In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Ramya DRozario chats with Bruce Feiler, a New York Times bestselling author, about A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World—and How It Can Save Us (Penguin Press / Penguin Random House, May 2026). Feiler chronicles how, as digital saturation grows, people are creating new rituals to reconnect with one another. He explains how gathering helps people navigate life’s transitions and why the future may be more human—and more communal—than we think. An edited version of the conversation follows.
Why did you write this book and why now?
I stumbled into this story, almost by accident. A few years ago, I was going through a difficult time. I had lost my father and was losing my mother. We had dropped our children off at college.
Suddenly, my marriage needed to be renegotiated and my friendships remade. And I walked back into our home and felt homesick. At first, I thought, “You can’t have this feeling. That’s what children have.” But then, I realized it was not just me. Everyone I know was feeling disconnected and off track in some way.
Everyone is leaving jobs, losing relationships, researching strange diseases, and feeling like we’ve abdicated our relationships for our smartphones, in a lot of ways. Everyone is experiencing a type of existential home sickness. That’s when I realized that I wanted a way to reconnect, to remake all of these things and restitch the bonds in my life. I thought, “I need a ritual.”
Rituals are one of the few things that we know work to hold us together. A ritual is a shared unnecessary act—shared because it connects with other people—that makes us feel at home.
They are unnecessary acts because you don’t need to get down on one knee to propose or wear black to mourn. Yet, they become necessary to give us meaning. They also make us feel at home. We know that rituals started around 300,000 years ago. Now with neuroscience we know that rituals calm us when we’re stressed and help us navigate difficult times. We have completed rituals in every century we’ve ever known—until this century, when we are turning our backs on traditional life rituals.
Our birth rituals are plummeting, the same with coming-of-age rituals. Fewer than half of us are married. Only one in three of us is buried. This was shocking to me. In 1970, 5 percent of Americans were cremated. Now, it’s 65 percent. Nearly half of those have no ritual, of any kind, to mark their deaths.
At the same time that we are in a recession, as I call it, of traditional life rituals, nontraditional ways of gathering are exploding all over the world—gender reveals, NICU graduations, cancer-versaries, sober-versaries, end-of-life doulas, end-of-companies doulas, and on.
Pet funerals are a $3 billion business. We have mom proms and daddy-daughter dances. And a lot of these are marking occasions that organized institutions never recognize: not just marriage, but divorce; not just fertility, but infertility; not just birth, but stillbirth. What we are seeing is that this movement, the rise of the “ritual renaissance” as I write it, really dovetails with the rise of the experience economy.
And it shows something that people are not talking nearly enough about, which is that there will be a human response to this digital saturation, tech overload, and the rise of AI. This is humans pushing and making the first serious dent on the loneliness epidemic that we’ve been talking about almost for a generation now.
How do habits, rituals, and traditions differ?
There are technical differences. A habit is something you do every day. A tradition is something that may be passed down in your family. A ritual is really a collective act.
And at the beginning of this journey, I was very, very interested in the definition of ritual. There are civic rituals, like carnations in inaugurations. There are annual rituals, like Thanksgiving or midsummer, and then there are daily rituals, like shaking hands or bowing. But I’ve come to feel quite strongly that we must end these definitions that arose a century ago, when anthropologists first started identifying life rituals, and really started focusing on what I call the ritual state of mind.
When we have outsourced ourselves to algorithms, the only thing strong enough to hold us together is the original human algorithm. And that’s ritual human gatherings.
As you know, I spent the last ten years collecting and analyzing more than 500 life stories of Americans of all ages, walks of life, and backgrounds. And what I determined is that the linear life is dead. The idea that from adolescence to assisted living, we will have one job, one relationship, one belief system, one home, and one political belief, that’s deader than ever before.
Instead, we live nonlinear lives. And my data show that we go through three to five, what I call “lifequakes” in the course of our lives. These are massive bursts of change that often have pain and confusion, but ultimately lead to growth and renewal. The average length of them is five years. So if you think three to five across four, five, or six years, that’s 25 years, that’s half of our adult lives we spend in transition. And what I discovered in doing the book’s research is that collective ceremonial life occasions, or ritual gatherings, are how we navigate those times.
When we have outsourced ourselves to algorithms, the only thing strong enough to hold us together is the original human algorithm.
We need these rituals more frequently. People are saying, “Forget the top-down, institutionally-mandated, pre-scripted rituals I grew up with.” As one millennial ritual designer told me: “I need a ritual when I want it. I don’t need anyone’s approval. And if I’m having a bad day, I’m losing my job, I’m moving, I’m having a double mastectomy, I want to be surrounded by my friends.”
The change is that we have moved from top-down rituals to bottom-up rituals. And what’s so powerful is that it is an entirely organic grassroots movement. And to me, it dovetails entirely with what we are seeing across the American economy.
People want to gather. The experience economy is now a $10 trillion business. It is one-third of the $30 trillion US economy. Every aspect of the economy, every neighborhood, and every family is affected by this.
After traveling across 16 countries, was there any particular ritual that changed you?
I would point to two rituals that really opened my eyes for the opportunity that we have now to rewrite the rules of how we live and to push back on loneliness, division, and digital saturation, and try to find meaning, collectively.
One is my wife’s favorite chapter in the book: “The Taylor Swift Divorce Party.” It’s about a woman who grew up on Long Island, both her parents were divorced, her grandparents were divorced. Her number one life goal was not to get divorced.
She grew up, got married, and had two children. She got divorced. Her husband took half her belongings; she gave away the other half. She realized: “I need a divorce registry. I have no sheets to sleep on. I have no towels to dry on.”
She started a company: the world’s first divorce registry. It took off. She realized: “It’s not just enough to have this registry. I want to be surrounded by my friends.” They asked how they could help, but she didn’t know how.
She wrote a blog post about the Taylor Swift divorce party. We all know Taylor Swift is the queen of breakup songs. So “Shake It Off” cupcakes and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” napkins. This goes viral.
Yet this is also happening among men, something that has not been reported in the larger conversation. I encountered a subculture I’d never heard of, called “misogi.” Misogi is a Japanese medieval ritual of jumping into cold waterfalls.
The concept was embraced by the online manosphere. Now, we have a huge culture among young men who do these things called misogi, which are popularly known as suffer fests, where once a year, they do something like swim with sharks.
People want connection, collective meaning, a sense of belonging. Step by step, gathering by gathering, they are pushing back on contemporary life and saying, “We want to take back our family, our team, our neighborhood, our corporation.” I have now become a ritual designer because there is so much untapped desire out there.
You mentioned ‘a ritual anytime, anywhere attitude.’ Could rituals begin to lose their significance If we created too many?
Arnold van Gennep was an anthropologist who, in 1909, coined the phrase “rite of passage.” In his book, he wrote that there were four major rites of passage: birth, coming of age, marriage, and death.
If you choose not to get married or have children, as many people do, for much of your adult life you don’t have a preapproved life ritual.
In the nonlinear lives we have today, we experience an idiosyncratic fingerprint of loops, whirls, twists, and turns. At their core, rituals are solutions to the feeling of being unsettled, unsure, afraid, and fearful.
It’s not that people are saying they want to create more rituals. People are saying, “I’m going through more and more times when I feel I need the connection, wisdom, strength, advice, celebration, or shared mourning of being with other people.” So, in that instance, because there are so many more times, I do not think that there is a scenario under which we have too many life rituals.
As I mentioned, the only algorithm strong enough to help us stay together is a type of gathering.
Some of these might become traditions that you do every year. Some of them might become something that happened on your corporate retreat, precisely because it’s unnecessary and a little discretionary. From studies, we know that the more you invest in something—both time, money, effort, and emotional commitment—the more you’re going to get out of it.
In a world in which it’s just too easy to retreat into our screens, what we’re seeing is there will be a human response. If you pull back and look at the history of the United States, and in particular the history of the American economy, during the last 25 years of the 19th century, in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, one-third of Americans lost their jobs and moved from rural areas to cities.
That’s 25 million people. At the same time, 25 million more people emigrated, mostly from Europe, also arriving in major cities in this country. A lot of the backbone of what people today think of as the ritual calendar, such as Thanksgiving, was popularized in this time, as were wedding showers, baby showers, and that entire ecosystem of registries and wedding photography. All of these things were invented as a human response to dislocation.
And what was created was entirely new ways to have cultural affinities from the places people left behind, whether it was rural areas or the European cultures they came from. Even if a fraction of what we’re told is going to happen with AI and job loss and dislocation occurs, there is going to be a massive hole and a massive opportunity. There will be a human response, and a massive part of that will be face-to-face human gatherings.
How can rituals help organizations during periods of uncertainty?
I’ve now spent ten years talking about how individuals, groups, teams, and leaders, especially, respond to times of transition and change. There are a couple of takeaways that I have.
Number one, we have to normalize change. The essential way to frame this is that how we look at the world affects how we look at our lives and the groups that make up our lives. In the ancient world, they didn’t have linear time. They thought that life and time worked in a cycle.
It was the Industrial Revolution that introduced the idea of linear time. What was happening during the Industrial Revolution? You have factories, you have conveyor belts, assembly lines. All through the 20th century, the great ideas were linear constructs.
Freud had psychosexual stages. Piaget had childhood development stages. Erikson had the eight stages of moral development. There was also the hero’s journey: the five stages of grief. They were all linear constructs, since that’s how we understood the world.
Now, we’ve changed how we understand the world and the economy. We know we lived in a networked, interconnected economy and global society where change comes at us from all sides. We’ve neglected to realize that we also spend half of our adult lives in periods of transition or change, as do our organizations.
First, the most important thing to do is to realize that leaders who use language that talks about this change are normalizing it. The way we’ve talked about change for almost a generation is that it’s an aberration and that we have to practice grit and resilience to get through it.
That normalizes the stable times and stigmatizes the unstable times. We have to flip that. We have to say that change is just as normal as stability; therefore, change is to be expected. Second, in these times, we have to say that we’re all not going to worry and stress about change in an isolated way.
If you go back to before the pandemic, in many corporations the department that was designed to deal with employee mental health and instability was relegated to a windowless room down in the basement next to the incinerator.
In the last five years alone, every corporation has elevated this to a much more regular part and made it part of every conversation because if you don’t make time for it, it will take over every conversation.
But in fact, it can’t take over every conversation because the business still needs to function. So, establish top-down leadership, then normalize times of change and find ways to experience it. Next, focus on the culture of the group.
Every community, every team has a group keeper. What I have been able to identify, and what I’ve been thinking about, almost exclusively now for three years, is that there is a kind of formula, an easy-to-understand way of how to make gatherings that work.
A huge part of ritual—the purpose—is to resolve conflict, get it onto the table. And what these group experiences do—from the rituals we do on retreat and in our team meetings, to the way we communicate in a group—is show that the group is important.
And as much time as we spend on our personal care, we have to spend just as much on the care of the group. Top-down leadership change is normal. Spend time focusing on the health of the group.
Was there anything that surprised you in your research, or while writing the book, or the response to it?
The number one thing that surprised me while working on the book is the universality of how successful gatherings unfold and how people think about, plan, and experience them.
I was in South Africa, at a traditional bride price negotiation. It ended with a traditional wedding and what they called a “white wedding,” a Western-style wedding, on the same day. And that day began with the family waking up, taking a home-brewed beer, and pouring it, as an honor to the ancestors, at the base of a tree.
Six months later, I was in Chile, in the Andes Mountains, visiting the Mapuche tribe and a traditional healer. And before he welcomed me into a sacred space to have a conversation about rituals, he took a home-brewed beer and poured it at the base of a tree.
The number one thing that surprised me while working on the book is the universality of how successful gatherings unfold and how people think about, plan, and experience them.
These things were not planned. The internet did not communicate this idea. This has happened before, a universal idea.
It’s a reminder that through the internet, we have access to so many different cultures. So what I tried to do, in the book, is to gather and promulgate what I call a “universal blueprint” of human togetherness. For example, these are the five things you need to do to have a successful gathering. And the fact that it’s universal—from weddings to funerals, from mom proms to pet funerals—is a reminder that this is the oldest thing that we’ve done. This was the original algorithm that made us human. And we can be human again, by returning to what we know that has worked for 300,000 years.
If readers could take away just one idea from this book, what should it be?
As mentioned, everyone is feeling some type of existential homesickness. We have been yanked from the basic feeling of being safe, secure, and together, and that sense of belonging and purpose and meaning in our lives that comes from being around other people.
This is the universal feeling. And this is the moment that we all have to meet. So what I’d like to do in drawing from the experience that I’ve had of traveling around the world for three years, going to events in every imaginable corner of the world—from the major cities of Rome, Paris, and New York, to the most isolated islands on the planet, like Easter Island in the middle of the Pacific—is to show there is a craving now to turn back from our screens and reestablish the elemental part of being human. And that is gathering together in times of change, to meet the moment with purpose and connection.
There are millions of opportunities every day, in this country and around the world, to remake the connections and strengthen the backbone of what it means to be alive.
So if you come on this journey with me, you’re going to see some incredible places, you’re going to attend some remarkable rituals that will blow your mind, you’re going to meet a lot of ritual designers who think about this, and you’re going to say to yourself, “You know what I want?”
The number one reaction people have had to this book is: “I want to have a gathering. I want to invite people over. I want to do it,” whether for a joyful occasion like a graduation or a wedding or a baby naming, or a mournful occasion, such as the loss of a job, the loss of a loved one, or the loss of a pet.
There are millions of opportunities every day, in this country and around the world, to remake the connections and strengthen the backbone of what it means to be alive. If we take those opportunities, we can make ourselves happier, and everyone in our groups, neighborhoods, businesses, and teams happier, too. We can remake the world.
