Why we keep showing up when things have stopped working.

It began well enough: a weekly engineering sync meant to surface blockers and set priorities. In the early weeks, people prepared. Problems came out into the open. Decisions actually got made. The cadence felt alive, a steady backbeat to our daily work.

Then, slowly, the meeting thinned out.

By week eight, updates sounded like status reports. Cameras stayed dark. Slack messages replaced conversation. Nobody declared the meeting over, yet it lingered, familiar but noticeably hollow.

One week I asked a question and waited. Seven seconds of silence. A flicker of a microphone unmuting, then off. Someone typed, then deleted. What filled the air wasn’t discussion but dread, like we were attending the funeral of something we used to need.

And still we kept showing up. Not out of conviction, but out of habit or inertia dressed up as loyalty. A ritual can die while we keep holding space for it anyway, hoping presence alone might bring it back.

Teams often use the word cadence to mean predictability — the repeating events that divide a week or a quarter. Cadence is easy. Put it on the calendar and it happens. Reserve a room, send invites, and you’ve created structure.

Rhythm is different. Rhythm only exists when people actually engage. Cadence reserves a room; rhythm fills it with purpose.

We search for rhythm outside of work as well: the daily run, the Friday night call, the holiday tradition that gathers family. But repetition without reflection hollows out even the best patterns. The run becomes routine. The call becomes small talk. The tradition becomes logistics. What was once rhythm turns into repeat performances: theater.

Loyalty does strange things when patterns lose their pulse. We keep watering plants that will never bloom. We keep rituals alive not because they work, but because stopping feels like admitting something we cared about has slipped away.

Inside companies, these hollow patterns multiply fast. The all-hands where nobody listens. The retro that produces no change. The newsletter that goes unread. They persist not because they’re useful, but because inertia is easier than naming the loss.

The ones that survive always share one ingredient: someone is paying attention. They ask whether the format still fits. They listen for signals, not just silence. They’re willing to revise instead of preserve for its own sake.

Think of it like tending a fire. You don’t rebuild from scratch every time, but you do poke at it, adjust for wind, add fuel, and notice when something is going out. The difference between maintenance and neglect is often just attention.

That’s what eventually saved our weekly sync. We shrank the guest list, dropped the slides, and replaced status updates with one question: what’s in the way right now? The change wasn’t dramatic, but it worked. The energy returned, not because the ritual was sacred, but because someone had noticed it was failing and cared enough to try.

Rituals aren’t fixed assets. They’re living patterns, fragile and provisional, capable of being redesigned, reclaimed, or retired. The hard part is admitting when the beat has gone flat — and finding the nerve to change it before silence sets in.

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