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Making Meaning With Small Actions

2026-02-16 · 12:03 UTC ·Dan Ariely from Dan Ariely Looks at Life ·4 min read

Brief

Dan Ariely’s short essay frames rituals as a mechanism for increasing attention and meaning in everyday life, in contrast to habits, which he defines as repeated behaviors optimized for low attention and automatic execution. Using a morning espresso ritual as his central example, he describes a sequence of intentional steps—washing beans, grinding them, and smelling the brew—that turns a routine act into a focused experience. He argues that rituals work by slowing people down, isolating an activity from multitasking, and encouraging savoring, which in turn makes moments more memorable. Ariely extends the idea to wine consumption, where specialized glassware and ceremonial behaviors shape perception and enjoyment. His broader claim is that modern life contains too many unnoticed moments; adding rituals or smaller ritualized elements to selected activities can help people remember and appreciate them more fully. The piece is reflective and prescriptive rather than empirical, offering behavioral framing without new data or experiments.

Why it matters

Dan Ariely argues in a 949-word Substack post published on 2026-02-16 that rituals, unlike habits, can make ordinary repeated actions feel more meaningful.

Key details

  • Ariely distinguishes habits from rituals by attention: habits automate repeated behavior and reduce cognitive effort, while rituals involve repeating an action with deliberate focus, slowing down, and savoring the experience.
  • His main example is a morning espresso ritual—washing beans, grinding them, and smelling the coffee during brewing—which he presents as a dedicated, non-multitasked activity rather than an efficiency-oriented routine.
  • He cites wine drinking as a common secular ritual, noting that tools and sequence matter: special glasses, swirling, looking, and smelling change the subjective experience compared with drinking the same wine casually from a beaker next to a laptop.
  • Ariely’s practical recommendation is to identify two or three parts of life to “accentuate” with either full rituals or “mini rituals,” with the goal of improving memory, attention, and enjoyment of everyday moments.
Cleaned source text

title: Making Meaning With Small Actions

author: Dan Ariely from Dan Ariely Looks at Life

content_type: newsletter

publication: substack.com

published: 2026-02-16T12:03:48+00:00

source_url: gmail://19c665aa9bd8665c

word_count: 949

Watch now (5 mins) | Everyday ritual

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Making Meaning With Small Actions

Everyday ritual

Dan Ariely

Feb 16

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Today I’d like to say something in favor of rituals. This is my morning espresso—my morning espresso ritual. Now, let’s think about what rituals do. Sometimes people think about rituals in the same category as habits, but that’s not the case at all. Now, there are some similarities, but the differences are more important than the similarities. A habit is about doing something with paying much attention to it. Consider when you drive home, you just drive home without thinking about which traffic lights to stop at and so on. Habits are a way for our mind to pay less attention to doing things in a more automated way. Habits are all about repeated behavior that demands less attention, and therefore they are more likely to happen.

Rituals are different. If I think about this morning coffee, I stood there, I washed the beans, ground them, I smelled it as it went through the espresso machine. Usually I don’t talk while I do my morning coffee ritual, but the ritual is the opposite in some way. Yes, it is an action that we are guaranteed to do repeatedly but it’s more likely that we’ll do the same activity over and over, and pay more attention instead of paying less attention. Rituals are about slowing down, it’s about savoring, and about making the activity unique.

When I do my morning coffee ritual, I don’t do it while doing other things at the same time. Yes, I think about some other things, but it’s the time dedicated to that coffee. By the way, I think that the best ritual we’ve come up with, the most common one, outside of religion, is drinking wine. We have special glasses, we swirl them, we look at the wine, we smell, we do lots of things, right? You could drink a wonderful glass of wine next to your laptop from a beaker, and you would not experience it in any positive way. But if you slow down, think about it, pay attention, focus—that’s what the ritual is for.

Rituals are a way to think about repeated consumption, but in a way that draws attention. The reason I’m saying all of this is that I think that we need more of these. So, if I ask you what you remember from yesterday? Odds are that you wouldn’t remember much. What a shame. What a shame that we didn’t always take the wonderful moments from yesterday and savor them and pay attention to them and kind of remember them in a bigger way. Rituals help us to focus on something, pay attention to it, and make it a bigger part of our lives. Habits, make a moment smaller and we don’t pay attention to them as much.

So I think we need more rituals, and I think we need to do the rituals better by focusing on them more. I think we also need to take the idea of rituals and make them have an even larger impact on our life. Maybe you don’t create a full ritual from something, but what else would you like to pay more attention to? What would you like to think about more? To remember more? To pay more attention to some elements and not others? That’s really the role of rituals. Think about two or three things in your life that you want to accentuate, that you want to make bigger, that you want to pay more attention to, slow down and experience in a better way. Try to either make a full ritual out of them. If not, then make a mini ritual with some benefit. So, to more rituals, to paying more attention, to slowing down, and enjoying the things that we’re doing, anyway, slightly more.

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