The Monkeys Do This Thing
There is a moment in this conversation — quiet, almost throwaway — when Dax Shepard says goodnight to the stairs. Not his daughter. The stairs. He would carry her up, and she would ask what the stairs needed, and he, playing the role of stairs, would say: nothing. And then it was bedtime. This is the thing about ritual that Michael Norton and Dax circle for ninety minutes without ever quite landing on directly: rituals are love made legible. They are the proof of presence. The stairs didn't need anything. But the little girl needed to ask, and the father needed to answer, and something sacred happened in that exchange that no developmental pediatrician prescribed and no ancient text ordained. It just grew, the way all real things grow — out of repetition and need and the specific texture of two people trying to get through a frightening thing together.
The frightening thing, in this case, is existence. Norton comes to the episode as a self-described skeptic of ritual — a social psychologist who stumbled into the subject through an infographic about grief colors and stayed because he couldn't stop noticing what the monkeys were up to. And what the monkeys are up to, it turns out, is constant. Bedtime sequences. Fork-clinking. Three-kiss greetings. Crossword puzzle handshakes on airplanes. September 1st movie nights. Pig Day. The Gray Bunny hierarchy. Wheels on the Bus extended nine-minute editions featuring every loved one in a child's orbit. These are not superstitions exactly, not habits exactly, not compulsions exactly — they live in the charged space between all three, doing emotional work that no one consciously assigned them.
What this conversation reveals about humanity is something anthropologists have always suspected and psychologists are only beginning to measure: we are ritual-generating creatures the way we are language-generating creatures. Not because anyone taught us to be, but because the alternative — raw unstructured existence, entropy, the pinhole vision of rage or grief or uncertainty with nothing to hold onto — is unbearable. The pigeon taps the lever three times because something came out once and it needs to believe in causation. The baseball player does forty-seven things before each pitch because the alternative is to stand in the box with nothing between him and failure. The couple clinks silverware because the wedding was one day and they need forty more years of proof.
Dax, who has been sober for sixteen-plus years and understands better than most people that the line between ritual and compulsion is not a line but a gradient, brings something the academic framework alone cannot provide: the testimony of someone who has lived on both sides of that gradient. He knows what it feels like when the ritual stops serving you and starts running you. He knows the Flagstaff hotel room panic when the sleep aids weren't there. He knows the coffee-then-brush-then-coffee logic that makes sense in one room and dissolves in another. He knows that the thing you tell yourself you're doing — helping the baby sleep, managing anxiety, being efficient in the shower — is almost never the whole story.
Norton's rain dance finding is the episode's quiet thesis: rituals don't make it rain. They never did. But when the drought is unpredictable and the social fabric is fraying and every man is tempted toward himself, something in the human animal reaches for the collective gesture, the shared word, the repeated action that says: we have done this before, and we got through it, and so will we. That is not irrational. That is the most rational thing a species without a snap-twice solution can do.
The aliens watching the monkeys would be baffled. The monkeys come from their little boxes from all over the country and sit in rows and the monkeys cry. And the monkeys wear weird robes and square hats and throw the hats in the air. And the monkeys scream at each other from either side of a barrier because one group clapped and stomped slightly differently. And two monkeys clink their forks together before every meal and have done so for twenty-two years and if you asked them why, they couldn't really tell you. But they would tell you, with total certainty, that it means everything.