Nobody tells you when you’ve grown upAnd how to mark one yourself

For most of human history, someone told you when you’d grown up. There was a ceremony. People gathered. You walked in as one thing and walked out as another, and everyone in the room saw it happen.

Now ask a 25-year-old if they’re an adult. You’ll probably get the most common answer in the research: in some ways yes, in some ways no. Many of us cross that line alone, in a rented apartment, on no particular day. Some of us aren’t sure we’ve crossed it at all.

That isn’t a personal failing. It’s a missing ritual. Here’s what anthropologists learned about how people move from one stage of life to the next, what happens when the ceremonies thin out, and how to mark a threshold yourself when nobody else is going to.

In 1909, the French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep published Les Rites de Passage. He compared ceremonies from all over the world, for birth, coming of age, marriage and death, and noticed they kept the same three-part shape.

First comes separation. You leave your old role behind, often literally: you leave the house, the village, the group of children. Then comes transition, an in-between stage where you’re no longer the old thing and not yet the new one. Last comes incorporation. You come back in with a new name, a new role or a new place, and everyone knows it.

Van Gennep’s word for that middle stage gave English the word liminal, from the Latin limen, threshold. The image at the top of this page shows a threshold of its own. In The Marriage Ceremony, a print from around 1768, Suzuki Harunobu pictures a stage of a Japanese wedding called ironaoshi, when the bride changes out of her white robes into colored ones. A change of clothes that tells everyone she has crossed.

Half a century later, the British anthropologist Victor Turner took van Gennep’s middle stage and made it the main event. Drawing on his fieldwork with the Ndembu people of Zambia, he wrote about it in a 1964 essay, later collected in The Forest of Symbols in 1967, and again in The Ritual Process in 1969.

Turner noticed that people in the threshold stage are stripped of their usual status. Initiates might wear the same clothes, give up their names and be treated as equals, whoever their families were. They sit outside the positions that law and custom normally hand out.

He also noticed what that does to people going through it together. With rank gone, they bond fast. Turner called this communitas: the intense, level sense of togetherness among people crossing the same line at the same time. Think of a first-year class in its first week, or a team the night before a final.

The threshold is uncomfortable on purpose. It’s also supposed to end. That’s the part modern life tends to skip.

In 2000, the psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett published a paper that named a new life stage: emerging adulthood, roughly ages 18 to 25. When people in that range were asked whether they had reached adulthood, most didn’t say yes or no. They said in some respects yes, in some respects no.

READ NEXT ↘Why astronauts, athletes and surgeons swear by rituals

READ NEXT ↘Why astronauts, athletes and surgeons swear by rituals

READ NEXT ↘Why astronauts, athletes and surgeons swear by rituals

Even later, the answer stayed mixed. Nearly a third of people in their late twenties and early thirties still didn’t feel fully adult.

The interesting part is what people said counts. At the top of the list: accepting responsibility for yourself, making your own decisions and becoming financially independent. At the bottom: finishing school, getting married and having children, the very milestones that come with ceremonies. The exception was people who already had kids, who tended to see becoming a parent as a major marker.

Look at that list again. The criteria people actually use are gradual. There’s no day you finish accepting responsibility. Nobody throws a party for your first year of paying your own bills. The changes that matter most have no ceremony, so the threshold never closes. You stay in the in-between, sometimes for a decade.

Japan ran a live test of this. Its age of adulthood was set at 20 in an 1876 proclamation and stayed there for more than 140 years. On April 1, 2022, a change to the Civil Code lowered it to 18. Drinking and smoking still wait until 20.

Japan also has one of the best-known coming-of-age rituals in the world. Each January, on Coming of Age Day, local governments hold ceremonies for the year’s new adults. So what happens to the ceremony when the law moves the line?

Mostly, nothing. Many towns kept inviting 20-year-olds. Young people were asked, too. In a December 2018 Nippon Foundation survey of 800 people aged 17 to 19, 74 percent said 20 was the right age for the ceremony, and 23.9 percent said 18. Many worried that a January ceremony at 18 would land in the middle of university entrance exams.

The law said one thing. The ritual said another, and people sided with the ritual. A legal age is a line on paper. A ceremony is the moment other people see you cross it.

Some thresholds have no ceremony at all. Divorce is one of the biggest changes a person can go through, and in most places it’s marked with paperwork and a legal bill.

In April 2009, a former salesman in Tokyo named Hiroki Terai started holding divorce ceremonies. As a child, he’d asked his parents why there were wedding ceremonies but no divorce ones, and they laughed. As an adult, he built one. Couples paid about ¥55,000, around $600 at the time.

The structure is pure van Gennep. The couple meets near Sensoji temple and rides to the venue in separate rickshaws, with friends following on foot. Terai sums up what happened, and a guest speaks. Then the two of them hold a hammer together and smash their wedding rings. The hammer has a frog’s head, because in Japanese kaeru means both “frog” and “change.”

Here’s the twist. Terai said about 10 percent of his couples decided not to split up after all, encouraged by the friends who came. A ritual built to close a door sometimes showed people they were still standing in the doorway.

Line up a typical modern life and mark which changes still come with a ritual. The pattern is hard to miss.

A SKETCH

Marked and unmarked

MARKEDUNMARKED

0

18

22

28

30

40

65

85

0

MARKED

Birth

A cradle, a name, a welcome.

Wooden cradle made in America, 1640–90 · The Met, public domain

18

NO CEREMONY

UNMARKED

Legal adulthood

In many places, a birthday and a form. No ceremony required.

22

NO CEREMONY

UNMARKED

First real job

Often the biggest change in daily life. Usually unmarked.

28

NO CEREMONY

UNMARKED

Moving in together

Shared keys, shared lease, few rituals.

30

MARKED

Wedding

Still a full rite: separation, threshold, return.

Suzuki Harunobu, The Marriage Ceremony, probably 1768 · The Met, public domain

40

NO CEREMONY

UNMARKED

Divorce

Common, and almost never ritualized.

65

NO CEREMONY

UNMARKED

Retirement

Maybe a cake in the break room.

85

MARKED

Death

Funerals remain. People once wore mourning rings, too.

Mourning ring, 1733 · The Met, public domain

Ages are illustrative, not data. Images: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain.

Birth, marriage and death mostly kept their ceremonies. The years in between, where most of the real change happens, are mostly bare. People once wore mourning rings after a death, a small object that told everyone what they were carrying. Now, after most of life’s big changes, we go back to work on Monday.

You don’t need a village to borrow van Gennep’s shape. Here’s how we’d build a small rite for a change nobody else is going to mark, like a first apartment, a new job, a breakup or a birthday that feels bigger than it looks. It’s our suggestion, not a formula.

Step out. Separation needs a physical signal. Go somewhere you don’t usually go: a walk to a specific place, a drive, a room you clear out first. Bring one object that stands for the old stage.

Stand in the doorway. Give the in-between a clear start and a clear end. Ten minutes is enough. Write down what you’re leaving and what you’re walking into. Read it out loud. Leave the object behind, or change something you wear, the way the bride in Harunobu’s print changes her robes.

Come back in. Incorporation means being seen. Tell one person, out loud, what changed. Better still, share a meal. Turner’s point was that crossing is easier with company, and that the people who see you cross help make it real.

That’s what Ritual OS is for. It offers short practices drawn from the world’s traditions that you can do alone or with the people close to you, each with a beginning and an end. It starts by asking where you are right now, in a picture: if your inner world were a landscape, which would feel closest? Ritual OS is also building a network of practitioners, called Firekeepers, such as doulas and chaplains, for one-to-one guidance through a change. It isn’t therapy. It’s closer to having someone who knows the old ceremonies stand beside you at the door.

Inside Ritual OS

Start where you are

Short practices from the world’s traditions, for you alone or with the people close to you. Each one has a beginning and an end.

Real screens from the Ritual OS iPhone beta. The practitioner network is still being built.

Nobody may tell you when you’ve grown up. You can still tell yourself, and ask someone to watch.

The Ritual Connection

Rites of passage were never meant to be done alone. Ritual OS matches you with short practices from the world’s traditions, for the changes in your life that nobody else is going to mark, each with a beginning and an end. Ritual OS can match you with practices for this.

Take the Spiritual DNA Quiz. Free.