The Power of Traditions

Why traditions matter, why they fade, and how to create them.

Post summary

• Holiday traditions improve our mental and physical health, forge social bonds and trust, and teach us essential lessons about being human.

• Today we’re diving into a brilliant scientific work on traditions—why traditions make us and mend us, and how we can build them. We’ll cover:

  • Four reasons why traditions are so powerful for human wellbeing.

  • Why traditions die (six reasons).

  • Why you should create new traditions when old ones die.

  • Three rules you must follow to create a successful new tradition.

• I’ll also tell a story about one of my family’s ridiculous holiday traditions, what I gained from it, and the lessons I learned after it faded.

Housekeeping

• Full access post is free to all subscribers. If you want full access to all three weekly Two Percent posts and their audio/podcast versions, become a Member below. Members save more time and money than the price of Membership.

• Need a last-minute gift? Gift Two Percent.

• ICYMI:

  • On Wednesday, we covered the 15 best comments on Two Percent and my responses/answers. This quarterly series seems to be becoming a favorite among many Members.

  • On Friday, we covered a scientific prescription to run faster, an epic soup recipe, my thoughts on optimization, seed oils and cancer, and more.

• Heads up: We won’t be sending a post or podcast on Wednesday. Enjoy your holiday.

Audio/podcast edition

• Listen to this post on your preferred podcast player here.

The post

On the evening of December 24th from 1986 to 2020, I did the same thing: I played bingo. I’m talking hours of highly competitive bingo.

My extended family—anywhere from 12 to 25 of us depending on the year—gathered at my aunt Shauna’s every Christmas Eve. After dinner, we’d clear the table of soup bowls and pile it high with cheap but useful wrapped prizes. Each person would carefully select a bingo card.

My grandmother would take to a tall stool in the corner of the room, overlooking the table, and deliver a short speech.

“Welcome to Nana’s bingo parlor. Don’t clear your cards after someone gets a bingo—we play until I say we’ve had enough bingos. Then, when I say, you can clear your cards and we’ll start again—only when I say. If you get bingo, you can choose a prize off of the table or steal a prize won by another player. And NO CHEATING.”

At “NO CHEATING” she’d eye certain family members.

Then she’d roll the bingo hopper and call numbers—B-11, N-44, O-73, I-19.

I recall family squabbles for items like clips that close chip bags, magnetic to-do note pads that attach to a refrigerator, dental floss, and more.

There were particularly historic showdowns, like in 1994 when my cousin Jena and I went back and forth perhaps 15 times—stealing, losing, and re-stealing—a forest green, maroon, and mustard yellow padded Trapper Keeper binder. Jena won. The loss crushed my young holiday spirit.

The next day at Christmas, Jena wrapped the Trapper Keeper and gave it to me as a gift. Everyone cried. The Trapper Keeper still exists somewhere in our family.

Eventually my grandparents passed away, and the family Christmas Eve bingo tradition went with them. Time happens. Traditions die.

I miss bingo.

I told you all that to tell you this: There are many hidden powers in tradition. Traditions make us and mend us—and they’re worth maintaining and bolstering and, when they eventually die, creating.

The power of tradition

In his book How Traditions Live and Die, the scholar Oliver Morin explains that traditions exist throughout the animal kingdom.

For example, many animals have courting, mating, or migrating “traditions.” For example, elk bugle and fight during the rut. Salmon move from freshwater to saltwater and back to spawn.

But humans have more, varied, elaborate traditions than any other species. Our traditions are unique because they help create our culture¹ worldwide and within nations, states, towns, families, and more.

And they’re ancient. Morin explains that traditions rose many millennia ago to encode “hidden” knowledge that helped us survive and thrive.

Still today, traditions give us vital information that allows us to live better and connect to something larger than ourselves—and that vastly improves our health and well-being.

Morin argues traditions give humans psychological, social, and cognitive benefits. For example, he says traditions do the following:

• Help us remember and learn essential cultural knowledge.
  Traditions provide stories, vivid imagery, and memories of those we love and admire. This transmits information about who we want to be and how we want to behave.

  • Take my family’s bingo tradition. There’s a good reason my grandmother and not a young cousin ran the show at bingo: We’re signaling that elders have wisdom and leadership qualities.
    My best memories of my grandmother are from those bingo games—she was a hilarious and fun-but-firm leader. I admired those qualities and tried to mimic them.

• They build social bonds and group identity.
  Traditions generate a sense of belongingness to groups and strengthen in-group loyalty and cooperation. By participating in the same traditions, we agree that we’re part of the same group and “in it together.”

  • Christmas Eve bingo is a weird tradition. But it was my family and I’s “thing.” By participating in bingo, we all bonded and staked a claim in our unique tribe. When Leah first played bingo with us, it was her sort of “official” welcome to the family.

• They give us stability.
  Life is uncertain and chaotic. But traditions give us a sense of order, predictability, and group reliance. This helps us feel more in control, less anxious, and more connected to a larger social and historical narrative.

  • As I went through the awkwardness of jr. high, the lawlessness of high school, and the adriftness of moving out of state for college, holiday bingo reminded me that I had a core group who accepted me and would take me in no matter what.

• They transmit social norms and rules.
  Traditions are similar year to year for a good reason: They help us pass down critical values.

  • NO CHEATING was a valuable lesson that went far beyond my family’s bingo table. And any alterations in how we played bingo had to be voted on by the larger group, teaching us that everyone’s opinion counted and that we all must cooperate.

Why traditions die

Traditions die for eight different reasons, according to Morin. To fire off a few:

• A new technology could make a tradition irrelevant.
  Think of an ancient tradition of taking young people hunting for food. The act becomes far less relevant and useful in a world of grocery stores.

• They face a cognitive mismatch, becoming hard to remember or boring.
  Think of younger generations who stop a religious tradition their great grandparents practiced because it’s too complex and arduous in a time of television and TikTok.

• They get outlawed.
  This is less common today, especially in the context of the traditions we’re talking about. But, for example, in the 19th century, the U.S. government banned the Ghost Dance, a Native American spiritual tradition. The dance’s principal idea was that “the spirits of the dead would be raised, the buffalo would return, and European settlers would be driven away.” The U.S. government banned the Ghost Dance in the late 1800s.

As for my family’s bingo tradition, it died for three of Morin’s eight reasons:

1. It had a high cost.
   Traditions often die when they become costly and difficult to maintain.
   With my grandparents no longer around as an anchor and all the grandkids growing up and having spouses and kids, it became challenging for our now giant family to gather in one location.

2. It suffered from cultural disruption.
   This means that forces break cultural continuity.
   In my family’s case, many of us moved to different locations nationwide. Maintaining the tradition began to require an overwhelming amount of travel.

3. It faced competition.
   This means new traditions begin to overtake older ones.
   As the generations of my family unrolled, some sects of the family grew—bringing in more spouses and kids—and those sects of the family decided it was time to create their own Christmas Eve traditions.

Let’s focus on that third point.

I like this point because it doesn’t suggest a dead end to traditions. It suggests that when one tradition dies, we can start another.

How to start a new tradition

Let’s return to Oliver Morin’s research. He suggested three rules to follow when starting a new tradition:

1. It should incorporate your senses: Give it vivid sensory details like certain music, colors, locations, and foods.

2. It should be emotionally charged: Make it exciting, joyous, fun, and even funny. I.e., Memorable.

3. It should have a story: People remember events that are tied to a story incorporating larger values.

And so it was, the year after Christmas Eve Bingo faded, Leah, my mom, and I went to our favorite Vietnamese restaurant in Las Vegas.

The food at the restaurant is the best (I refuse to offer its name until I’ve gone to war with you).

But the food was only part of it. The place is a quirky, hole-in-the-wall joint. It blasts bizarre pop music and is open 22 hours a day (?). I’d become great friends with the owner, who migrated from Vietnam as a kid. (We bonded over our childhood love of professional wrestling.)

After dinner at the restaurant, we returned to our home to play ridiculous games like Cards Against Humanity and Incohearent, where we scream obscenities and toss around inappropriate ideas.

The whole night was weird. But that’s just like us: offbeat, untraditional, fun, and strange.

We did it again the next year. And the next. And a tradition was born.

The night “worked” as a tradition because it hit all three of Morin’s rules around forming traditions.

• It incorporated vivid sensory details of place and food.

• It was joyous and funny.

• And it highlighted the story of us and what we stand for and value: absurdity and hilarity over conformity and formality.

We add more people to the tradition every year. This year, it’ll be me, Leah, my mom, one of mom’s friends who’d otherwise be alone, and my sister and brother in law and their toddler².

The lesson here, if there is one, is that you should lean into your traditions. Savor them. Consider their bigger meaning, narratives, and the larger lessons about living you get from them.

And when they eventually die, start over again and make the next one yours.

Have fun, don’t die, and when I say, you can clear your bingo cards and we’ll start again—only when I say.

-Michael

Partnered with GOREWEAR

GOREWEAR designs endurance gear for Two Percenters. Their products are tailored for athletes and optimized to help us perform in any weather. GOREWEAR leverages the most cutting edge science and works—no matter how hard we train or what Earth throws at us. Use code EASTER for 30% off your next order. Discover more at www.gorewear.com.

Partnered with Momentous

Momentous made me feel good about supplements again. Over 150 professional and collegiate sports teams and the US Military trust their products, thanks to the company’s rigorous science and testing. I don’t have the time or desire to cook perfectly balanced meals that give me all the necessary nutrients and protein I need (let’s face it, few of us do!). So I use their Recovery protein during hard workouts; essential multivitamin to cover my bases; creatine because it’s associated with all sorts of great things; and Fuel on my longest endurance workouts on 100+ degree days here in the desert (because Rule 2: Don’t die). And I also love (love!) that Momentous is researching and developing women-specific performance supplements.

**Use discount code EASTER for 15% off.**

1. The OED defines culture as “The distinctive ideas, customs, social behaviour, products, or way of life of a particular nation, society, people, or period. Hence: a society or group characterized by such customs, etc.”

2. The game-time obscenities will wait until after the toddler’s bedtime.