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Sharpen your pattern recognition here → 🧭 At the Center

Quick suggestion: copy and paste this essay into Claude/ChatGPT. It’s completely okay if you don’t read the full essay, but I encourage you to at least train your AI!

Across the first five essays of 🧭 At the Center, I have been naming patterns: heaven and earth, time and space, hierarchy, and the fractal architecture that explains why those patterns recur at every scale of reality.

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Today’s Edition:

🧭 ATC_006 names the mechanism by which those patterns play out in our human experience.

That mechanism is ritual.

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Let’s get into it.

Let me set the stage.

Princeton football beats Harvard the third week of October, and two weeks later in the first week of November, beats Yale. At the conclusion of the season the following week, the school responds in a way that it has responded since the late 1800s, a tradition like none other: a bonfire on Cannon Green to celebrate a Big Three sweep.

I was there for it twice, once as a freshman and once as a junior, surrounded by thousands of students, family, and faculty who had made it a point to gather around the same patch of grass to do the same thing their predecessors had done since 1869.

The bonfire is a ritual. And the point I'll make here is that rituals are not merely sentimental gestures, arbitrary school-spirit events, or marketing exercises. Rituals are a binding. 

The administration sets the wood, the football team leads the procession, and the rest of the Princeton body participates, because the only way the celebration carries weight is if the celebration is collective. 

In 🧭 ATC_001, I argued the following about sports:

The bonfire is but one small instance, and it is happening in some form, somewhere, every day, across every sport, across the entire calendar year.

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By examining just how much of human behavior conforms to ritual, we begin to see that ritual is not the exception but the rule. Consider the rituals you have already performed today without naming them as such:

If you doubt the ritual is doing work, try the inverse:

The discomfort you immediately imagine with these examples is the proof that all human behavior is ritualized. That’s what “common courtesy” and “manners” are.

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I assert that ritual is the inevitable mechanism by which humans bind themselves to something larger than themselves. 

Ritual is religion. And sport, examined structurally, is the new religion. 

Sport is the new dominant binding system of modern Western life, and the great illusion of our moment is that we believe we have somehow risen above the need to be bound at all.

We have not. We have only changed what binds us.

Ritual is ordered behavior, and ordered behavior reduces cost while preserving purpose.

When a village figures out the shortest line to their local river through a forest, a trail forms. Each subsequent walker pays a smaller cost than the one who walked prior to arrive at the same destination. These subsequent walkers do not “waste” the same amount of energy in finding the trail as the former, and that trail becomes an inheritance the village does not have to think about going forward.

The handshake exists because we figured out the shortest line to effectively communicate "I am not here to harm you."

Common courtesy and manners exists because we figured out the shortest line to peace between strangers and dignity in shared spaces. 

Each of these is an ordered behavior that encodes meaning into a structured action and reduces the cognitive cost of producing the same meaning the next time it has to be expressed.

You do not think about shaking someone's hand to express peace, you just do it.

All goal-directed behavior is ordered behavior: the easiest way to figure out what to do is to start with the end goal in mind and work backwards from there, right?

James Clear's Atomic Habits is the scientific articulation of the same claim. The brain physically wires neural pathways that optimize for what is repeated, until the behavior is no longer a deliberate act but a structural feature of the person performing it.

And just as we have discussed before, there are higher goals and lower goals, higher behaviors and lower behaviors. This is heaven-and-earth + hierarchy.

Ritual, just like hierarchy, fractals, and the other patterns we have discussed, is Jacob's ladder, a continuum stretching from heaven to earth. This continuum runs from the lowly trivial (shaking someone's hand) to the upper sacred (corporate worship).

Ritual then, is a continuous gradient of binding, from the lightest to the heaviest.

The pattern recognition here is that the ritual is not only carrying meaning, but forming the person who performs it.

The cost of breaking a ritual is steeper than the cost of performing one.

Consider the embedded ritual of confrontation. When we imagine two knights dueling, there is a pattern: they face each other, square up, and fight on terms that both parties recognize, with a clear beginning, middle, and end.

Should one party step outside the ritual and stab the other in the back, the ritual will collapse. Yes, the knight will win, but he will win only once. The phrase "stab someone in the back" is associated with cowardice across every culture for a reason: it names the breaking of a binding ritual that holds combatants in mutual respect and recognition.

If everyone were to start stabbing each other in the back, society breaks down, and society would then have to rebuild its ritual at a higher level: this time with clear and explicit rules – Thou shall not stab each other in the back. 

When ritualization is broken, it will always reassert itself. You cannot escape ritual; you can only force it to come back at a more elaborate scale than the one you tore down.

Let’s take another example: the class clown.

The one who refuses to participate in the dominant ritual, in this case being well-behaved in class, are still participating in their own ritual which has its own pattern.

The class clown is a pattern: he is an archetype who has a script, embodies a role, and the group recognizes him instantly for what he is.

The contrarian who refuses to wear a tie at a black-tie event embodies the ritual of rebellion, which is itself a pattern. The artist who insists he has no method indeed has a method.

The point is that we must determine what ritual pattern we are participating in, because we indeed are participating in one.

So this naturally begs the question: what are your rituals ordered toward? 

You will pull people into your pattern, whether you intend to or not. 

A waltz and grinding at the club are both rituals. They are both dancing, both patterned, and both binding to something. But they are clearly patterned after different things: one is beautiful and higher, and one is grimey and lower.

The form of the ritual reveals what it is ordered toward, and what it is ordered toward is what it forms in you and in those who participate with you. 

Like everything else with 🧭 At the Center, this is about meaning.

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Therefore, the figure who is placed at the center of ritual and collective attention cannot avoid manifesting meaning, regardless of intent. 

The athlete on the field, the captain in the locker room, the commissioner at the press conference, the president on the stage, all of them are ritual “figureheads” whether they want to be or not. 

Their clothing, their posture, their language, and their silence are meaningful by the very fact that they have been placed at the center and embody their hierarchy and governing principle. 

In 🧭 ATC_004, I argued that hierarchy is the structure by which collectives organize themselves into heads and bodies, and that the head carries the whole body in the meaning it holds. 

I said hierarchy forms you . . . but how does it do that? Through ritual. 

Hierarchy places certain people at the center, those people do certain things (ritual), and those things become the mechanism by which everyone in the hierarchy is formed.

We laugh at the strange hat of a bishop, and yet we accept without question the policeman's uniform and the sports team's jersey. 

The bishop's vestments, the policeman's badge, and the C on the captain's chest are the same reality at different scales: a ritualized identity-marking that signals role, authority, and belonging. They differ only in what they point toward, and in the height to which they bind the wearer.

Which leads me to my next point.

The depth of a ritual is tied to the depth of the binding and intimacy. 

Let us examine how rituals scale across different relationships and how that naturally calibrates the ritual accordingly:

The same fundamental structure, ordered behavior, scaled to different magnitudes of binding, calibrated to the depth of the relationship being expressed.

Same pattern, different heights.

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A brief science lesson: what is happening cognitively in these heavier rituals is actually more than ordered behavior reducing cost. 

The wedding takes a relationship that has been a slow accumulation of intimacy – dates, conversations, and unspoken commitments – and crunches that accumulation into a single moment in time that the couple, their families, and their entire community will refer back to for the rest of their lives. 

A ritual like this takes you out of normal time, wraps a narrative around the moment, and lodges it deep in your episodic memory as a “hyper-episode” that you can return to indefinitely. This is why heavy rituals are heavy: they are cognitively engineered to be permanent demarcations.

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A common misunderstanding is that you can have a relationship without a ritual.

But this is not possible because ritual is the very form by which the depth and intimacy of a relationship is expressed.

Strip away the ritual and you have erased the form by which the relationship was carried. 

There used to be, and there still is, a rhythmic cadence to the human experience. 

We do not just experience time linearly, but rather we experience it cyclically. And that cyclical rhythm is expressed in ritual.

All human behavior is ritualized, but that ritualization is always on some sort of cadence, and the layering of those cadences is what produces what we call a life rather than a sequence of disconnected days.

Human beings have their own liturgical ritual calendar, and so do sports.

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Football, basketball, hockey, baseball, soccer, motorsport, and the dozens of other emerging leagues that have launched in the last decade all have their own liturgical calendar, too. 

We call it the off-season, the pre-season, the in-season, and the post-season. 

But taking a global macro view, all of these calendars line up against one another to create a sort of meta-sporting liturgical calendar:

Let’s zoom in on cricket:

Translation: cricket is always-on, and make no doubt that this savvy liturgical rhythmic maneuver ensures a significant increase in the commercial value of cricket globally, serving with precision its over 2.5 billion fans.

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Now let us superimpose on top of this the Olympic and international calendars, which recur every two to four years.

Do you see just how rhythmic we can get?

Above each of the professional calendars sits an even higher liturgical calendar that gathers the smaller ones up into themselves.

The UEFA Champions League is the ultimate sporting calendar that the EPL, La Liga, Ligue 1, the Bundesliga, Serie A, and every other European league feeds into. 

The World Cup is this same idea, but supercharge by calling on virtually every nation on the planet.

Each higher liturgical calendar is a ritual that gathers smaller rituals up into itself, and the participant in the smaller ritual finds himself by extension in the larger one above him, whether annually, biannually, or quadrennially.

What does that lead to? 

Well, I now have the optionality of becoming a fan of this league and not that one. To follow this team and not that one. To follow these players and not those. 

I am now in a position to custom build my own ritual liturgical calendar and bind myself to all of these rituals that are above me. None of which I actually control, but nonetheless willingly submit myself to and elect to participate in anyway.

And we call that fandom.

But let us add a further, daily layer: 

TikTok. Instagram reels. YouTube. Podcasts. Streaming. AI. Influencers, personalities, celebrities, and athletes. The news. Timeline feeds.

I am constantly inundated with information and exposed to all of the possible rituals that I could bind myself to.

I now exist within an ocean and abundance of possibility. I can choose to participate in whatever rituals I want. 

We think this is a good thing, but let me tell you why it’s not:

Not only am I being pulled every which way, but the forces at be (not us) actually end up being the ones that set my calendar for me. When Super Bowl Sunday and the World Cup Final come around, you know what I will be doing.

What does this mean? 

It means that we have actually lost agency, not gained it. This is a twisted, perverted version of what the human experience is meant to be and what the liturgical calendar, rhythmic, ritualized, cyclical nature of human life is meant to be.

Even though we are choosing to participate in what we call ours, in a calendar we call custom, we end up all tuning into the same thing, we end up not being any different from everyone else.

Me and 15 million other people watched the NFL Draft. Me and 5 billion other people will watch the World Cup this year. All I have done is lose agency to be the same as everyone else.

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And we are surprised when people claim that sports is the new religion?

It is a new iteration on a calendar that has organized human life across centuries: weekly mass, seasons reserved for fasting, seasons reserved for feasting, Christmas in the Winter, Easter in the Spring preceded by the forty-day Lenten period.

The hours that used to belong to corporate worship now belong to corporate fandom. The fasts and feasts that used to mark the year now run from training camp to championship.

It is all collective participation, whether you have named it as such or not.

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To make matters worse, food delivery apps are actively negating ritual. 

Eating a meal together at a shared table, family-style, used to be the chief way that humans participated in ritual together. The shared meal is the most basic act of binding, the place where kinship is renewed daily, and the form has held across every culture for all of human history because the form is the binding.

We have substituted those meals for convenience and fandom, binding with strangers in our team's colors over our own kin at our own table. 

The pattern reasserts itself, like it always does. The custom calendar that promised liberation from binding has produced its own liturgical calendar, with its own feasts and fasts, sacraments and saints, and demand for collective participation.

And we willingly adhere to it.

The diagnosis above is bleak. 

But the positive reality is that there is nothing else in modern life that does what sports does. Even other cultural industries (film, TV, music, art) pale in comparison.

Few institutions overcome racial, socio-economic, and religious divides the way sports does. The same form that flattens our agency also gathers us across the divides that other institutions reinforce.

And this is why we love sports. But back to our regularly scheduled programming.

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Roger Goodell has stated that he wants the NFL mentioned alongside Disney and the Vatican. 

NCAA institutions operate as 501(c)(3)s and are tax-exempt, classified the same as churches, an ode to an earlier era's recognition that amateur athletics functioned as a civic-religious good. 

Sports betting is the new sacrament and follow the same weekly cadence and personal stake.

Stadiums are the new cathedrals and carry with them the architecture, centered focal point, gathered congregation, ritualized entry and exit, corporate singing, and shared identity-marking carried in colors, chants, and flags to prove it.

All of this, the sports that we so clearly have placed at the center, emerged because the form is the form, and the binding requires the form regardless of which content it is bound to.

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But a distinction should be made.

There are some sports leagues that are consumed as content, and there are others that are participated in as a weekly ceremony. 

The former builds a relationship between fan and athlete and is mediated by the next dopamine hit. The latter is a civic religion that binds a fan and team through ritual.

The teams and leagues that have understood this distinction are the groups that have built the deepest and most sustainable cultural moats. And like luxury brands, they have done so by asking for more from their fans, not less.

The ever increasing intensification of fandom is not random.

The first time visit → the second time visit → the painted face → the road trip to the away game → the season ticket → the sports betting → the tattoo.

These escalating examples of fandom are costly to the fan, and the cost is the point. The participant is signaling, to himself and to everyone around him, that no one would carry this kind of cost unless he were genuinely committed.

My future brother-in-law sent me this video of the Vancouver Canucks asking their fans what they would give up to see their team win the 1st overall pick in this year’s draft. Yes, it’s all in jest, but notice the language by some of these responses!

The lighter the demand, the lighter the binding. The heavier the demand, the heavier the binding. 

Teams and leagues that demand more from their fans build deeper binding because the cost is higher, and their cultural relevancy becomes so deeply embedded in the living practices of their fans that they become functionally irreplaceable.

This is what is behind the following real examples from the past week:

Josh Kushner launches Thrive Eternal to invest in “Iconic franchises and cultural institutions rooted in tradition, identity, and shared experience,” beginning with the SF Giants.

Packy McCormick writes in Scarce Assets that in an era of AI-driven abundance, these assets get repriced up because humans roll the winnings of abundance back into things that cannot be made abundant.

Brent Peus pushes that same observation one level deeper in Visceral Capital: the assets that even the most AI-pilled investors (Thrive, HOF Capital) are now buying are precisely the ones that cannot be prompted or rendered, the ones felt in the body before they are processed in the head.

Not from this week, but Ari Emanuel’s anti-AI bet.

The pattern powering scarcity, viscerality, and the need for IRL is ritual.

These assets are un-replicable because they embody ritualized bindings which escalates fandom and cements their cultural relevancy.

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The linguistic evidence of this binding appears in our grammar before it appears anywhere else. Do we not say “we lost” rather than “they lost”?

We have been ritually integrated into a body that we do not control, that does not pay us nor know that we exist, and yet our emphatic and willing integration shows up in our very speech.

The last piece worth naming: fans remain fans of their teams whether the team wins the championship or not. 

Ritual bindings, whether to the Dallas Cowboys or Catholic Church, only require that the institution exists and is participated in. 

The binding was never about outcome; it was about what it does to us when we participate in it. The ritual is what keeps us coming back.

If you are building inside this ecosystem, the key takeaways are clear:

1) You do not get to choose whether to ritualize. You only get to choose what you ritualize toward, and know that you will be formed into its likeness.

The institution you are building, team you are leading, league you are commissioning, or brand you are stewarding are all operating through ritual whether you have named them as rituals or not.

You have rituals. Now figure out whether the ones you have are forming your people and institution towards your governing principle or not.

If you do not take ownership over your rituals, they will be named for you. Consequently, they will form the people inside your institution into a particular kind of person, one which may not align with your North Star.

If you build with that in mind, you can be deliberate about what you are becoming. Otherwise, unchecked rituals will form what they may, and you will find yourself at the head of an organization whose participants have been bound to something other than what you intended.

2) The custom liturgical calendar is the great illusion of modern agency. 

We will never escape binding, it is a fundamental human truth. We are only masquerading around as though we have risen above it, yet ultimately all we have done is change what we are binding oursevles to. 

And this thing we have chose is now forming us, week by week and season by season, into the kind of person who finds his identity in the colors of a team he does not own, the schedule of a league he does not run, and the outcomes of games whose winners and losers have nothing to do with the conduct of his life.

This is not an argument against watching sport. I love sport. I have given my life to sport. 

This is an argument against the unexamined life inside the rituals that sport has become. If you participate in the ritual without naming what the ritual is doing to you, the ritual will do what it does anyway, and you will be formed into its likeness without your consent.

You will be bound by whatever rituals you are putting at the center. The only question, then, is by what, and at what height.

If you are still reading this, thank you.

Hopefully you have a better understanding of what 🧭 At the Center is, how sports embodies the pattern of ritual, and what that pattern reveals about us.

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