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Redefining Rituals: How Gen Z, Pets, and Digital Detoxes Are Reshaping Holidays

  • Writer: horizonshiftlab
    horizonshiftlab
  • 5 days ago
  • 16 min read
Cozy room with a person meditating by the fireplace. A table displays a dog's photo, candles, marigolds, and petals. Warm, serene ambiance.
Image Source: AI Generated via Gemini

Holidays and rituals are ancient ways humans commemorate life, but their meaning is rapidly shifting in the digital age. This episode explores the redefining of rituals by looking at new observances and evolving traditions. Sue highlights the growing trend of including pets in rituals, citing the ritualization of loss with pet altars on Día de los Muertos and recent laws in Australia and Milan allowing pets to be buried in family plots. Raakhee shares observations that Millennials and Gen Z are disconnecting from traditional holidays, instead seeking to ritualize new values such as wellness days (like International Day of Yoga) , nature days (like moon bathing) , and digital detoxes (taking "calmcations" in tech-free cabins).


The hosts also discuss the profound way social media has altered daily rituals, replacing the conscious choice of reading a newspaper with the passive, personalized consumption of news through scrolling. This has created a longing for coherence and connection, driving movements like digital detoxes and the creation of "humans-only" spaces. The episode concludes that the future will see new observances, like a Day of the Robot and a Day of the Human, as people make conscious choices to celebrate what truly holds value for them.




Rituals and holidays are ancient human traditions that help us commemorate life, assign meaning, and connect with others. However, the digital age, shifting demographics, and a growing emphasis on well-being are profoundly changing what we choose to celebrate and how. The future of holidays is defined by personalization, a connection to nature, and an increasing emphasis on intentional, technology-free connection.


1. The Generational Shift: Gen Z Reimagines Tradition

Younger generations, particularly Gen Z, are actively reshaping traditional holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving to prioritize meaning, simplicity, and personalized experiences over financial strain and pressure.

  • Financial Strain and Simplicity: Gen Z feels significant pressure to spend on gifts and meet expectations, with over 55% feeling obligated to buy gifts for everyone. Consequently, 72% keep total holiday spending under $500. They are leading the charge in seeking a simpler, less stressful approach that emphasizes connection over pressure.

  • The Evolving Menu: More than half of Americans (54%), and especially younger generations, would prefer a protein other than turkey for Thanksgiving, opting for chicken, pork/ham, or steak/beef to reduce cost, waste, and stress.

  • Workplace Celebrations: Traditional holiday parties are losing their appeal. Gen Z demands "Holiday Lite" celebrations, preferring interactive and creative events like escape rooms or workshops. The most desired alternatives are practical: 79% of employees would prefer a monetary bonus, and 71% would opt for additional time off.

  • The Power of Nostalgia and Social Media: Gen Z's celebrations are increasingly fueled by nostalgia for the simplicity of their childhood, which they share on platforms like TikTok. However, social media is a double-edged sword: while it fuels influence, 46% of Gen Z say it influences their perception of Christmas, leading many to feel inadequate and prefer not to share their holiday moments online.

  • Digital-First Holidays: In countries like China, Gen Z is changing the Spring Festival with online rituals, sending virtual red envelopes, and increasing digital socializing over in-person gatherings in major cities.


2. New Objects and Redefining Rituals: The Inclusion of Pets

As human bonds with pets strengthen, rituals around loss and remembrance are shifting to reflect the status of pets as full family members.

  • Public Commemoration: Institutions are creating public spaces for remembrance, such as pet altars in celebration of Día de los Muertos. In Los Angeles, one such celebration included contributions to pet altars with framed photos and a mariachi band.

  • Burial with Humans: In a major symbolic shift, some municipalities in countries like Australia (New South Wales and Victoria) and Italy (Milan, since 2022) are now allowing pets to be buried in family plots with their humans.

  • Pet Funerary Services: In places like Korea, where current law may consider pet remains as "waste," there is a growing trend toward offering specialized funerary services, creating special urns, and recognizing pets with memorial houses.


3. New Observances: Focus on Wellness and Nature

Future rituals will center on issues of increasing societal importance: wellness, digital disconnection, and a renewed connection to the natural world.

  • The Digital Detox: Holidays are increasingly being ritualized as a period for digital detox or "calmcation". Retreats like Unplugged in the UK and Europe offer tech-free cabins for people to intentionally disconnect. Conscious choices, such as setting a digital detox day once a month, are becoming necessary to counteract the constant digital pull.

  • The Loss of Shared News: Social media has displaced traditional media (newspapers, magazines) as the primary source of news, particularly for younger adults. This leads to a lack of coherence, as people consume "incidental news" tailored by algorithms, which can increase stress, anxiety, and the tendency to catastrophize. Creating a ritual around reading a newspaper or engaging in a community-based news filter becomes a conscious choice for shared reality.

  • Commemorating New Values: We will likely see new observance days dedicated to important modern values, such as a "wellness day" (like the growing International Day of Yoga), a "nature day" (celebrating things like agritourism or moonbathing), or a "human day" to celebrate our shared humanity and counteract the rise of AI.



Selected Links:

Travel Trends
Pet Burials and Memorials




Episode Transcript:

Raakhee: (00:00)

Hello and welcome to Signal Shift with me, Rocky and Sue. This week's episode will reach you around mid-December when we are deeply entrenched in the holiday season. Holidays and observances like Halloween, Thanksgiving, and soon Christmas seem to really take up the last three months of the year. We celebrate life largely and then get into health and planning mode by January.


Rituals help us commemorate life. And though they are intertwined with annual leave requests and school schedules now, they're actually as ancient as we are. They are natural ways of being for us. When we see something as different or important or special or even reoccurring, we want to ritualize this. We want to call it out. We want to highlight and remember its meaning. And we have invented some fun, some crazy and often expensive ways of doing this.


But I know that Christmas is just as special, if not more, without presents under the tree, right? It's not about all the peripheral stuff. Holidays become what we decide to make them and what we choose. I think about my local book club and they have an annual gathering because typically they do digital sort of calls and they meet in person, but at the end of the year, everybody, like even if they haven't even been in the book club for the last 12 months, we'll pitch up for the end of year celebration. And it's a very special way to close the year out. It's just so nice. It's in the library, it's paper plates, everybody brings something. It's as simple as you can ask for. But it's just something about that fact that everybody pitches up, because they simply want to see each other connect and they show appreciation for other thinking minds, what does the future hold around holidays, rituals, and the type of meaning we are going to assign to them in the future?


We've spoken a lot about values. We've spoken a lot about meaning over many different things and many subjects over the last few weeks.


So Sue, what is your signal or your observations in this regard?


Sue: (02:16)

Thanks, Raakhee. And yeah, this has to do with a ritual because we just actually passed Halloween not too long ago. We're in the thick of this holiday swing. And I saw in a couple of news sources that in celebration of Dia de los Muertos, there was an inclusion of pet altars in many places. And in Los Angeles in particular, there's the Wallis Annenberg Pet Space, and they offered a public celebration that allowed visitors to contribute to the pet altars with a framed photo of their loved furry one. And it included a mariachi band, other family-friendly activities. And that was just one example. There were articles all over the country, really, of institutions like zoos or animal shelters that were creating these public spaces for remembrance.


There was an article in the Washington Post about one particular girl who wanted to change her family celebration of Dia de los Muertos by including their cat who had passed away. So it was just an interesting way that rituals were changing. And yes, I had to bring it back to pets. I felt like we hadn't talked about it in a while. So this was really thinking about just this broader ritualization of recognizing pets who have gone and remembering them.


And as humans are developing stronger bonds to their pets, as we've talked about so many times, how have rituals changed around the death of a loved pet? ⁓ And so I'm definitely part of that pet algorithm on social media. And so I've seen a lot of acknowledgments over the loss of a pet. But in actuality, at least in the US, if your pet passes away, you in many states can bury them in your backyard, right? Or something like that.


But in other countries, that's not legal. And I read recently in Korea, for instance, it just seems awful as a pet owner that their remains are considered waste. So it's illegal to bury them. You have to dispose of them in a garbage bag, which just seems unthinkable. I mean, when I was reading this, I was starting to cry, just thinking about that. So my signal is actually very recently.


There have been in a couple of countries, municipalities that have recently changed their laws, not just to bury pets, but to bury them with their humans. And in a lot of cemeteries, I know in the US that's not legal as well. And so in Australia, there was an article from this past summer that the states of New South Wales and Victoria are now allowing pets to be buried in family plots.


Milan, Italy also passed a law back in 2022 that allowed this. And in the summer, this past summer was the first time they used it to have a human and pet burial together. So in Korea, where I was just talking about this, in many places it's still illegal and they have a lot of regulation to go through, but there are more places that are allowing even just funeral services to happen. they... have now created urns for them. have like the special kind of hanji paper wrapping with them and they offer funerary services. And now some of them have those kind of urn like houses to have and recognize their pets just as they do family members. So I thought that was a pretty interesting and just important signal that really is shifting who is considered as a family member. I know we've talked about like increasing medical care.


You know, they even have mediums to talk to, you know, your pets and things like that. So I thought this was like a huge step in terms of remembrance and what to do. So that was that was my signal.


Raakhee: (06:14)

I love that Sue and I love you bringing it back to pets. And I think, yeah, that's such a beautiful, signal. It's also, it tells the biggest story that we have been all along, right? About pets and the importance in our lives and now our rituals. And it makes complete sense. I can't believe that anyone would be able to just put their pet in a waste bag, right? That's, my gosh. Yeah.


I didn't have a specific signal. but I definitely had observances. And I think a couple of things that I think we're going to see change with holidays and what we give meaning to I think the one is noting that so many holidays or the holidays we are given, certain public days we all have in different countries, don't necessarily resonate particularly with millennials and more so with Gen Z. And I think they will ask for different meaning. They're very disconnected, to some of the holidays or the way we've celebrated them.


And you think about even Thanksgiving being adapted to friendsgiving And so I think we're gonna see so much more adaptation in the years to come there's three things that I picked up and the first one was there are new things that are very important to us that I think we want to say we need to commemorate via day.


And I think about wellness days and I think of International Day of Yoga, for example, which has just gotten bigger and bigger over the years. And it's like, hey, that needs to be a day or a day like that, which is wellness day, where people say, I commemorate this day because I know how important it is to take care of myself and I want it to always be remembered for every generation to come.


Another one would just be like a nature day, like a moon day. Everyone is very much into astrology a day where we just say tonight we all moonbathe and we respect the moon and what it does for us I see that agritourism is becoming really popular as well and people wanting to go onto farms for a holiday and kind of reconnect with nature and animals and the source of our food and that that is cultivated as an actual holiday, especially when they have kids.


So that's really interesting. So I see this, you know, the sort of convergence And then, of course, just really importantly, this thing that we know that is very important, which is the digital detox and even the day of rest and calmcation is now a thing as well. So taking these vacations that are literally calming and regulate your nervous system. there's a place called Unplugged that offer cabins. they're in UK and Europe, and they basically, they offer sort of tech-free cabins. So you can go there deliberately to shut off and say, you know, I don't want to be connected to anything. there's a new retreat in Helsinki called Maja Maja. And it's also these off-the-grid kind of cabins that allow you to literally reconnect with nature, I think we're going to see this day of rest or sleep. And maybe everybody's going to book themselves a cabin like this on that day, right?


Two was, I think we are a world in transition. And I think we are going to find ways of bringing days that help us remember that transition and the importance of that. And, you know, a kind of big one that comes to mind is veganuary. But I imagine having kind of a plant-based day or a vegan day also night day or nocturnal day, as it becomes hotter, will we choose, to celebrate a night day to normalize it. And I think things like day of nostalgia, like adult summer camps and those sorts of things There's certain things that it will no longer be.


They're gone, they won't exist again. It's going to be a different world. And I think this day of nostalgia is just a way of celebrating those things.


We might have a literacy day to remember and commemorate how literate we needed to be and were once. I don't know. Interesting. And then the last one was just around, I think the obvious thing, which is we may see things like day of the robot, like to commemorate the robots in our homes. We will have day of the human just to celebrate our humanness.


And then I wonder with less parents, is there going to be just an adult day, just to say that, even if I don't have kids or even if I'm single and I choose to be alone in this world, I matter.


And there should be a day celebrating that it's OK for anyone to choose that lifestyle as well. those are some of my thoughts.


Sue: (10:39)

Yeah, those are great. was thinking, I think we've talked about that before, right? Well, we've always talked about like a humans only space and the further we get into it, you can clearly see a possibility of like, this is going to be a day of remembrance when there was humans only on this planet.


Made me think about the just the observation of how social media, how much it has changed our rituals because more people are onto them. So one example of what you were talking about, even with the recognition of just adults day or something like that, there was an article about how this tradition of holiday cards has generally been like families or maybe even couples, single women, younger single women have just taken it as its own brand of like the ways that they're using the holiday card.


There was some really great ones of like newly single women using it as essentially like a dating card for their friends to give out to eligible bachelors they may know for instance. And just like, yeah, as a very clever, fun way to say, this is me, this is who I am and I'm like, I should be recognized for me, right? So I thought that was really, really interesting.


I think a couple other things though are just the general observance of what social media has done to our daily rituals too, because I was even looking for just how quickly rituals have been changing and I couldn't find any specific data on it because it's like you were saying, it's just these kind of informal observances or informal rituals that we have.


And I feel like every day there's a new ritual on TikTok or on YouTube or Instagram that people are going by like, this is the new morning routine you need to have, or these are the new words you need to say, just all of these different things, you know? And I think one of the things we talked about was literacy and how this is changing digital literacy. And yeah, it just made me think, just taking a step back for social media, just, you know, in the older days, and you can see this on like any eighties era TV show, right?


Like how the family gathers at the breakfast table and you have the parents, the dad or the mom or both, they're reading the newspaper or after dinner, they get back, they're in the living room, they're reading the newspaper, right? And that was the major source of news. And now it's just every single person of a certain age, you just, the minute you wake up, you're on your phone, you're scrolling. At dinner, you're scrolling, you're just scrolling, right? And so you're just passively consuming news at this space.


Mostly all the surveys I've seen from Reuters, from Pew have just confirmed that this is the way people are consuming news now, right? there's no like confluence or like coherence around how we're getting the news. And that made me worry just from a ritual standpoint of like, we're all separately having these algorithms tailored to ourselves to find the news. So we're not even talking about like a centralized anchor of news stories, even at your own dinner table.


So how can you go out in the world and start talking about this? So I did think like that's a convergence with the humans only narrative you're talking about. Like there is a movement for people to do digital detoxes to actually go read the newspaper and talk about it. There's areas for community space. Even online now, people are trying to figure out community gatherings to really filter through what's important to them as a group and to refine their values, which I think is just going to be more important the further we get into tech and even AI starting to filter and curate the news for us too.


Raakhee: (14:20)

Whenever they show women at hair salon, they're always at a magazine, you know, flipping the magazine. And, you know, that's just, yeah, it's a world away for young people now, like, my gosh, it's ancient. And so how do you connect them back to that and the power of what those things did hold? Because they did hold some power in a different way. So I think there's going to be a lot of kind of days and rituals to remind us who we used to be, because I think it's very easy to forget.


Is there anything that excites you particularly or some sort of holiday or a ritual you may want to create an observance around or just see something that might be special for you?


Sue: (15:03)

Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, think the first observance is probably something like you were talking about, like this connection between nature and humans. And there was an article that just came out about, I think it's in Finland, that they created basically a rewilding of a daycare center, which increased immunity and just overall human wellness for these kids as they grew up.


You know, having something like that to remember all the benefits we have as we become just, yeah, further glued to our desks, to our devices, like all of those things, I think would be just a great way to remember. then hopefully a way not, yeah, hopefully a way to actually include it in your daily rituals, not necessarily like one observance for the year, but just, just like all these other daily rituals. How do you include that?


Every day. I think that will be important. And then I think as we were just talking about all of the social media, I you know, one ritual around at least the newspaper was like, it was a very conscious choice. You had to subscribe to the newspaper. had to figure out which one you were going to read. You knew exactly when the newspaper boy was going to bring it over. You know, like there was the, you go out and you go get it and all of those things. So every, every single step of that was a conscious choice.


Whereas just immediately picking up your phone and seeing it. Like we've known all the dangers, right? And just how we've been influenced that way. what are the rituals in my life where I am choosing into that versus things I am just subconsciously doing or being kind of, yeah, co-opted into. So I think that's just a good reminder to know that you have the power to shape the kind of rituals you want in your day. Yeah, what about you?


Raakhee: (16:52)

I love the reminder on conscious choices and choosing what you want to celebrate in the meaning you want to assign. I think definitely I loved everything that was about a connection to nature and to self as well.


And I think even for us as a family, once a month, is our digital detox day. Like that's it, you know what mean? As hard as it is, like we are putting these things away and we're gonna survive without it. And remember what it's like to live in a world that was a little different and really connect with nature and not having everything instantaneous and at our fingertips and maybe trying to improve our literacy on that given day in the month I'm looking forward to seeing how holidays evolve for all of us. Is there something interesting you're doing, something different these holidays?


Do share and let us know, you know, are you building in digital detox day in the middle of your vacation? Yeah, let us know what you're doing differently and how holidays are evolving for you. I think it's clear that we have understood the importance of the meaning that they hold and we want to create things that are different than hold importance and value for us. So I'm looking forward to seeing how things shift in the next decade in the world with holidays.


So yeah, thank you so much for joining us. And as you're preparing for your holidays, I hope you're having a fun time and you're getting up just to have lots of good memories and be around family and friends and good food and just enjoy these holidays. So thank you as always for listening and we will catch you again next week. Thanks a lot. Bye for now.

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