands hardest. The argument I keep coming back to is that participation works better than persuasion in human engagement, especially for marketing and communications. Most of the time, when I say that, the implication is at the macro level: participation produces stronger and more durable engagement than interruption.

The brand-ritual question is where the principle becomes mechanical.

Persuasion can drive purchase. Persuasion can drive habit. Persuasion can drive compulsion under the right conditions. Persuasion cannot drive ritual, because ritual is constituted by what the participant brings, and what the participant brings has to come from the participant. You cannot be persuaded into meaning. You can only arrive at it through your own engagement with something worth engaging with.

The reason ritual is the most valuable position a brand can hold is also the reason a brand cannot manufacture it. The same property that makes it powerful makes it unbuyable. That paradox is the spine of everything that follows.

What Forcing Looks Like

The clearest way to see the limit is to watch a brand run straight at it. Michelob Ultra has spent the last two years on a campaign it calls Play For An Ultra, the friendly wager where someone says play you for an Ultra, and the loser buys the round. It runs constantly, with Super Bowl money and high-profile talent behind it, and every time one of the spots comes on, I cringe. It feels forced. It feels like a brand trying to install a social ritual by saying the line out loud often enough that the rest of us start saying it back.

For a while, I wondered whether I was the one who had it wrong. The numbers do not obviously agree with me. Michelob Ultra became the best-selling beer in America by volume in 2025 and now holds the largest share of the country’s draft lines. If the work is forced and the brand is winning, maybe forcing works.

Then I looked at what was actually driving the win. The Michelob Ultra brand sits on correct positioning, a light beer that belongs to an active life, which is a real association that people already hold. On top of that sits enormous media weight, marquee sports sponsorship, and a piece of category luck, the collapse of Bud Light after its boycott, and the pressure on Modelo from tariffs, within a beer market that shrank overall. That is a media machine using brute force on top of a sound position. It is the persuasion engine doing exactly what the last section said persuasion can do, which is to drive purchase. None of it is evidence that Play For An Ultra has become a ritual in anyone’s real life. The beer is selling. The practice the ad depicts is hard to imagine happening in the real world.

So the cringe was diagnostic after all. The positioning is fine. What grates is the attempt to script the practice itself, to write the participant’s line for them and hand it back as though they had chosen it. That is the difference between fostering and forcing, and forcing always leaves a mark. My kids would call it “try-hard.” A brand that has earned its way into a ritual never looks like it is trying that hard, because it did not have to manufacture the thing it is standing in. The strain is the tell.

There is a quieter irony in it. Michelob already stands next to a real practice, the beer at the end of the run or the round, the reward at the close of the effort. That is something forming in the world, and it could be fostered. Play For An Ultra is the louder, more synthetic thing built on top of it. Even inside a single brand, you can watch the choice play out, between noticing what is already there and trying to construct what is not.

What Brands Can Actually Do

Once you can see the structural limit, the useful work begins. Brands cannot build rituals. But they can do four other things, in sequence, that produce something close to the same outcome over time.

Observe and Diagnose

The first move is getting honest about what the brand is currently doing in the lives of its customers. Most brands have no idea. They have engagement metrics, frequency data, and retention curves. They do not have a clear answer to the question of whether what they have built is a ritual, a habit, or a compulsion.

The diagnostic I recommend for this is the One-Year Audit I have described in detail in a previous essay. Stand back from what the brand is doing in a customer’s day, week, or year. Imagine asking the customer, a year from now, how they would describe what the brand is doing in their life. “It improved my life” indicates ritual. “It cost me more than it gave” indicates compulsion. “It was neither here nor there” indicates habit.

Recognize Where Rituals Are Forming

The next move is observational, not generative. Brands that earn ritual position usually do not invent the ritual. They notice it.

Stanley did not invent the morning hydration practice. The cup had been on the market for over a century. What changed was the company’s recognition that a specific product had quietly entered the morning routines of millions of people, and that they could leverage that information once they saw it.

Wordle did not need to be marketed. Josh Wardle built a small game for his partner, and the daily one-puzzle structure baked the ritual in. The New York Times acquired it after the participants had already made it a daily practice. The skill was in seeing what was already happening and not breaking it.

Apple has been building its keynotes into the technology calendar for four decades. Most of that history is the company paying attention to what was forming around its own announcements and shaping the form to honor what the participants were already doing.

The pattern is consistent. Brands earn ritual position by recognizing where the practice is forming, not by engineering it from a blank page. This is closer to gardening than to construction. The brand notices what is growing and gives it the conditions to keep growing.

Support Without Overtaking

Once a ritual is forming around a brand or its category, the brand’s job is to remove friction from the practice without inserting itself into the mechanism. This is harder than it sounds, because most marketing instincts run in the opposite direction.

The brand that tries to colonize the meaning, to put itself at the center of what the participant is doing, breaks the ritual. The brand that knows how to stand back, to serve the function without occupying the heart of the practice, earns its way deeper over time.

The instinct most brand teams will resist here is the one that says do less. Do not overlay. Do not message at the moment of practice. Do not turn the cup, the socks, or the pen into an advertising surface for the brand at the exact moment the participant is using it. The brand that respects the practice gets to stay in it. The brand that tries to use the practice as a billboard gets pushed out of it.

Steward Over Time

Rituals compound across years, not quarters. The brand that earns ritual position has to operate on a timescale that most marketing teams do not plan for.

This means consistency in form. The mug needs to be the same mug, year over year, with the same weight, the same lip, and the same color. The pen has to be the same pen. The keynote has to keep its shape. The annual event has to happen on the same day in the same week. Variation kills ritual position. The practitioner is depending on the form to be what it was last time.

It also means consistency in posture. Brands change marketing leadership every couple of years. Strategies pivot. Messages get refreshed. The brand that earns ritual position has to behave as if those changes do not happen at the level of the practice. The mug does not care who the CMO is. The Wordle player does not care who owns the New York Times this year. The brand has to develop a way of working that protects the ritual layer from the noise of the broader business.

The marketing teams that manage this well share a few characteristics. They are usually small enough that decision-making stays consistent over time. They sit inside companies where founder-led continuity has kept the practice steady through changes in leadership. They work with brands whose ritual position has become so well established that the brand itself acts as a conservative force in its own organization. None of these is an easy condition to manufacture. All of them are what the position requires.

What Gets Earned

The brand that does this work, year after year, earns something the rest of the industry cannot manufacture.

It earns time. Not bought time, not borrowed attention, not impressions. Recurring time. The time the participant is going to spend anyway, in the morning, the week, or the year, on the practice that has become part of their identity. The brand sits inside that time as the medium of the practice. Every iteration deepens the relationship between practice and brand. Every iteration is also defensive against competitors who would want to occupy the same position but cannot, because they were not present when the practice was forming.

This is the deepest version of what the rest of this Exchange has been pointing toward. Participation produces stronger engagement than persuasion. Ritual is participation at its most concentrated. And the brand that has earned its way into someone’s ritual has earned a position no campaign can buy, and no competitor can dislodge.

As a brand, you cannot build a ritual. But if you embrace the four practices described above in sequence, with patience, you can become part of one. That is the play. That is what the brand teams asking for the recipe were really asking for. That is the position I kept arriving at when I went looking, the one no campaign can buy and no competitor can take. The meaning was never the brand’s to write. The work is quieter than that. Be present while the practice is forming. Be patient enough to still be there when it becomes part of someone’s identity. That is the whole play, and it is the one most brands will never slow down enough to run.

In Rituals Beat Reach, I made the case for ritual as the most valuable position a brand can hold in the era of infinite reach. The argument held. But once it was out in the world, the question that kept popping into my head was about the edges. The morning coffee, the Sunday family dinner, the pre-game tunnel run, and the mat slap before training are all clearly rituals. What about the wake-up scroll? It happens daily. It shapes the morning. It compounds across years. Does it qualify? Is it a darker version of ritual, or something else altogether?

I had been treating ritual as a category without drawing the lines around it. The previous essay made the case for ritual as a powerful position but did not need to define it precisely. Once I tried to answer the wake-up scroll question, the looseness in my own framework started to show.

Then it became clear. The wake-up scroll is not a darker ritual. It’s not a ritual at all. It belongs to a different category, one I had not been distinguishing. There are at least three kinds of repeated behavior that get labelled as rituals, but only one of them actually qualifies.

Three Things That Look the Same

I had been thinking in binary terms at first. Ritual versus habit. The morning coffee versus the 365th tooth-brushing. Both repeated. Both daily. Both are architecturally similar. The difference, I thought, was that ritual carries meaning the person feels, and habit does not.

That binary was incomplete. The wake-up scroll is not a habit. Nobody who scrolls before they have opened their eyes describes the practice the way they describe brushing their teeth. The character of it is different. The person often knows it is not quite serving them, even if they keep doing it.

That third thing is compulsion. It looks like a habit because it repeats. It can look like a ritual because it can have intensity. But it is neither, and the distinction matters.

The three categories, as they came clear to me:

Compulsion. Repeated behavior driven by anxiety, dopamine seeking, or a pattern of return the person has not chosen. The wake-up scroll. The slot machine pulls. The streak-preservation play in a mobile game built for daily login. Compulsion can be mild and harmless, or strong and costly, depending on the person and the duration. At the harder end, it compounds dependency.

Habit. Repeated behavior driven by routine. The 365th tooth-brushing. The background podcast on the commute. The way most people open their email in the morning. Habit is mostly invisible to the person who performs it. The behavior is functional, sometimes useful, sometimes not. Habits are not necessarily good or bad. They are mostly background.

Ritual. Repeated behavior that carries meaning beyond its function. The morning coffee, with the temperature of the cup, the sound of the grinder, the smell of the bean, the marking of the beginning. The weekly family dinner. The mat slap before jiu-jitsu training. Hajj. Rituals are felt by the people doing them. They evoke meaning, personal or shared. Some are solo, and some are communal. Communal rituals tend to carry more force because the shared performance amplifies what is being marked, but solo rituals still qualify because intention is what makes a repeated behavior a ritual. They produce something more than the activity itself produces. The coffee is just coffee. The morning ritual is also the beginning of the day.

All three are forms of repeated engagement. All three are more meaningful for brands than the interruption-based marketing that defined the previous era. The distinction between them is structural rather than moral. They compound different things, and what compounds is what eventually emerges. Getting that right is what the rest of this essay is about.

What Separates Them

From the outside, the three look almost identical. A person watching someone else scroll at seven in the morning cannot tell whether the practice is a compulsion, a ritual, or something in between. The difference shows up not in the behavior but in what the behavior is doing to and for the person performing it.

Three things belong to ritual that do not belong to the other two.

The first is sensory texture. Ritual engages more than one sense. The morning coffee has temperature, smell, the sound of the grinder, and the weight of the cup before the day starts. Hajj has movement, light, sound, and the press of bodies in shared space. A scroll has visual stimulus and nothing else. The body is barely involved. Compulsion can be intense without being textured. Habit is texture-free by definition.

The second is intentional meaning. Rituals carry meaning beyond the behavior itself. The morning coffee marks the beginning of the day. The mat slap acknowledges a shared agreement between training partners. The Sunday family dinner reaffirms a bond that the food alone could not affirm. Habits have no such layer. Compulsion may have an emotional layer, the relief or the anxiety, or the dopamine hit, but it is not the kind of meaning that survives outside the moment.

The third is identity formation. A ritual becomes part of how the person describes themselves. “I am someone who makes coffee every morning the same way.” “I am a black belt.” “I am a member of this congregation.” Habit produces no identity. Compulsion produces a kind of negative identity. The person who scrolls knows they scroll, often with embarrassment, but does not see it as part of who they choose to be.

The morning coffee has all three. The wake-up scroll has none.

What Each One Compounds

All three compound. That’s why they look so similar from the outside. All three involve repetition that builds up over time. The mistake I had been making was assuming the compounding direction was always the same.

Compulsion compounds dependency. Each iteration reinforces the underlying mechanism. The brain learns to expect the next iteration and produces discomfort in its absence. At low intensity, this is barely noticeable and largely harmless. At high intensity, scaled across years, it produces the kind of attachment that costs the person more than it gives.

Habit compounds routine. The 365th tooth-brushing is no richer than the first. What accumulates is the strength of the pattern, not any meaning the pattern carries. Most marketing that succeeds at repetition reaches habit. That’s not failure, but it’s also not a ritual.

Ritual compounds something different. Meaning, identity, belonging. Year ten of a real ritual is richer than year one because the participant has become more themselves through the practice. The compounding moves in a direction the person values and recognizes.

The Categories Are Not Fixed

One more observation before going further. The categories describe where a behavior currently sits, not where it will always sit. Movement happens in both directions.

A compulsion, recognized and named, can decompose into a habit. The morning scroll that has been a pull for years might soften into a routine that no longer feels as costly. A habit, infused with intention and meaning over time, can become a ritual. The cup of coffee that was background routine for a decade might, on the day a parent dies and is poured one more time at the table they used to share, suddenly become a ritual.

The opposite movement happens too. A ritual can hollow out into a habit when the person stops bringing intention to it. A habit can be hijacked into compulsion when the underlying mechanism gets exploited. None of these are stable categories. They’re descriptions of what a behavior is doing now.

For brand work, this distinction matters. The brand that finds itself in habit territory might be on a path toward ritual if the conditions are right. The brand operating in compulsion territory might be on a path toward dependency if the architecture goes industrial. The categories describe the slope as much as the location.

Where Compulsion Compounds Hardest

Some examples make the mechanics easy to see, especially where compulsion has been scaled up by design.

Casino loyalty programs are built on compulsion architecture. The system rewards return visits regardless of the outcome for the gambler. The brain learns to expect the next iteration. Over the years, the compounding produces dependency in some users and entertainment in others. The architecture is the same. What it compounds depends on the person and the duration of exposure.

Mobile gaming uses similar mechanics. Daily login streaks. Energy systems that refill on a schedule, and that the player learns to obey. Limited-time events that create urgency. These are compulsion mechanics, and they’re not pretending to be anything else. Some players find them fun and stay light. Others find them costly and stay anyway. The structure doesn’t care which.

Buy-now-pay-later platforms operate on compulsion mechanics around purchase. The four-installment structure makes each purchase feel small. Return to the platform becomes conditioned. The platform compounds usage. The user compounds the obligation. The structure is real, and so is what it builds at the harder end.

The algorithmic feed runs compulsion at the largest scale of any of these. It learns what keeps a particular person scrolling and serves more of it. The conditioned return is the product that the platform sells to advertisers. When the person comes back, the architecture is working as designed.

None of these are pretending to be rituals. The mechanics are compulsion mechanics, and they do not disguise themselves as anything else. The confusion happens downstream, in the marketing language. Habit-building, ritual-building, and engagement-loop-building have all been used to describe what is actually compulsion architecture at scale. The diagnosis gets blurred. The categories matter precisely because they look identical from the outside but produce different outcomes inside.

The One-Year Audit

The cleanest way to tell which of the three you are dealing with is a simple audit. Stand back from the practice. Imagine running it across a full year. Now ask what the person engaged in the practice would say about it, looking back.

If the answer is “it improved my life,” the practice is ritual.

If the answer is “it cost me more than it gave,” the practice is compulsion compounding hard.

If the answer is a shrug, “it was neither here nor there,” the practice is habit.

If the answer is somewhere in between, the practice is on a slope, headed somewhere.

The audit can help you separate the categories that look the same on the surface.

Why This Matters More Now

The tools have gotten sharper. The psychology has not moved an inch.

Algorithmic feeds do not distinguish between a person who returns because something matters to them and a person who returns because they have been trained to do so. They optimize for the signal of return itself, blind to what drives it. AI-driven personalization can now identify the exact sequence, the exact cadence, the precise emotional pressure point that will keep a specific human being coming back, whether or not coming back is doing them any good. The behavioral nudges were first designed to help people exercise more, save more, and live better. They have been quietly repurposed. They are now standard infrastructure for any platform that needs daily users to survive.

What this machinery produces at its hardest end is not connection, far from it. It is captivity dressed as convenience.

These are not rituals. Rituals build identity and meaning that compound over time. What optimization systems manufacture is the shape of ritual without its substance: the return without the reward, the habit without the humanity. Compulsion at scale. And compulsion compounded for years, no matter how precisely engineered, cannot generate the meaning it was designed to mimic.

This is why the brands that pursue ritual as a strategy in the current environment carry a different responsibility than the brands that pursued mass reach in the previous one. The mechanism is more powerful. So is the consequence of confusing one tier for another. A reach campaign that misses its target is a quarter of wasted spend. Compulsion at scale, marketed as ritual, is a slow harm distributed across millions of lives, compounding for as long as the architecture holds.

Four Properties of Genuine Ritual

The same four properties that distinguish a ritual from its imitators also reveal whether a brand is building something that earns compounding, or something that merely mimics it.

First, the underlying offer has to be worth repeating without the ritual layer. The morning coffee works because the coffee is good. The Stanley tumbler works because the cup keeps drinks cold for thirty-six hours. Strip the ritual scaffolding from a real ritual offer and you still have something the person uses. Compulsion fails this test. Strip the ritual architecture from a slot machine, and you have a random-number generator no one cares about. Strip the streak mechanic from a brand built on streak mechanics, and the brand has nothing left.

Second, the ritual itself has to reward the person more over time. Year ten of a real practice should be richer than year one. The instrument you have played for a decade rewards you in ways the first fumbling month never could. The morning meditation that has quietly become part of who you are carries a weight, a settledness, that day three could not touch. Meaning compounds. That’s what makes it meaningful.

Compulsion runs the other direction when it compounds hard. Year ten of a slot machine relationship is hollower than year one, even as the pull gets stronger. Especially as the pull gets stronger. The commitment deepens while the return evaporates. That is the signature of a system that was never designed to give the person anything lasting or beneficial.

Third, the community formed around the practice has to be additive. Real ritual produces voluntary advocacy. Wordle players sharing their results are doing something the brand cannot make them do. Stanley collectors recommending colorways to each other are not being paid for the conversation. Compulsion at scale produces the opposite. Isolation, in part because the participant often knows the relationship is unhealthy and avoids talking about it.

Fourth, the brand has to benefit because the person benefits. The contract is not zero-sum. The morning coffee company sells more coffee when more people make coffee at home, which is also better for the people making it. The exercise brand grows when more people exercise, which is also better for them. Symbiosis. On the compulsion side, the casino grows when more people lose money, which is worse for the people.

A practice with all four properties is a ritual. A practice with some of them is on the way. A practice with none of them is likely a compulsion.

The Language

The value of working all this out is not the three categories themselves. The categories are useful. What is valuable is the diagnosis they give you.

Once a brand team can name what they are building, the conversation changes. The team that has been calling something a ritual when it is actually a habit can ask whether the habit is what they wanted in the first place. The team operating in compulsion mechanics gets to decide whether that is the position they want to keep. The team approaching something closer to ritual can stop trying to engineer it and start paying attention to what is forming organically.

All of those conversations require the diagnostic: the audit. That is the lever. Once you have your diagnosis, your operating architecture becomes legible. What was happening on its own becomes something you can shape. That is the value of the language. Name it. Then shape it.

Most mornings, before I do anything else, I make my coffee. And that coffee always gets made the same way.

The grinder runs for the same number of seconds. The kettle clicks off at the same temperature, and the pour starts in the same place every time. There is nothing functionally necessary about any of this. I could make coffee faster. I could make it differently. The ritual exists because, for ninety seconds every morning, before the day arrives, I am doing something I have done thousands of times before.

That is what a ritual is.

A repeated action that carries meaning beyond what the action itself produces. The coffee could be made in a thousand different ways. What makes my morning process a ritual is that the series of actions does something the coffee alone cannot. They mark the beginning. They steady the start of a day that will otherwise contain a thousand unpredictable moments.

Humans have been doing this for as long as we’ve existed. Long before commerce or marketing or any modern apparatus, rituals were how human beings made sense of time. The shared meal. The seasonal observance. The marking of births and deaths and the partnerings in between. Every culture in every era has developed them.

What rituals do for us is make a pattern out of flow.

Time itself is featureless. The hours arrive one after another, and none of them is inherently distinct from the others. The ritual gives this new morning a relationship to last morning, and to a morning a year from now. It creates the through-line that makes a life feel like a life rather than a sequence of unconnected hours.

A ritual is, in this sense, the most concentrated form of participation a human can practice. It is the deliberate choice to show up for the same form across time.

Why Rituals Matter Now

That function has always mattered. But it matters more now.

The world that human rituals evolved to comprehend moved at the pace of seasons and lifetimes. The patterns that rituals tracked were the patterns that actually structured human experience. The world we live in today is different. The pace of change is no longer set by anything human. The technology stack underpinning our daily life updates faster than we can adapt to it. The cultural references shift weekly. The platforms migrate. The tools transform. We watch hundreds of fragments of other people’s lives before breakfast and remember none of them by lunch. The expectations around what we should know, who we should be, and how fast we should respond all keep accelerating.

In a world like this, anything that recurs becomes valuable in a way it did not used to be.

The ritual is what recurs.

Whatever else is changing in your life, however the week is reorganizing itself, the morning coffee is still there. The Sunday phone call is still there. So is the pre-game tunnel run, the mat slap before training, the candle on the table, the week-long observance every spring. These are the few places left where pattern is preserved on purpose. Where what happened last time will happen again, more or less, because the practice itself depends on it.

That is not nostalgia. It is structural. Rituals are one of the only grounding things humans have left.

From Coffee to the Wake

Rituals can be as small as the morning coffee or as large as the funeral.

A ritual is anything that runs on the same principle: repetition makes meaning. The scale of the practice is unrelated to its weight. A morning gesture between two people can carry as much ritual force as a national holiday. A daily walk with the same dog along the same route can carry as much ritual force as a religious observance. What makes something a ritual is the fact that the same form gets repeated on purpose, with meaning accumulating inside repetition.

At the heavy end are the rituals built around the things human beings cannot otherwise face. Funerals, wakes, burials. Every culture in human history has developed rituals around the moments that are too large for any individual to navigate alone. They are load-bearing structures. The Irish wake. Shiva. The jazz funeral. The Day of the Dead. The forms vary. The function does not. The community gathers, the form holds, and the unbearable becomes survivable because nobody is asked to survive it alone.

At the light end are the daily and weekly practices. Coffee in the morning. The Sunday newspaper. The five o’clock dog walk that turns into the same conversation with the same neighbors over the same loop around the block. These rituals do not announce themselves. Most people who do them do not even call them rituals. They function the same way the heavy rituals do, just on a smaller scale and at a faster cadence. The wake holds the bereaved together when grief alone would scatter them. The morning coffee holds the day’s first ten minutes together before the day itself can scatter them. The scale of what they hold against differs. The mechanism is the same. Repetition is what does the work.

In between is everything else. Sports teams build elaborate pre-game rituals because coaches understand intuitively that the ritual itself produces something that strategy and practice cannot. The Notre Dame players touch the Play Like A Champion Today sign. The All Blacks perform the haka. The locker room speech, the warm-up music, the captain’s address, all of it is ritual scaffolding around the moment when the team has to walk into the noise as a single entity. Religious traditions across the world are essentially nested ritual systems, daily prayer inside weekly observance inside annual cycle. We jiu-jitsu practitioners slap our training partner’s hand and bump fists before every roll, a tiny ritualized acknowledgment that what is about to happen is bound by an agreement to take care of each other. The ritual layer in human life is much thicker than most modern people realize.

Then there are the rituals built around products.

Products Wrapped in Ritual

A bottle of yerba mate is not, in any meaningful sense, just a beverage.

The traditional way of drinking yerba mate in South America involves a gourd, a metal straw, hot water poured at a specific temperature, and a group of people sitting in a circle while the gourd passes from hand to hand. The cebador, the one who serves, refills for everyone. The drinking is communal. The conversation has its own pace because the gourd’s pace dictates the rhythm. The product, the leaves themselves, is almost incidental to the practice that has built up around them over centuries.

When companies sell yerba mate today, they are not selling a caffeinated tea. They are selling access to a ritual structure that predates the brand. The product is the ticket. The ritual is the experience.

This is what the strongest product rituals all have in common. The product itself is functionally replaceable. The ritual is not. You could drink your morning coffee from instant grounds and get the same caffeine. You don’t, because the ritual is doing something the caffeine cannot. You could play Wordle once and stop. You don’t, because the daily practice is doing something the puzzle alone cannot. Most Stanley tumbler owners could replace the cup with any thirty-dollar insulated bottle and lose nothing functionally. They don’t, and they wouldn’t, because the cup is not what the brand is actually selling.

What the brand is selling, in each of these cases, is the ritual layer that the product unlocks. The plastic and the steel are the medium. The repeated practice is the product.

The Marketing Reframe

Brand marketing has spent decades chasing reach.

The logic was simple. More people seeing the message means more potential customers. The whole machinery of media buying, optimization, attribution, and creative production was built on top of that assumption. Reach was the asset, the scarce resource. The brands with the most reach won.

That logic is breaking, and it is not breaking because of AI or any technical problem inside the media stack. It is breaking because reach has become abundant, and time has become scarce.

Human attention spans have not increased. Human hours have not been extended. What has changed is that the volume of content competing for that attention has exploded past anything advertising was originally designed to handle. The signal-to-noise ratio inside any given person’s daily life is now operating at a level that would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. A brand that gets seen once does not stay seen. A brand that gets seen ten times in a row may still not stay seen.

What does stay seen is what gets folded into the ritual.

The morning coffee. The 5 p.m. dog walk. The pre-game tunnel. The Sunday paper. The holiday meal. Any time a brand becomes part of one of these, it has earned something that no amount of reach can manufacture: time. Specifically, it has earned recurring time, time that compounds, time that the person is going to spend again, whether or not they are being marketed to.

This is the resource that brands cannot manufacture.

You can buy reach. You can rent attention. You can pay for impressions, dwell, engagement, and any number of other proxy metrics. But you cannot buy ritual time. Ritual time is earned through years of being integral to a practice that the person has decided is worth repeating.

Reach was always a function of space, the dimension marketing knew how to buy. Ritual is a function of time, the dimension that earns itself. Ritual time is the only currency in marketing that compounds, because every additional iteration deepens what is already there.

The Shape That Lives in Time

An earlier essay in this Exchange described eight recurring shapes of participation. Seven of them are spatial structures, visible at a single moment. Ritual is the one that is not. Ritual is the only shape that lives in time rather than in space. It does not get larger through reach. It gets deeper through repetition.

That asymmetry is doing a lot of work now.

The reach economy was always spatial. Buy more billboards, run more ads, expand more channels, extend the message across more screens. The whole machinery of mass marketing was built to optimize for the spatial dimension. AI is making that dimension effectively infinite, which means it is also making the dimension effectively worthless. When the supply of any resource explodes, the value collapses.

The ritual economy is temporal. Time, in the world that is now arriving, is the one resource that cannot be made cheaper or more abundant. Every person has the same number of hours they had a century ago. The amount of attention any one person can give to any one practice is bounded by the fact that they are a human being with a finite life. That boundary is not optimizable.

Which means the brands that figure out how to earn time, rather than rent attention, are going to compound while the brands that keep buying reach watch their numbers grow on dashboards that no longer correspond to anything happening in the world.

What This Looks Like in Practice

The brands that understand this allocate their effort accordingly.

Stanley did not become a billion-dollar brand by buying impressions. Its products had been on the market for over a century. What changed was the company’s recognition that a specific cup had been quietly folded into the morning routines of millions of people. The cup goes in the car. The cup goes on the desk. The cup gets filled and refilled and noticed by everyone in the room. Stanley leaned into the ritual layer the cup had accidentally entered, and the brand has compounded ever since on a piece of plastic that any competitor could match functionally but not match ritually.

Wordle did not need to advertise. The daily one-puzzle structure baked in the ritual. Players shared their results because the sharing itself was part of the practice. The game survived an ownership change, a paywall, and a thousand competitors because the ritual layer was the actual product.

Apple has spent four decades building keynote events into the technology calendar. The keynote is functionally a press conference. The ritual layer is what makes it an event that millions of people show up for, year after year, with no advertising spend required to remind them it is happening.

Peloton, even through corporate crisis, retained the bulk of its committed user base because the rides themselves had become ritual practices. The bike was the hardware. The 6 a.m. ride was what people had actually committed to.

The pattern across these examples is consistent. The product is the medium. The brand is the connective tissue. The ritual is the durable asset that survives competitive pressure, market shifts, and the brand’s own occasional mistakes.

What Compounds

The world that has emerged over the last few decades has accelerated past most of the social structures that used to do this work. Many of the traditional rituals are weaker now, or absent entirely, or replaced by routines that do not quite fill the same space. People are looking, mostly without naming it, for whatever still steadies them.

The brands that get folded into that work are doing something different from the brands that interrupt the day. They are not buying time. They are being given it. And the time being given is the only kind that matters, because it is the only kind that compounds.

The original framing of this argument is that rituals beat reach. That is true at the level of marketing tactics. The deeper version, the one that connects to everything else this Exchange has been working on, is this: Reach is a function of space, ritual is a function of time. Of the two resources, time is the genuinely scarce one. It cannot be manufactured. And humans need more of it, not less, the further into the synthetic decade we go.

That is what the brands that compound have figured out. They left the impression economy long ago. What they do now sustains itself. They stopped chasing the impression. They started being present for the ritual. And presence, repeated across time, is the only thing in marketing that does not need to be bought twice.

Before there were brands, there were ceremonies.

Before markets, before media, before any of the infrastructure we’ve built to connect people to things and things to meaning, humans gathered. Around fire. Around food. Around the dead and the newborn and the changing of seasons. They marked transitions with shared acts. They turned strangers into kin through repetition and presence. They brewed fermented drinks and passed them between hands and in doing so said something that had no words yet: we are here, together, and this moment is worth marking.

Ceremony is the oldest participation technology we have. Not a metaphor, a technology. A designed system for creating shared meaning that every culture on earth, without coordination, without contact, without any common ancestor of instruction, arrived at independently. The Japanese tea ceremony and the West African kola nut ritual and the South American mate circle and the Germanic beer hall and the Mexican ofrenda — none of these borrowed from each other. All of them solved the same problem the same way. When you need people to feel that they belong to something larger than themselves, you design a ritual, and you invite them in.

This is not a historical observation. It is a description of what humans are still doing, right now, whether we call it that or not.

Every tailgate is a ceremony. Every Thanksgiving table is a ceremony. Every bar where the same group of friends occupies the same corner every Thursday is a ceremony. The form changes, the function doesn’t. We are wired, at the level of neurochemistry, for the rituals that make participation visible. We release oxytocin, the hormone of belonging, when we are in the presence of shared acts. Our mirror neurons fire when we watch others move in rhythm and pull us toward joining. The drive to gather and mark and celebrate is not a cultural habit. It is a biological instruction.

I’ve been writing about participation as the original human operating system for nearly three years now. The argument I keep returning to is that the most durable brands aren’t the ones with the largest audiences. They’re the ones that have earned the largest groups of active participants. The ones that figured out how to make showing up feel like it means something.

What I haven’t said clearly enough is that this isn’t a new insight brands need to discover. It’s an ancient truth they need to remember.

And then, a year ago, two of my co-founders at The Many decided to make a beer.

Not a craft beer. Not a flavored beer. Something more specific than that. Jens Stoelken — who grew up in Germany where beer is heritage before it is beverage — traveled to Kyoto and encountered a matcha beer at a small brewery and recognized something that most people would have dismissed as a novelty. He saw a signal. The botanical wasn’t a gimmick. It was a cultural ingredient carrying centuries of ritual in its DNA. Matcha comes from the tea ceremony. It was never just a flavor. It was the medium of a gathering practice.

He came home and built Ceremony Botanical Brewing around that instinct, together with Blake Marquis, who named the brand and designed every element of its visual identity and packaging. The name Ceremony wasn’t a marketing decision. It was a recognition of what the thing actually was. The botanicals Jens chose are not trendy ingredients. They are ingredients that cultures selected, over hundreds of years, because they belonged to occasions. Hibiscus moves across three continents under three names — aguas frescas, bissap, karkade — and everywhere it appears, it appears at gatherings. Mate is passed in a gourd between people. That is the entire ritual. Receiving from someone else’s hands and passing it forward.

Every botanical was chosen by a culture, across time, to mark the moments that matter.

And then Jens put them in beer. Which is itself among the oldest ceremonial creations humans have made. The Sumerians wrote hymns to Ninkasi, the goddess of brewing. Egyptians placed beer in tombs as an offering. Germanic tribes sealed bonds by passing it at communal tables. The first beers weren’t made to quench thirst. They were made because humans needed a reason to gather and something to share when they did.

Ceremony inside ceremony. Ritual all the way down.

I want to say one more thing about why this matters right now, in this particular moment.

We are entering an era in which the question of what is human and what is synthetic is going to define our culture. What a person made versus what a machine generated. What it means to actually be in a room together. What counts as a real experience and what is a produced simulation. These questions are already in the air and they will only get louder. People will be looking, without always knowing that’s what they’re doing, for things that are unambiguously human. Things that cannot be machine-generated. Things that require a body, a place, other people, and the irreducible act of showing up.

A botanical chosen by a culture over centuries. Fermented by hands. Opened at an occasion. These things cannot be automated. The ritual that happens when people gather around them cannot be produced. Ceremony didn’t plan to launch a beverage that stands as a counterpoint to artificial intelligence. But it did. Because what it is, at its root, is a celebration of the thing that makes us human: the ancient, biological, universal need to gather around something meaningful and say, together, that this moment counts.

On April 4, at 4:30 in the afternoon, Ceremony Botanical Brewing is hosting a free public event at Hi Sign Brewing in East Austin, 730 Shady Lane. Live music. A local artist. The first pours of the Matcha Botanical Pilsner and the Hibiscus Botanical Ale. An open door.

If you’re in Austin, please come. Not because it’s a product launch. Because it’s an invitation. The participation is the point.

That’s always been the point.