Welcome to Play Fool, a newsletter about the games we play and the games which play us. This is a short, reflective and personal piece - I’m calling it a ‘Sidenote.’ Let’s see if it sticks. As always, if you enjoy it, please consider sharing and subscribing.
There was some time between my most recent newsletter (Escaping the Mind Palace) and the one which preceded it (Animal Teachers). Although I try to publish fortnightly, I don’t put myself under any great pressure to do so. The internet, in general, is a place where we could all benefit from speaking a great deal less. So, my commitment is to only publish when I have something to say which I think may be worth hearing.
That said, I also bought an apartment, and this has been a significant drag on my time, energy, and sleep—to the detriment of Play Fool and literally anything discretionary with my time.
I moved in the day after my birthday, and one of the ironic refrains I developed during the whole process was that I expected more ritual, or at least some pomp, to accompany my move. The official handover took place without me — a ‘PEXA call’ was made between my conveyancer (who I never met) and another conveyancer, creating three or four layers of legalese between myself and whoever used to own this apartment. The handover of the keys was managed by a representative from the agency, and ten minutes after her arrival I was standing in an empty apartment with a bottle of plastic-wrapped champagne, alone, with a weekend-long move ahead of me.
I had a fist-sized hole in my expectations that I dimly wished would be full of streamers and party poppers, or perhaps a giant cake. Instead, the move was all work and no play. The first night in my new apartment was entirely uneventful, aside from the time I spent trying to ignore the low-frequency groan of my new downstairs neighbours having sex. So it goes. The universe continues its tragicomic character without regard for its minor performers.
Of course, I made my own small rituals as best I could. I had a few friends over the week after. Three weeks later did I finally pop the champagne provided by the real estate agent over dinner with my family. As I write this, I have been here over a month, and my new home is basically my new normal.
None of this, of course, is surprising to us in the deritualised — or even sacrilegious — West. Who am I to expect any significant life changes from owning a home, aside from a few more comforts and a significantly greater debt? Contemporary life has lost its ritual and mythic elements like an archipelago disappearing beneath a rising sea. All that remains above the swallowing tides of rationality and liberalism are weddings and funerals, and even there water laps hungrily at the shore. People are really quite proud of themselves these days if they get married at a registry office under the augur of a rented celebrant.
My perspective is that rites and rituals are deeply important, and we forgo them at our own expense. I’m not a conservative — I acknowledge many of our old rituals were broken or problematic. I’m certainly not arguing for big, ostentatious white weddings where a father exchanges his daughter like chattel at a market. I simply think that the solution to 'poor rituals' isn’t 'no rituals.' As the old saying goes, perhaps we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Or, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi put it1:
Rituals… serve to separate celebrants from the concerns of everyday life, and focus their minds on the event to be enacted.
When we abandon a ritual, we do so because we falsely believe that something really is just a simple, logical process and that an individual can common-sense their way through it. In a deritualised society, marriage is just love plus a tax break. Any free-loving couple can decide whether or not to get married using a SWOT analysis and a Casio calculator. If they choose to have a wedding, good for them — but it’s really just a party with their friends, like a sentence ending in an exclamation mark rather than a full stop.
If you decide to buy a home, what constitutes advice is little more than a suite of calculators and legal guidebooks — all of which reduce the house to an asset, rather than a place to be inhabited. It doesn’t help that most of this advice is produced by people with a vested interest in people buying houses. The closest you get to ethical advice when buying a house is the admonition to balance desires (which are presumed to be infinite) and means. This is the kind of the advice we give to children who want a snack before dinner. Housing advice also has a cruel edge. It alerts you to all the possible ways in which you might be exploited. All of this utility-maximising Machiavellianism is something we mistake as “common sense,” and it means that housing advice becomes a recipe for high blood pressure and disappointment.
An individual cannot create rituals, which are always steeped in communities and traditions. What the individual can do, however, is notice where a ritual might be needed — where it finds itself caught in loops and spirals, the eddies of a mind hell-bent on a certain course. These loops and spirals are opportunities to play, to question the linear logic of calculators and “common sense.” This kind of playful unpacking is a precondition for newer and better rituals, a point made by Dutch Anthropologist Johan Huizinga2:
Gradually the significance of a sacred act permeates the playing. Ritual grafts itself upon it; but the primary thing is and remains play.
So, while I didn’t have rituals to help me navigate my apartment purchase, I did have playful questions. These questions might open a space where — in the future — useful rituals can exist.
I doubt you, reader, are buying a house any time soon. If you do, however, here are ten questions I found helpful before deciding to buy mine. If you would like to establish a ritual around them, I suggest discussing them with a friend over a cup of coffee. I suspect they will be more useful to you than a mortgage calculator.
In what ways can assets become liabilities?
In what ways can liabilities become assets?
What kinds of things will owning a home incline me to notice?
What kinds of habits will owning a home instil in me?
What does my desire to buy a home tell me about my implicit beliefs about the future?
What kinds of financial, emotional and relational investments in modernity will owning a home ask of me? Of these investments, which can I accept, which can I refuse, and which must I learn to live with?
What does my desire for a home suggest about who I want to become? What desires for personal transformation might I be projecting onto home ownership, and are there other or better ways to become that person?
If I were less addicted to pleasure, comfort, convenience, status, surety, and coherence, would I still want a home?
Is capital ownership a good defense strategy against an uncertain future? What other personal, affective, and relational investments and disinvestments can I make to support myself and those I care about to navigate this uncertain future with discernment, humility, humour and care?
Will owning a home help me feel at home?
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1971), Johan Huizinga.