This post was written by Porter Kindall, a Humanities Center student fellow.
In the summer of 2025, this video of fitness influencer Ashton Hall’s morning routine went viral. Captioned as “The morning routine that changed my life 3:50am to 9:30am,” Hall starts shirtless, with tape on his nose and mouth. He spends time working out, both at home and the gym. He wipes a banana peel on his face. The nature of Hall’s routine, optimized to the minute, is the nature of time that spends itself rather than time that lingers. The general reaction people had was one of utter disbelief; for me, my reaction wasn’t one of shock, but of longing—not of longing for what he had, but for what routine cannot produce. While he has routine, I crave ritual.
My concept of ritual comes from Byung-Chul Han’s 2020 book, The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present. Han works to trace where rituals went and what we have collectively lost as a result, the very same things I see as missing from Ashton Hall’s routine.
Han describes ritual is “symbolic acts” that “bring forth a community without communication” (1). Specifically, Han means that ritual is about what is unsaid more than what is said, that the unsaying brings into existence relations between people that otherwise could not have been. In Ashton Hall’s routine, neither communication nor community exist. While other people are present, they’re only present to present him with the things he needs in his life. Women cook and hand him meals; men drive him to the gym and put his jewelry on for him.
Hall becomes an example of Han’s “Cult of Authenticity”: he creates himself; he is his own person, a self-referential entity that ignores the alterity of people around him (16-17). Other people, humanity at large, becomes a means to the end of his existence without the mutuality that philosophers like Hegel, who center relationship and mutal recognition in what it means to be a self, would hope to see in this type of construction of the self.
Another component of rituals is their status as “temporal techniques of making oneself at home in the world” (3). One might think Hall gets this right in that he gives us a near minute-by-minute playbook for his mornings (including his so-called “time-dive,” in which he stand at the edge of the pool, jumps, and hovers in the air from 7:36 a.m. until 7:40 a.m, an impressive feat to be sure). However, ritual time is not the minute-by-minute consumption of the morning. Rather, ritual time removes one from the “erratic stream… that rushes off,” it makes life itself “linger” (3). In presenting each moment, in filling each second, Hall removes the capacity for time to linger and for moments to last.
Rituals… are narrative processes that do not allow for acceleration” (13). Han’s concept of narrative is based on the idea of shaping identity from a common history or myth, such as the Bible, instead of building oneself ex nihilo, as an island (The Crisis of Narration). What Ashton Hall gives instead of a narrative is a story, not a method of identity formation, but a display of himself. His story of what makes him successful is individualized, personalized, and wholly lacking in the collective elements that narratives and rituals generate for communities.
So, where does this leave me, someone who wants to have something of a structure in their life but not the consumption and individually-oriented structure of routine? Where do I begin to look for the ritual that Han says has disappeared from the present day? Though there are many ways to engage in ritual, I turn—perhaps naïvely—to scripture.
The turn to scripture is naïve because scripture itself, when read in isolation, fails to create community and narrative. It remains purely at the level of routine. I read scripture for myself to create myself and tell the story of myself. The narrative epic of the story of Israel, the Lehite community’s failure to adhere to their ideals, the crossing of the plains by the pioneers—each of these become part of my identity as I read the books that contain them. I relate my trials, triumphs, and tumults to those who have gone before.
Scripture, if it is to be ritual, must form a community. People must gather, in some capacity, around the text. While communities, rituals, and narratives abound within the scripture, what does it take for me to bring these into my life? Han is silent on this question, but I have a suspicion of where I can go. A community around scripture looks a lot like a church, or at least like my experience of church.
It hardly matters to me what is said at church. I attend to be in an ecclesia, to be in a community. What removes the communication from this community is the symbolic act of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. The central part of the meeting that is led up to, and which time is brought down from. The first meeting derives its name from the very fact that a sacrament is being served. This is a time where speaking is not only unnecessary but is even frowned upon. It is a time for “community without communication” (1).
For me it is also a place where people gather to linger (and not in the cheap sense of the “linger longer” my congregation has each week, though the food tends to be good). Lingering looks not only like forgetting about time but like letting go of time, proceeding not as a series of “point-like presences.” Rather, it comes together into a single moment that can be called Church, or even Sabbath (3).
The narrative of Church is difficult to put into words. I don’t find it in the persecution or stories; if Han is right, it can’t be found in stories. Instead, I find it in the change from “being-in-the-world into being-at-home” that Church provides (Crisis of Narration 1).[1] This being-at-home is a presence that I feel most when I am surrounded by people who are otherwise entirely unlike me, but identify with me, nonetheless. My politics, language, and national identity don’t matter because we are all together-at-home through the narrative that Church brings into our lives.
Han’s work, and my reaction to Ashton Hall’s routine, ultimately reveals a fundamental choice in how we can structure our lives: the cult of the individual or the comfort of the community; the consumption of time or the creation of lingering. My turn to scripture and Church is one answer to the void left by disappearing rituals. The real question this leaves isn’t just ‘Where can I find ritual?’ but more fundamentally, ‘What have I been mistaking for it?’ The next time you see a ‘life-changing routine’ or feel the pressure to optimize every second, ask yourself: does this create a community? Does this make time linger? The answer might be the first step toward building a life that feels less like a performance and more like a home.
References
Hall, Ashton. “The morning routine that changed my life 3:50am to 9:30am.” YouTube, uploaded by AshtonHallOfficial, 2025.
Han, Byung-Chul. The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present. United Kingdom, Polity Press, 2020, pp.1-17.
Han, Byung-Chul. The Crisis of Narration. United Kingdom, Polity Press, 2024.
[1] Yes, Han took this straight from Heidegger. To quote the person who introduced me to Han, “Han is the loudest Heideggerian in the world right now.”
