I Refused The Ritual, Then Invented My Own

We were on holiday, and because holidays are apparently where good judgment goes to evaporate, I had a bit of alcohol the night before.

I do not react especially well to alcohol anymore, so the next day had that slightly haunted quality.

Not disaster.

Just low-grade human malfunction.

Anyway, we ended up on a long journey through Bali, moving from one place to another, and somewhere in the middle of this day we went to a temple.

At the temple there was a purification ritual.

The idea was simple enough. You get semi-naked, wear the temple cloths, go into a pond fed by mountain water, and submerge yourself. Spiritually, symbolically, culturally, there was meaning in it.

Physically, there were fish.

Lots of fish.

Fish around your legs. Fish in the same water as everyone else. Fish doing fish things, which I assume are not aligned with modern hygiene protocols.

My wife went in.

Other people went in.

I stood my ground.

There is a version of this story where I am brave and principled. There is another version where I am just a slightly eccentric man refusing to get into a bowl of dirty fish.

Both are probably true.

The second one is funnier.

Afterwards, I did what any spiritually mature person would do.

I went on AI to make myself feel better.

I started asking why people do these things. Why a ritual called purification could involve standing in a pond full of fish and strangers. Scientifically, it felt less like purification and more like the opposite of purification.

Which made me feel correct.

And then, annoyingly, the thought kept going.

Because maybe the point was never hygiene. Maybe it was surrender. Maybe it was belonging. Maybe it was a way of saying, “I am part of this old strange thing, and I will let the water and the story do something to me.”

I still did not want the fish water.

But I could see the machinery a bit more clearly.

Humans are not really walking around looking for clean facts. We are looking for stories strong enough to live inside. We need reasons. We need rituals. We need some frame around the chaos so we do not have to stare directly at the fact that nobody really knows what is going on.

The funny part is that I rejected the temple ritual, then immediately invented my own.

My ritual was not water and fish.

It was AI, first principles, philosophy, nihilism, optimistic nihilism, and a little private courtroom where I could prove to myself that I was not simply the weird man outside the pond.

I had refused one belief system and built another one on my phone.

That is very human, unfortunately.

The deeper I went, the more relaxing it became. Not because I found the answer, but because I remembered there probably is not one. Or at least, not one that fits neatly in my hungover little head.

Everyone is ignorant.

Not as an insult. Just as a condition.

And obviously, I am ignorant too.

Famous people are ignorant. Spiritual people are ignorant. Scientific people are ignorant. People in fish ponds are ignorant. People outside fish ponds are also ignorant, but slightly drier.

There is something relieving about that.

Maybe the best we can do is notice our stories while we are inside them. The temple has its story. Science has its story. AI has its story. “Optimistic nihilism” is a story too, even if it sounds like a clever label you discover after too much scrolling.

And maybe that is fine.

Maybe humans are just paranoid, contradictory, connection-seeking creatures who cannot sit with chaos for very long. So we build rituals. We build meanings. We build philosophies. We build little excuses for why we did or did not get into the pond.

I did not get purified that day.

At least not in the official way.

But I did catch myself performing a different ritual afterwards. One where I tried to wash off embarrassment with analysis.

Same impulse.

Less fish.