Pulling a lever isn’t necessarily ritual but it can be part of a ritual, such as for operating a machine that requires you to pull a series of levers in a parti

Pulling a lever isn’t necessarily ritual but it can be part of a ritual, such as for operating a machine that requires you to pull a series of levers in a particular order. Control-alt-delete is a ritual because it has multiple parts to it that must be done properly or it doesn’t work. Disengaging the parking brake (which is usually done by pushing a lever, sometimes accompanied by a button press) is part of the ritual of starting to drive your car. It’s not strictly necessary (you can drive the car with the parking brake engaged though it’ll damage the car) but it is part of a multi-step process that becomes ritualized in your subconscious. Pilots learn to formalize the pre-flight check ritual because they tend to die if something goes badly wrong in the air. Japanese train conductors [1] have even incorporated ritual pointing gestures into their routine checks. All of this is to say that rituals play psychological and cultural roles in our behaviour. They’re an excellent memory aid! And that may be their original evolutionary raison d’être. [1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pointing-and-calling-japan-trains https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pointing-and-calling-j...