Gender Jumper

I've absorbed a lot of concepts over the past few years about how significant the actions of belonging are to all kinds of communal activities, from religious worship to concerts to fandoms to family to professional athleticism... In many of these contexts (including religion), the acts of participation become ritual, and those rituals are as important (or sometimes more important) than the actual tenets of faith, understanding of art, or agreement between community members.

As someone who grew up with zero religion, a weak sense of family, and a strong sense of finding my own way, I've rarely had use for ritual. ( Ritual thinkies... )

Which raises questions: can those of us who have spent most of our lives mostly adrift from community ties solidify our ties when we do find them through some kind of ritual. Is it ethical to do so? Is it ethical NOT to? If we pursued this line of inquiry further, would it be more ethical to make up a meaning or borrow one, to turn meaning-making into the meaning, or to eschew meaning altogether, and how would that affect the hold the ritual keeps on participants?

(I guess I need to supply a theoretical foundation here, but the best I can offer is my own personal brand of "life-hacking": recognize the way the brain works and leverage that knowledge in the direction of becoming the person you most want to be.)