Sublime

Repetition stabilizes and deepens attention.

Today’s society is no longer Foucault’s disciplinary world of hospitals, madhouses, prisons, barracks, and factories. It has long been replaced by another regime, namely a society of fitness studios, office towers, banks, airports, shopping malls, and genetic laboratories. Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather

We internalize the message of what Byung-Chul Han has called the “achievement society” where the primary goal of a life is to constantly improve, nudged to become “entrepreneurs of [our]selves.”⁠1 But constantly trying to be “better” can push us toward goals that are not ours, robbing us of our connection to ourselves.

Rituals are characterized by repetition. Repetition differs from routine in its capacity to create intensity.

We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-the-world into a being-at-home.

The fundamental nature of life may be not atomistic but relational.