A Ritual For When You Reach Your First 100 Followers on Instagram
Part of an ongoing series of ritual design sprints to imbue my own work-life with meaning and purpose. These are descriptions, not prescriptions. Utilize, customize, and remix these if you’re not sure where to start when crafting your own.
How can we use rituals to shift from a purely capitalist transactional relationship with our instagram followers to one of genuine gratitude and giving?
Frame
My free association on the significance of the number “100” led me down a Wikipedia rabbit hole through the history of the $100 bill to Benjamin Franklin (who yes, no surprise, owned slaves, though he did eventually become an abolitionist), and which also revealed this surprising little nugget:
Big Benjamin was an avid vegetarian who was so excited by tofu that his letter to a Chinese trade expert asking how it was made is believed to be the first recorded use of the word “tofu” in the English language. True story.
2. Spending Time
So I spent all night designing an $100 bill that replaced Benjamin Franklin with a piece of magical flying tofu, and then sent it to my first 100 followers as a small symbolic token of my genuine gratitude.
With rituals, the what is often less important than the why.
3. Connect to Something Bigger
Finally, I donated $100 in their honor to the Pulitzer Center’s 1619 Project Curriculum, which is equipping teachers with resources and lesson plans to reframe U.S. history and explore how the “societal structures [that] developed to support the enslavement of black people, and the anti-black racism that was cultivated in the U.S. to justify slavery, influenced many aspects of modern laws, policies, systems, and culture.”