Celebrations

We drink alcohol and eat sugar to ritually say "We are so healthy and fit, let us dabble with poison and enjoy how it is blunted by our surplus."

Toward celebrations generally: "Our position and future is so certain and assured, let us frivolously burn a day or two because we can afford it." So joyful, but perhaps one is not as rich as imagined and boasted.

The older idea of celebrations was to provide a short-term goal, e.g. a monthly festival was a pretense for harvesting crops and preparing food for the village.

We now lack goals, but repeat rituals.