Creativity Quote by John Hench

A quiet alarm is embedded in Hench's plainspoken lament: modern life has stripped itself of ceremony, and the bill comes due in the psyche. As an artist, he’s less interested in theology than in design-for-living. Ritual, in his framing, isn’t antique fluff; it’s infrastructure. It’s the small, repeated choreography that tells people where they are in the story of their own lives.

His phrase "life symbols" does a lot of work. He’s pointing to objects, gestures, and shared scripts that function like emotional signage: birthdays that actually stop the week, communal meals that mark belonging, seasonal routines that make time feel textured rather than flattened into an endless scroll. Without them, "well being" becomes a private, exhausting project, sustained by willpower and consumption instead of shared meaning.

The subtext is bleakly contemporary: the more society prides itself on efficiency, personalization, and permanent optionality, the more it quietly manufactures anxiety. Rituals are constraints, and constraints can be comforting. They outsource decision-making, soothe the nervous system, and create moments of synchronized attention when everyone isn’t optimizing alone.

The line "that life is not too bad after all" is tellingly modest. Hench isn’t promising transcendence; he’s talking about keeping despair at bay. This is postwar, late-modern sensibility: progress has delivered convenience but thinned the communal calendar. His final pivot - "required more and more" - reads like a warning from someone who understands spectacle and symbolism: if you don’t intentionally build meaningful rituals, you’ll end up with hollow ones, engineered by markets and media, selling you the feeling you used to get for free.