They do exist. As my friend tells me there is a whole ritual around cigarette smoking that includes alleviating one’s stress and goes through the feel of the packet, the buying and lighting up, the inhaling and even the satisfaction of seeing the thing burning away. Electric cigarettes are there to help you and very useful if the drugs and patches make you feel unwell.
I am guessing for all of us there are rituals about everything we do. How we go to work, how to rest at night, how we prepare to make love; and I am wondering how much of these rituals are just the habits we employ to stop ourselves thinking too deeply.
We are after all animals that can think but sometimes it is plainly easier and simpler to be an animal that thinks less. Yet is being so we must be missing clues as to who we really are and what we are actually doing. The ‘whys’ of life are difficult questions and have no set answers but that very chaos, that very uncertainty, is an immense intellectual strength if you can learn to live with it.