We often think freedom means having fewer things that bind us.


Fewer traditions. Fewer obligations. Fewer fixed roles.


Contemporary people want to choose who we are, change our minds, reinvent ourselves, move whenever we want. And there is something genuinely liberating in that. But Byung-Chul Han asks us to notice what may disappear along with those constraints.


In The Disappearance of Rituals, Han argues that rituals once gave life a kind of shape. A ritual is not simply something people repeat because we humans are conservative or afraid of change. We are eating together, greeting one another in a particular way, commemorating the dead, celebrating a season, gathering at the same place, and repeating a shared ceremony. These actions create continuity. They tell us that this moment is connected to another moment, that I am connected to other people, and that not everything has to be invented again from the absolute zero.


Modern life works different. We are encouraged to move faster, consume more, produce more, update ourselves and constantly become something new. Previous “I think, therefore, I am” is changed to “I buy, therefore, I am”. Even identity becomes a project. Relationships can begin to look replaceable. Places become temporary. Experiences become content. We are increasingly asked to manage, display and optimize our lives.


The strange result is that we have more individual freedom while losing some of the structures that made freedom meaningful.


Rituals place limits around life. They tell us when to stop working, eat together, remember, mourn, and celebrate as well as if this person deserves our attention. The point is not necessarily that the ritual is efficient. In fact, rituals are often very inefficient. Their value lies precisely in refusing to treat every minute according to productivity.


Without such shared forms, life can become an endless succession of moments. New purchase. New message. New job. New relationship. New identity. New outrage. New aspiration. Nothing necessarily stays long enough to become part of a common world.

This does not mean that old rituals were always good. Rituals can preserve hierarchy, exclusion, patriarchy and obedience. Some deserve to disappear. The real question is therefore not whether we should return to tradition but what kinds of shared practices do we need so that freedom does not become isolation?


Perhaps modern societies need forms of continuity that can survive change. We may need rituals consciously created rather than merely inherit. Ways of eating together, remembering together, grieving together, celebrating together, and so on.


A society cannot live entirely through choices made by isolated individuals. It is too absurd. Belonging is not always created not by asking, “What do I want now?” but by knowing that, at certain moments, are not lonely apes and certain repeated acts have "meanings" to us.