This morning I drove about 20 miles to a little coast town where I used to spend my childhood summers. Excepting one quick driveby six years ago, it was my first time back since I was 11.
The place was unrecognizable. Built up, and polished, and deforested. It almost made me physically sick to walk around, the modern reality at such odds with what I remember.
But one thing was still comfortingly the same.
At a sunny seaside bar, on a Saturday morning at around 11am, there was a group of old men.
They were throwing down hand signals on the table and yelling at each other. Numbers, corrupted from Italian:
Šije!
Šete!
Šije!
Šije!
It’s an old game. In Italian, it’s called morra. In Croatian, šije-šete (bastardized Italian for six-seven).
The game is basically like rock-paper-scissors, but with numbers instead of rocks, and five options instead of just three.
I read a bit about the history of morra. It was apparently played even in Roman times. For the past century, it has been banned in much of Italy because it’s considered gambling and, more important, because it seems to lead to drunken knife fights.
And yet, the game lives on. A short while ago, a video went viral on YouTube, showing 9-year-old kids playing morra with full fury. It’s just what men in these parts do. And these boys, at 9 years old, know it, and they are getting ready.
I’ve written before about the Inner Ring.
It’s a powerful motivator. A big part of what it means to be human.
We want to belong to a community, or to a dozen overlapping communities.
In the ancient, precorona world, these things happened spontaneously — work cliques, friend groups, drinking buddies.
Today, the need for the Inner Ring is serviced online in the form of masterminds, lairs, and various kinds of membership programs.
But here’s the thing:
A lot of these online communities suck. One reason is that they are missing rituals.
Rituals are enjoyable for their own sake.
But rituals also keep the structure of the Inner Ring.
Everybody performs the ritual because everybody else performs it, and nobody wants to fall out of the Inner Ring by being a drag.
Men around here play šije-šete because it’s fun and it’s competitive and because they can get a free drink out of it. But also, because a giant and frightening void starts to open up if they don’t play when their buddies do.
So that’s what I’m suggesting to you too.
Maybe you have an online community you run already. Or maybe, like me, you’re just thinking about creating one.
In either case, think about rituals you can introduce to give your community some structure and coherence. Even if they lead to drunken knife fights on occasion. It’s a small price to pay for unity and the wonder of the Inner Ring.
Want inside my own Inner Ring? Oh no, it’s not so easy. But the first step is to join my email newsletter. You can do that here.