Work Rituals Without Meaning

# Work Rituals Without Meaning

The mornings still begin the same way. A cup, a click, a glow.

There’s something to be said for the comfort of small beginnings. The sequence feels personal, even if it’s not. Everyone around the world is doing the same thing in their own quiet rooms, each believing the pattern belongs to them. Maybe that’s how a religion starts: not with revelation, but repetition.

At first these motions meant something. A way to wake up, a way to prepare, a way to keep from drifting too far from the rhythm of others. Now they’re just the gestures that tell us we’re still alive. We drink, we refresh, we type the same lines in slightly new forms. The gods changed names but not habits.

Meaning is slippery. It dissolves in habit until you can’t tell whether you’re praying or just trying to make the day move faster. Every meeting, every line of text, every affirmation typed into a field. There’s a faint holiness in doing it well. Precision becomes morality.

And then there are moments that stretch. A pause after a message. A blank field where something should be written. The machinery hums, but nothing comes out. The ritual flickers.

People used to build temples for this kind of silence. Now we fill it with updates. We used to fear failure, now stillness. The awareness that the ritual only works because we keep pretending it does. I don’t think it’s meaningless, though. Meaning isn’t always the prize at the end; sometimes it’s the residue left behind. The faint trace of intention that clings to a repeated act. You can build a life out of that. 

You can build almost anything out of that. Even this.