Let’s be honest: as a species, we can build quantum computers and send rovers to Mars, but if someone drops a piece of bread, we still kiss it so the universe doesn’t smite us.
We ditch outdated things all the time. We abandoned bloodletting, dial-up internet, and low-rise jeans without blinking. Yet, we refuse to let go of rituals that make absolutely no sense. Why? Because human beings are deeply weird, comfort-seeking herd animals wrapped in a thin coat of logic.
Tradition is essentially just peer pressure from people who have been ghosts for 300 years. Somewhere along the line, an ancestor decided that the best way to celebrate a birthday was to put fire on top of a baked good, make everyone sing a terrifyingly slow song, and then have the guest of honour blow their lung germs all over the food everyone is about to eat. And we just keep doing it because questioning it feels like a cosmic crime.
Deep down, we are bored. Bizarre traditions give us a legally and socially acceptable hall pass to act completely unhinged.
Without tradition, if you wore a giant terrifying mask and demanded candy from strangers, you’d get arrested. Under the banner of Halloween, you’re just festive.
If you throw a perfectly good cake in a toddler’s face on a random Tuesday, it’s child cruelty. Do it on their first birthday? It’s a “smash cake” and goes straight to Instagram.
Many customs survive purely on generational spite. Take the concept of formal wear. No human being has ever put on a starched tuxedo or a pair of Spanx and thought, “Yes, this is a sensible way to clothe my biological form.” But because our parents had to choke in tight collars and high heels at weddings, they’ll damn well make sure we do the same.
If a group of people does something perfectly logical, it proves nothing. If you and your friends all agree to wear warm coats in the winter, that’s just survival. But if an entire town in Gloucestershire agrees to chase a 4kg wheel of Double Gloucester cheese down a cliff at 70 mph—resulting in broken ankles, concussions, and medic call-outs—that is true commitment. It says, “We are all part of the same specific brand of crazy.”
Ultimately, logic is great for building bridges, but it’s terrible for building community. We keep the weird stuff because a purely logical world would be efficient, productive, and utterly, miserably boring.
We absolutely did not keep the pigeon post because delivering a modern Amazon package via pigeon would require a terrifying Hitchcockian swarm of birds lifting a cardboard box, only for it to end up covered in bird droppings on your roof anyway.
When a system involves actual work, human beings are incredibly quick to say, “Yeah, screw this, there has to be a better way.” The moment we realised we could send a message via copper wires instead of waiting for a bird to not get eaten by a hawk, the pigeons were immediately fired.
The division in the human brain is simple: if it’s a chore, we automate it; if it’s a ritual, we institutionalise the madness.
If an old method costs extra money, takes more time, or involves manual labour, it dies.
The Loom. “Should we spend three weeks weaving one pair of trousers?” “No, buy the machine.”
The Mail. “Should we trust Bob on a horse to ride across the country to deliver this bill?” “No, email it.”
The Map. “Should we unfold a giant piece of paper while driving 70 mph?” “No, let the robotic voice in my dashboard yell at me.”
The second an activity enters the realm of “sentimentality,” our brains completely short-circuit. We will happily fire the pigeon, but then we will turn around and do something like The Royal Ascot, where British high society spends thousands of pounds to wear hats that look like architectural disasters, all to watch horses run in a circle just because people did it in 1711.
If we applied our “anti-carrier-pigeon” logic to the rest of our lives, society would look entirely different.
Weddings. Instead of spending £25,000 on a giant party, a dress you wear once, and a fruitcake nobody likes, you would just send a calendar invite that says: “As of 2:00 PM, Dave and Sarah are legally a financial unit. Please click ‘Accept’ to acknowledge.”
The Legal System. Barristers and judges in the UK would stop wearing 18th-century horsehair wigs that smell like a musty attic. We keep them because apparently, a judge cannot properly sentence a criminal unless they look like George Washington’s grandmother.
Graduation. You wouldn’t wear a heavy polyester robe and a square hat with a dangling string just to walk across a stage and receive a rolled-up piece of paper. You’d just get a PDF emailed to you while you’re in your pyjamas.
We ditch the carrier pigeons because we want our Wi-Fi fast, but we keep the bizarre customs because deep down, we know that if we optimised everything, we’d just be highly efficient robots waiting around to die. We need the nonsense to keep life spicy.
