Obligations Give us a Sense of Purpose/Meaning

In college I had a pretty snarky (and kind of dreamy!) teacher in the Classics department who taught Religion in the Pagan World. Once, we were discussing ritual and its significance etc. He said that ritual is powerful because having obligations provides the necessary illusion that our lives matter. I think the gist was that religious ritual makes us matter by connecting our behavior to the harvest or the rain or something. Consequence for my actions, any consequence at all, means that I am significant, that I have impact. It’s nice. Maybe our modern expression of ritual is our habits or obligations. As a very minor example, I shower once in a while because the consequence of my stinkiness is to offend others’ sensibilities. My smelly armpits have impact on the world. Creating the obligation of showering reflects my belief that my participation in society, and the manner of my participation, matters.

Everything we do is like this. Tidying up. Calling our parents. Feeding the cat. We need obligations to feel as though we matter. Which, as you may have guessed, I am pretty sure we don’t. We don’t “matter” to anything. But this is also nice. It means that I can go ahead and behave in ways that make me feel as though I matter, knowing that it is merely a balm against the chafing of my own insignificance, because my insignificance is comforting, too – it means that “consequence” for my actions can remain somewhat abstract. It doesn’t really matter if I am the stinky person in the world on any particular day. I don’t matter. Anyone taking offense at my stinkiness would be trying to create their own sense of significance in the world in opposition to me through our handy tool of disapproval – which is just another expression of obligation (this would go something like this: “I oblige myself to be un-stinky, and to give meaning to this obligation, I must therefore disapprove of the opposite expression – stinkiness – and therefore reaffirm the credibility of my showering ritual”). So anyway I can do my stuff to make me feel significant and let the rest roll off my back.

I’ve just been rolling this idea around my head a little bit and wanted to see where it went. We’ll see.