Rituals are the invisible architecture of belonging

Our everyday life is a series of consecutive events, tasks, errands and switch in streams of thought. But there is core architecture that holds them together and gives structure to our routines. That is what Rituals do.

A morning croissant at the corner bakery, or a decompressing evening shower with music and candlelight - these carry psychological power, as well as the power to bring stability in a chaotic saeculum.

Routine is our form of autopilot: a set of functional, purposeful actions you have to complete every day, like heating your pre-prepared lasagna in the microwave after a long day at work. Fast, efficient, and requiring very little mental involvement.

Ritual is where you stay attuned. It is not about the end purpose, but about the process itself. It is the original lasagna from your friend's Italian nonna's family recipe: a pasta machine, fresh eggs, meat to mince, and fresh basil leaves from your windowsill "garden place", of course. You do not cook it out of hunger; you cook it for exceptional savour. Possibly to share with friends.

Rituals create meaning and give rhythm to life.

Modernity imposes its own rhythm: life prizes efficiency over form. If something has no obvious function or economic value, it gets discarded. You do not need a print issue and time to educate yourself on a topic; you simply type your question into an AI chat window. You get information, ideas and inspiration, entertainment, and communication with friends online. This is how gadgets have robbed us of effort and attention. They have also robbed us of time.

Without rituals, time becomes shapeless. We sink into a stream of content and are consumed by it for hours without noticing. Then we begin to feel that time has sped up, do we not? Physicists may have their own answer to this too, but what if the main problem is that we are losing our grounding?

We still feel connected to other people online. We even have access to glimpse what is happening in their lives and minds on Threads or through the Reels they like. But are we even aware of each other's presence?

This is close to what Byung-Chul Han explores in The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present. His argument is that rituals are not merely decorative traditions or charming leftovers from the past. They are symbolic forms that give structure to time, stabilize human relations, and create a sense of a shared world. Han's book is less a theory of rituals in the anthropological sense and more a diagnosis of what kind of life becomes possible - and impossible - when rituals disappear. He is writing about the texture of the present: why modern life can feel overexposed, accelerated, individualized, and strangely empty even when it is full of communication and choice.

[ Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present. 2019: https://www.amazon.com/Disappearance-Rituals-Topology-Present/dp/1509542760 ]

What he seems to care about most is that rituals are forms. They are not valuable because they are efficient, expressive, or emotionally intense. They are valuable because they stabilize life through repetition and symbolic order. They mark beginnings and endings, thresholds and returns. They tell us how to enter a meal, a weekend, a season, a celebration, a farewell. They create a world that does not have to be invented from scratch every day.

That is why, in Han’s opinion, the loss of rituals is not just the loss of charming traditions. It is the loss of shared form. And when shared form disappears, the individual is left alone with the task of producing meaning, identity, and orientation out of raw experience. This is one of his recurring concerns across his work: modern subjects are told they are free, but in practice they are often just burdened with self-production.

Han is drawing a contrast on emotions and feelings that is subtle but important. He tends to treat emotion as something more immediate, volatile, and event-driven - a surge, a reaction, or a burst. Modern culture is full of outrage, excitement, confession, stimulation, visibility, instant response. These emotions have a quick cycle. They are contagious, but not necessarily binding. They flare up and disappear.

Feeling, by contrast, is closer to duration, depth, and inward resonance. It has more continuity, it can ripen, settle, and become part of how one inhabits the world. Rituals belong more to this second register. They are not designed to produce emotional spikes. In fact, they often do the opposite: they contain, shape, and de-intensify raw emotion by placing it inside a form. A mourning ritual, for instance, does not deny grief, but it gives grief a shared language and sequence. A shared evening conversation does not need everyone to be emotionally expressive – you can roll on a coach like a cat and listen others’ chat; it still creates warmth through form, repetition, and presence.

That distinction matters because our current culture often mistakes emotional intensity for meaningful experience, about which Han is sceptical. He suggests that a life made only of emotional peaks and displays becomes unstable. It may be full of stimulation, but not of inhabitable meaning. Rituals offer something quieter: they transform passing states into durable significance.

Shared experience is central here. Han does not romanticize togetherness in a naive way, but he clearly believes that rituals create a common world. A ritual is shared not only because several people are present, but because they are participating in the same form. Today many people look at the same content, react to the same event, comment on the same trend. It is co-attention, not necessarily communion. Rituals create shared experience because they coordinate multimodal concert: bodies, time, gesture, and attention. They slow people into a pattern they recognize together. Think of setting a table, greeting one another in a familiar way, lighting candles, singing, toasting, mourning, gathering every Sunday, celebrating someone's arrival or departure. The power is not mainly in novelty or information. It is in the fact that something is being enacted together. A ritual says: this moment is not random, and we are not just adjacent individuals passing through it privately. We are participating in something held in common.

And this is exactly why the idea matters so much in coliving.

Coliving is often spoken about through design, convenience, flexibility, and community. But community does not appear automatically just because people share a balcony or a bathroom. Shared space is not yet shared life. What turns a place into something warmer and more memorable is often ritual.

A welcome dinner for new tenants. Sunday morning espresso made by your barista-housemate. A birthday sweet treat in the common area. A monthly Cuisines-Of-The-World cooking together. A goodbye tradition before someone moves out. These things may seem small, but they create rhythm. They give people something to return to, something to recognize, something to belong to.

Without rituals, coliving can remain functional, beautiful, even friendly - but still feel transactional. With rituals, it gains texture, continuity, and emotional memory. Rituals are what transform cohabitation into community.

In this sense, rituals are the invisible architecture of coliving. Not an accessory to community, but one of its real foundations. In a world shaped more and more by convenience and digital overstimulation, maybe what people long for is a place where life regains rhythm, meaning, and presence.

Tatiana Tsapenko | August 2026 · info@houseofco.eu