Design, or Be Designed

Your phone designed your morning before you woke up. Here is how to take it back, one ritual at a time. No app, no guru, no subscription.

You probably woke up inside someone else's ritual this morning.

Before your feet hit the floor, before a single conscious thought had formed, your hand found your phone and your thumb opened the same three apps in the same order it opened them yesterday. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. It happens in the same place, at the same threshold of the day, every single day. By any honest definition, that is a ritual. You just did not design it. Instagram did, and it designed it for a couple of billion of us at once.

6:59

Tuesday, before you were really awake

IG

Instagram · now

14 people you half know reacted to a photo you have not seen yet

WA

WhatsApp · 3 new

Mum, the group chat, and someone you owe a reply from Sunday

✉

Mail · 9:41pm

The email you will reread nervously the second you wake up

◷

Screen Time · weekly report

Up 14%. Most of it before breakfast.

I have spent years fascinated by rituals, ancient and modern, sacred and secular, the solo morning candle and the roar of a stadium. And I keep landing on one uncomfortable idea: you are either designing your rituals, or being designed by them. There is no neutral setting. That is the small-stakes version, the phone on the nightstand. The high-stakes version is the one you are now building with AI, because a ritual is how you train the one thing AI quietly takes from you: your ability to be with yourself, and with other people. This essay is about taking the pen back.

You are either designing your rituals, or being designed by them. There is no neutral setting.

What a ritual actually is

Let me strip the word back, because "ritual" makes people picture incense and robes, and that is the smallest part of it. A ritual is a sequence of actions with an intention, and a shape: a beginning, a transition, and an end. That is it. A birthday moves you from twenty to twenty-one with the intention of celebrating a life. A funeral moves us from presence to absence with the intention of honouring one. Lighting a candle before you sit down to think moves you from the noise of the day into a quiet where you can actually hear yourself.

The magic word is intention. Without it we are just going through the motions: a massage can leave you tense, a meal can taste of nothing. Add intention and the same actions come alive. It is the whole difference between a ritual and a habit, and it is thinner than you think. Brush your teeth on autopilot and it is a habit; do it looking yourself in the eye, thanking your body for the day ahead, and the same two minutes become a small act of care. The gesture is identical. The intention is everything. This is why the anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas can call rituals "cultural technologies," and why the psychologist Michael Norton finds they turn an experience "from black and white to technicolor."

There is a clean kit for making one on purpose, five elements set out by the Stanford ritual designer Kursat Ozenc.

I learned this by accident, in a meeting room. Told to run my first ever design sprint, a brainstorm for twenty people I barely knew, I knew everyone would arrive from a different meeting, away with the fairies. So instead of opening with the agenda, I surprised them: an animated slide, a track nobody expected, then a few quick questions. Did they know the goal of the meeting? The number one rule of brainstorming? The most offensive words you can say in one ("no, but" and "that's too...")? They were eating out of my hand. I was not running a meeting. I was designing a ritual to carry a distracted room across a threshold into one shared, open, non-judgemental mind.

Here is the part that took me longest to name: if you design anything for humans to use, you are a ritual designer. You are not crafting pixels or screens or user journeys. You are crafting behaviours and habits, frames around moments, repeated until they become part of a person. Every product manager, every app, every feed is in the ritual business, whether they admit it or not.

We gave our rituals away

Which brings me back to your phone. Google did not just build a way to find information. It built a reflex: look up anything you do not immediately know, rather than sitting in the discomfort of not-knowing long enough to think your own way toward an answer. Pinterest taught us to pick from other people's minds instead of digging into our own. These are extraordinary pieces of design. They are also rituals none of us consciously agreed to, tuned for a compound effect that serves the metric on the designer's dashboard, not the shape of your life.

So I have started asking one question of anything that wants a daily place in my life:

What is the positive, or negative, compound effect of this, as a habit, over ten years?

It is a blunt little question, and most of what I do on reflex does not survive it. Now put AI into that frame.

For the first time, the thing designing our rituals can also fake the relationship the ritual was meant to build. A morning practice used to point you back at yourself, to your own inner counsel, the thing Casper ter Kuile calls "connection to self", and then outward, to other people and to something larger than you. AI offers a shortcut: a voice that always answers and never needs anything back. It will stand in for the friend, the journal, the walk where you would work it out. Lately it stands in for the thinking too, and that is the one that scares me.

I only clocked it once I started counting. I leave the chicken out too long and, instead of ringing my mum, I ask the LLM whether it is still safe to eat. I press send on an email, feel that small lurch, and ask it to reread the thread and tell me whether I got the date wrong. I feel a bit funny and ask it to be my doctor. Not one of those went to a friend, a doctor, my mum or my partner. They all went to the same quiet box.

A lot of that is harmless, and honestly a bit brilliant. But watch where it creeps. After a meeting I will pull up my Granola notes and ask the AI how well I did, when I could ask the colleague who was actually in the room. And after a hard conversation with my husband, a real one, I have sat and typed out here is what I think, here is what he thinks, how do I say my side in a way he can actually hear.

Notice the drift. The chicken is a lookup. The last two are relationships. When I route my own reflection and my own repair through the machine, the machine gets the practice, and my colleague and my husband and I do not. That is the muscle quietly wasting while I am not looking.

Me, 10:47pm, instead of walking downstairs

ok so my husband and I just had a fight

here is what I think. here is what he thinks.

how do I say my side so he can actually hear it?

Of course. Here is a gentle, non-defensive way to open that conversation…

That is the real stake, and it is not "screens are bad." It is that the capacities most at risk are relational ones: the ability to be alone with yourself, to tolerate another person's difference, to belong to a group, to feel your reciprocity with the living world. Call it relational intelligence. It is the one thing AI cannot do for us without, in the doing, taking it from us.

You cannot outsource your relationship with yourself and still have one.

Ritual is how relational intelligence is trained

So here is my claim, plainly. As AI automates cognition and even companionship, relational intelligence becomes the scarce, irreducibly human capacity. And ritual is its training ground.

The evidence is not soft. Norton and Gino showed, in controlled experiments, that rituals measurably reduce grief, even for people who do not believe in them, by restoring a felt sense of control. And Priya Parker has spent a career proving that a gathering built on real intention creates belonging, while one on autopilot creates distance.

There is a harder-nosed reason to care, too, and it comes from the designer Alastair Somerville, working with the Design Council's systemic design framework. As design scales from a single person all the way up to the planet, he noticed, the principles go missing: faced with a deadline, teams keep the convenient tools and quietly drop the ethical and ecological commitments the moment they feel inconvenient. His answer is ritual, the container that holds ethics and responsibility in place while everything else races ahead. That is not a wellness nicety. It is governance, and at the scale we are now building AI, "the principles go missing" is close to the whole risk.

The oldest cultures already knew this. Robin Wall Kimmerer, in Braiding Sweetgrass, and Adah Parris, with her idea of "cyborg shamanism," point the same way from opposite ends: braid ancestral, reciprocal ways of knowing back into how we live with our machines. Parris asks the question I keep coming back to: what kind of ancestor do you want to be? You cannot answer that one on autopilot.

Nobody is holding these for you any more

For most of human history you did not have to design your rituals. The community did it for you: a service on the sabbath, a harvest festival, a wake, a name day. You turned up and the shape was already there, waiting.

That scaffolding is quietly coming down. Fewer of us go to a weekly religious service than a generation ago, especially in Britain. We volunteer less. We get the food delivered, so even the tiny liturgy of the local shop, the same faces, the thirty seconds of chat, is thinning out. And we are, measurably, spending more and more time alone. These were never just errands. They were our little transitions, the low-key rituals that stitched us to other people and marked the turns in a life. As they fade, the job of making them does not vanish. It lands on you.

Here is the part almost nobody tells you is allowed: you can invent your own. My mum did it for me. When I got my first period she made a quiet ceremony of it and took me to get my ears pierced. She turned buying my first bra at M&S into a marking of the same crossing. And when I was handed my first front door key, that got its own little ritual too, a nod to becoming someone the household trusted with the key. Nobody gave her a script for any of it. She decided each moment deserved marking, and she made something.

It does not have to be gentle, either. A world away, the Bukusu of Kenya carry a boy into adulthood in front of the whole village, and he must not so much as wince. One of these ends with a Costa; both do exactly the same work, marking a crossing out loud, in front of witnesses, so everyone knows it has happened. A coming of age needs marking. The scale is optional. The marking is not.

The empowering part

If you feel this heading toward "and that is why you should buy my course," let me be clear, because it is my oldest pet peeve. You do not need anyone to design your rituals for you. That includes me. The self-help industry runs on convincing you the answer is external: one more app, one more guru, one more subscription. But a shaman does not heal you the way a surgeon does. A shaman removes the blockers so you can heal yourself. The resources are already inside you. Ritual is simply how you reach them, and the reaching is free.

This is why I care so much about turning knowledge into wisdom. Knowledge is cheap now, and about to be free and infinite. Wisdom has never been available to download. It comes only through practice, embodied and repeated. My husband and I run a sculpture studio, and when I hold a finished piece I am touching raw wood, a connection to the earth, but I am also touching the thousands of hours of patience, hand to eye, that live inside a single well-made joint. AI can hand you every fact ever known about joinery. It cannot put those hours into your hands. The gap between knowing a thing and becoming it is exactly where ritual lives, and it may be the last piece of ground that stays reliably ours.

So start small, and start tonight. My own days are held together by tiny sensory rituals, and not one of them needs a subscription. I open with a few pages of pen and paper journalling, writing down what I think, what I feel and my intention for the day, before the day gets its hands on me. I hang from the pull up bar in the house, walk a slow lap of the pond in the garden, light some incense, wash my hands with a soap that smells gorgeous. Written down it looks like a lot; in practice each one takes seconds. Every single one has the same intention: to drop back into my body and my senses, so I move through the day as a whole person and not a floating head being piped through a screen. And that is where connection to everyone else begins too, because you cannot be present with another person while you are absent from yourself.

Notice, too, what a ritual quietly refuses to be: optimised. In a world, and now an AI, built to squeeze efficiency out of every spare minute, the whole point of a ritual is to do one thing for its meaning rather than its output, which is how you break the exhausting spell of analysing every waking moment.

You do not have to overhaul your life. You just have to take back a little authorship. Here is where I would start.

1. Audit one habit. Pick something you do on reflex and ask my blunt question: what is its compound effect over ten years? Keep it, or quietly kill it.
2. Reclaim one threshold. Give your morning, or the end of your workday, a real beginning and end that a notification cannot touch. A song, a candle, a scent, closing the laptop with one honest sentence about the day. Mine is box breathing and a few pages of journalling before anything else gets in. Yours will be yours.
3. Before you ask the AI, ask a person. Next time you reach for the box after a meeting or a row, send the message to the colleague or the partner instead. Give the reps back to the relationship.

Metabolise the technology. Do not let it metabolise you. The choice was always sitting there, quietly, underneath all of it. It is just louder now.

Design, or be designed.