Closure, as Ted points out, is vital here. It is a structural part of all genuine ritual. A scroller never has closure on anything, which means he is de-structured, which soon enough produces de-struction - of attention, focus, meaning, significance. I'm reminded here of Hegel's concept of "bad infinity", which isn't infinity so much as endlessness - something quite different. What is more endless than a social media scroll? That is why articles like this are so helpful, because they encapsulate, limit and define, and thus enable us to get to grips with this toxic phenomenon in something like a constructive way.
My painting is ritualised. All my concentration is focused upon my work. My senses connect my intention to it. Every movement of the edge of my brush is simultaneously a part of a ritual and a ritual in and of itself.
I'm sixty eight years old now and I have conducted this ritual on most days for as long as I can remember. I am conscious that everytime I enact this almost daily ritual I am continuing the ages old deeply needful human action of leaving a physical mark upon space as an expression of what it is to be alive and present.
I tried dipping an old obsolete phone in paint a while ago to see what kind of marks I could wrest out of it by utilising it as a replacement 'brush'. Big gestures. Big Marks. Painting from the shoulder.
I dropped out of the online world from the summer of 2020 until December of 2022. Starting a vegetable garden was a beautiful and sane way to spend my days--no TV, no scrolling. Quiet gardening in the sun became my ritual.
My brain needed the break for so many reasons you listed here.
This is why I make a point of listening to music predominantly on vinyl. I still use streaming services to discover new music or while on the move, but when I really like a record, I buy it on vinyl as and when I can. Apart from the much-needed break from my phone, vinyl gives me focus, intentionality, and purpose.
Ted, can you talk about the difference between ritual and habit? Getting up and making coffee and reading the newspaper before you get down to business may get you in the right mind for doing said business, but that just seems like a set of habits to me and not a ritual. Mindfully brushing your teeth is a good habit, not a ritual. If "ritual" is going to mean something substantial, it needs to be more than mere habit-chaining, even as it includes habit-chaining. Most people have habit-chains in their lives, for better or for worse, but that is not the same as, say, participating in a weekly religious event or even subscribing to a concert or theater series. I think you outline many of the differences in your Wallace-Stevens-referencing article structure, but detailed, attentive coffee prep is not a ritual in and of itself. What is the missing thing? It's not just mindfulness.
I just reviewed what Joseph Campbell said about ritual. He mentioned that ritual came from vision, a higher form of insight than whatever comes from words used to describe the connection between myth and ritual. Whenever we are only talking about ritual, we aren't participating in a way where we can benefit from it. This column was a good reminder about how to get back into connecting myth with our daily lives. Thank you for it.
While your cultural critique is strong and important, it relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of how dopamine works, thankfully for humanity.
Anna Lembke is wrong— a dopamine fast is not a thing (or, if it were a thing, it would be Parkinson's disease— well beyond anhedonia). Dopamine is an extremely complex neurochemical, but for what we’re talking about here, it mainly drives only one type of pleasure: that is desire, the pleasure of the hunt, also known as “wanting.”
Satisfaction—the pleasure of the feast, known as “liking” to people unlike Lembke, who actually understand neuroscience and addiction— relies on endogenous opioids, endorphins etc. (In other words, you can get completely high on opioids even if you have no dopamine!)
What happens in addiction is that desire (“wanting”) escalates but satisfaction (“liking”) either stabilizes or drops. The reality is that most people DO NOT become addicted, even if they try cocaine, heroin, fentanyl or gambling. The percentage of people who become addicted to most drugs is around 10-20% and for gambling, it’s around 1%. We don’t know yet what the deal is with internet addiction, but you need to understand what addiction is and what drives it before you can make proclamations that we’re all hooked and doomed.
Basically, addiction is compulsive behavior despite negative consequences. If consequences of engagement with an activity are life-expanding (like love, art, child-rearing), compulsive behavior despite negative experience is necessary: if we couldn’t persist despite these experiences, we’d never succeed in love or art or parenting. So, if you are obsessively engaged with your art or your love but it’s making your life better, that’s not an addiction— if it’s making your life worse, it is.
Who is at highest risk for addiction? People in distress, typically due to childhood trauma, incipient mental illness, existential despair or all three. It is these predispositions that cause anhedonia and lead people to seek relief in drugs or other compulsive behavior. The drugs work at first— but over time, they start to fail and make things worse. This, not dopamine alone, is what drives anhedonia in addiction.
And this is why a “dopamine fast” is absolutely the last thing you want to do if you are attempting to recover from addiction and why punishment and tough love fail. The problem in addiction is not too much pleasure, but too little satisfaction and meaning.
Taking away pleasure therefore, fails. Replacing it with better pleasure— AKA art that satisfies, intrigues and shines or real love or motivation to making meaning— is what’s needed.
Please do not help drive pop culture misunderstanding of the neuroscience of addiction and recreate the horribly failed drug war approach to improving internet health!!
I’m not sure ritual is the grounding antidote to our techno-virtual mania. The Catholic reenactment of Christ’s last supper has a grounding effect, but it’s a grounding in a story from Christ’s life—and story is always secondary, an interpretation of reality.
We postmoderns have been living through the wholesale destruction of the myths and rituals that have grounded Western culture for centuries—and into the vacuum of meaning have stepped the techno-dweebs and the lords of capital they serve. We live in the breach.
On that I think we agree, but the prime antidote is contact with the Real—“chopping wood and carrying water,” as the Zen monks put it. Out of THAT contact—out of an original relationship to humanity’s enduring realities—visionary men and women create new, authentic art and maybe someday even new rituals more adequate to our times.
Kids unable to watch a movie without a dopamine fix? Maybe they exist. But in the very small pool of my teenagers and their friends, I don’t see it. I see kids devouring long and complex films to discuss and analyze. I see kids drawing all afternoon. I see kids learning instruments or singing sea shanties together. I see my son using his grandfather’s 60-year old Nikon to learn how to photograph slowly and deliberately. I see my other child reading books on the theatre and dreaming of their own shows. Maybe some kids of this generation are hooked on social media. But the kids I see blow me away with their thoughtfulness and curiosity. They encourage me put down my phone and finally pickup that huge book I bought in college but never read.
Even small rituals: washing one's face, brushing teeth, getting dressed, making the bed, eating breakfast, if done mindfully center us to start the day.
. . . and here I was, scrolling to read your post about ritual. Frightening. I find myself increasingly thankful that I am as old as I am (79) and won't be here for what is coming. Now I am even more grateful for my daily rituals. Spending time with nature is my most important one. Even if it's merely going out to our backyard and watching the birds and other little critters like lizards going about their own rituals. Plus staying in the moment and not worrying about what might happen or what I think ought to happen.
Pray…isolate yourself, find quiet, be quiet and self reflect. It is difficult at the start and one must go slowly. It is soul cleansing… calming to the spirit and uplifting. Search for the peace and it will be bright…thank you, Ted for your constant inspiration.
Ted: I'm enjoying your Substack immensely and I will over time probably buy half the albums you recommended in your 50 best lists. I won't download them. I will buy them as vinyl or CDs. Please tell anybody you know in the music industry. I am vaguely familiar with many of those artists but because of the devolution of music criticism and radio I haven't heard or read enough about these artists to put some money down.
As to solutions to the distraction culture, the easiest and most accessible recommendation I could give would be for someone to learn to play a musical instrument. A harmonica costs $50. Electric keyboard under $500. Good beginner guitar under $1000. There are a kajillion YouTube videos to help you. I started playing guitar in 1976 mostly learning from books, but once YouTube instructional videos got going, I've been able to learn 10X more than I ever did from books. And any kid from about age six can do this.
Another possibility is to take up a hobby like woodworking. This can get expensive over time, but you can always start with simple projects and gradually and build up your shop as budget allows. In a similar manner, working in one of the trades is a great way to learn to focus your attention--while making money to boot. Carpentry is a great trade to learn, more interesting and varied than the others. And the thing that people don't understand about the trades is how hard you have to focus, how creative you have to be every single hour of every job, and how satisfying it is to solve a problem. Read Matthew Crawford's book Shopcraft as Soulcraft on this. I've been doing carpentry and woodworking as a living, a hobby and occasional side gig for 50 years now. I'm arguably more knowledgeable than 80 percent of the people doing it now. I know enough to build my own house from the ground up and all the furniture in it but I'm still learning new things. I spent six hours in the shop yesterday and checked my phone twice.
Even if manual. arts or music isn't intrinsically valuable, six or eight hours of working with your hands is its own form of dopamine and one that leaves you feeling better at the end of a day instead of strung out and anxious.
Excellent piece Ted! My husband Peco and I experienced a similar reaction to our recent writing on the (esp. 3Rs of Unmachining: Guideposts for an Age of Technological Upheaval and Sowing Anachronism: How to be Weird in Public, and Private)https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/sowing-anachronism-how-to-be-weird.
Especially Parents and Educators are profoundly concerned with the distraction and addiction they are witnessing and desperately want guidance to help their children and students reconnect with reality. The "great rewiring" of digitally captive brains will require a turning away from the virtual, and a turning toward the Real: agency (action in the real world) and communion (with people in the real world)(see Build a Songbird Compass https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/cp/141896694). Thanks for your writing Ted!
I realise now my bedtime (sometimes morning, on days off) routine is actually a ritual to help me shuck off the often tech-mediated stresses of the day. I'm going to start calling it a ritual and honouring it more. Great piece, thank you.
Closure, as Ted points out, is vital here. It is a structural part of all genuine ritual. A scroller never has closure on anything, which means he is de-structured, which soon enough produces de-struction - of attention, focus, meaning, significance. I'm reminded here of Hegel's concept of "bad infinity", which isn't infinity so much as endlessness - something quite different. What is more endless than a social media scroll? That is why articles like this are so helpful, because they encapsulate, limit and define, and thus enable us to get to grips with this toxic phenomenon in something like a constructive way.
My painting is ritualised. All my concentration is focused upon my work. My senses connect my intention to it. Every movement of the edge of my brush is simultaneously a part of a ritual and a ritual in and of itself.
I'm sixty eight years old now and I have conducted this ritual on most days for as long as I can remember. I am conscious that everytime I enact this almost daily ritual I am continuing the ages old deeply needful human action of leaving a physical mark upon space as an expression of what it is to be alive and present.
I tried dipping an old obsolete phone in paint a while ago to see what kind of marks I could wrest out of it by utilising it as a replacement 'brush'. Big gestures. Big Marks. Painting from the shoulder.
The result was ugly.
It got recycled.
I dropped out of the online world from the summer of 2020 until December of 2022. Starting a vegetable garden was a beautiful and sane way to spend my days--no TV, no scrolling. Quiet gardening in the sun became my ritual.
My brain needed the break for so many reasons you listed here.
This is why I make a point of listening to music predominantly on vinyl. I still use streaming services to discover new music or while on the move, but when I really like a record, I buy it on vinyl as and when I can. Apart from the much-needed break from my phone, vinyl gives me focus, intentionality, and purpose.
Ted, can you talk about the difference between ritual and habit? Getting up and making coffee and reading the newspaper before you get down to business may get you in the right mind for doing said business, but that just seems like a set of habits to me and not a ritual. Mindfully brushing your teeth is a good habit, not a ritual. If "ritual" is going to mean something substantial, it needs to be more than mere habit-chaining, even as it includes habit-chaining. Most people have habit-chains in their lives, for better or for worse, but that is not the same as, say, participating in a weekly religious event or even subscribing to a concert or theater series. I think you outline many of the differences in your Wallace-Stevens-referencing article structure, but detailed, attentive coffee prep is not a ritual in and of itself. What is the missing thing? It's not just mindfulness.
A jazz concert is not a performance, but a ritual- Victor Lewis
I just reviewed what Joseph Campbell said about ritual. He mentioned that ritual came from vision, a higher form of insight than whatever comes from words used to describe the connection between myth and ritual. Whenever we are only talking about ritual, we aren't participating in a way where we can benefit from it. This column was a good reminder about how to get back into connecting myth with our daily lives. Thank you for it.
While your cultural critique is strong and important, it relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of how dopamine works, thankfully for humanity.
Anna Lembke is wrong— a dopamine fast is not a thing (or, if it were a thing, it would be Parkinson's disease— well beyond anhedonia). Dopamine is an extremely complex neurochemical, but for what we’re talking about here, it mainly drives only one type of pleasure: that is desire, the pleasure of the hunt, also known as “wanting.”
Satisfaction—the pleasure of the feast, known as “liking” to people unlike Lembke, who actually understand neuroscience and addiction— relies on endogenous opioids, endorphins etc. (In other words, you can get completely high on opioids even if you have no dopamine!)
What happens in addiction is that desire (“wanting”) escalates but satisfaction (“liking”) either stabilizes or drops. The reality is that most people DO NOT become addicted, even if they try cocaine, heroin, fentanyl or gambling. The percentage of people who become addicted to most drugs is around 10-20% and for gambling, it’s around 1%. We don’t know yet what the deal is with internet addiction, but you need to understand what addiction is and what drives it before you can make proclamations that we’re all hooked and doomed.
Basically, addiction is compulsive behavior despite negative consequences. If consequences of engagement with an activity are life-expanding (like love, art, child-rearing), compulsive behavior despite negative experience is necessary: if we couldn’t persist despite these experiences, we’d never succeed in love or art or parenting. So, if you are obsessively engaged with your art or your love but it’s making your life better, that’s not an addiction— if it’s making your life worse, it is.
Who is at highest risk for addiction? People in distress, typically due to childhood trauma, incipient mental illness, existential despair or all three. It is these predispositions that cause anhedonia and lead people to seek relief in drugs or other compulsive behavior. The drugs work at first— but over time, they start to fail and make things worse. This, not dopamine alone, is what drives anhedonia in addiction.
And this is why a “dopamine fast” is absolutely the last thing you want to do if you are attempting to recover from addiction and why punishment and tough love fail. The problem in addiction is not too much pleasure, but too little satisfaction and meaning.
Taking away pleasure therefore, fails. Replacing it with better pleasure— AKA art that satisfies, intrigues and shines or real love or motivation to making meaning— is what’s needed.
Please do not help drive pop culture misunderstanding of the neuroscience of addiction and recreate the horribly failed drug war approach to improving internet health!!
I’m not sure ritual is the grounding antidote to our techno-virtual mania. The Catholic reenactment of Christ’s last supper has a grounding effect, but it’s a grounding in a story from Christ’s life—and story is always secondary, an interpretation of reality.
We postmoderns have been living through the wholesale destruction of the myths and rituals that have grounded Western culture for centuries—and into the vacuum of meaning have stepped the techno-dweebs and the lords of capital they serve. We live in the breach.
On that I think we agree, but the prime antidote is contact with the Real—“chopping wood and carrying water,” as the Zen monks put it. Out of THAT contact—out of an original relationship to humanity’s enduring realities—visionary men and women create new, authentic art and maybe someday even new rituals more adequate to our times.
Kids unable to watch a movie without a dopamine fix? Maybe they exist. But in the very small pool of my teenagers and their friends, I don’t see it. I see kids devouring long and complex films to discuss and analyze. I see kids drawing all afternoon. I see kids learning instruments or singing sea shanties together. I see my son using his grandfather’s 60-year old Nikon to learn how to photograph slowly and deliberately. I see my other child reading books on the theatre and dreaming of their own shows. Maybe some kids of this generation are hooked on social media. But the kids I see blow me away with their thoughtfulness and curiosity. They encourage me put down my phone and finally pickup that huge book I bought in college but never read.
Even small rituals: washing one's face, brushing teeth, getting dressed, making the bed, eating breakfast, if done mindfully center us to start the day.
. . . and here I was, scrolling to read your post about ritual. Frightening. I find myself increasingly thankful that I am as old as I am (79) and won't be here for what is coming. Now I am even more grateful for my daily rituals. Spending time with nature is my most important one. Even if it's merely going out to our backyard and watching the birds and other little critters like lizards going about their own rituals. Plus staying in the moment and not worrying about what might happen or what I think ought to happen.
Pray…isolate yourself, find quiet, be quiet and self reflect. It is difficult at the start and one must go slowly. It is soul cleansing… calming to the spirit and uplifting. Search for the peace and it will be bright…thank you, Ted for your constant inspiration.
Ted: I'm enjoying your Substack immensely and I will over time probably buy half the albums you recommended in your 50 best lists. I won't download them. I will buy them as vinyl or CDs. Please tell anybody you know in the music industry. I am vaguely familiar with many of those artists but because of the devolution of music criticism and radio I haven't heard or read enough about these artists to put some money down.
As to solutions to the distraction culture, the easiest and most accessible recommendation I could give would be for someone to learn to play a musical instrument. A harmonica costs $50. Electric keyboard under $500. Good beginner guitar under $1000. There are a kajillion YouTube videos to help you. I started playing guitar in 1976 mostly learning from books, but once YouTube instructional videos got going, I've been able to learn 10X more than I ever did from books. And any kid from about age six can do this.
Another possibility is to take up a hobby like woodworking. This can get expensive over time, but you can always start with simple projects and gradually and build up your shop as budget allows. In a similar manner, working in one of the trades is a great way to learn to focus your attention--while making money to boot. Carpentry is a great trade to learn, more interesting and varied than the others. And the thing that people don't understand about the trades is how hard you have to focus, how creative you have to be every single hour of every job, and how satisfying it is to solve a problem. Read Matthew Crawford's book Shopcraft as Soulcraft on this. I've been doing carpentry and woodworking as a living, a hobby and occasional side gig for 50 years now. I'm arguably more knowledgeable than 80 percent of the people doing it now. I know enough to build my own house from the ground up and all the furniture in it but I'm still learning new things. I spent six hours in the shop yesterday and checked my phone twice.
Even if manual. arts or music isn't intrinsically valuable, six or eight hours of working with your hands is its own form of dopamine and one that leaves you feeling better at the end of a day instead of strung out and anxious.
Excellent piece Ted! My husband Peco and I experienced a similar reaction to our recent writing on the (esp. 3Rs of Unmachining: Guideposts for an Age of Technological Upheaval and Sowing Anachronism: How to be Weird in Public, and Private)https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/sowing-anachronism-how-to-be-weird.
Especially Parents and Educators are profoundly concerned with the distraction and addiction they are witnessing and desperately want guidance to help their children and students reconnect with reality. The "great rewiring" of digitally captive brains will require a turning away from the virtual, and a turning toward the Real: agency (action in the real world) and communion (with people in the real world)(see Build a Songbird Compass https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/cp/141896694). Thanks for your writing Ted!
I realise now my bedtime (sometimes morning, on days off) routine is actually a ritual to help me shuck off the often tech-mediated stresses of the day. I'm going to start calling it a ritual and honouring it more. Great piece, thank you.