> What must the observer get from it The compulsion to raise and seek answers for questions like this has a lot to do with it. Over the last couple centuries,

> What must the observer get from it The compulsion to raise and seek answers for questions like this has a lot to do with it. Over the last couple centuries, increasingly much of the world has been inducted into a culture that looks at life from the perspective of an individual, looks at that individual's life through the lens of economy and benefit, and invites the individual to approach that life as some engineer seeking optimization. For many, this way of seeing the world as economic individuals is even projected onto the people of elsewhere and elsewhen, taking for granted that they must have been doing the same thing whether they knew it or not. A different perspective sees ritual and tradition as the blood and flesh of a community or legacy, and sees the community and legacy that lives for hundreds or thousands of years as the far more important thing than the individual that arrives and leaves over the pittance of just a few decades. For a community, carrying forward a ritual is like breathing, and an individual who fully understands themselves as a fleeting little lung cell in this long-lasting community implicitly fulfills their role of perpetuating the community's life by practicing the ritual. But what's interesting is that asking questions framed like yours is itself a kind of ritual, perpetuating a different (and much more recently birthed) community, and there are countless other rituals of "modernity" that we implicitly peform. These rituals are so natural to us that we barely even recognize them as something outside of us... the same, most likely, your great-grandparents with theirs.