TRADITION IS JUST PEER PRESSURE FROM DEAD PEOPLE
ALM No.91, July 2026
ESSAYS
We are all actors in a play whose playwrights have long since left the theater, yet we continue to recite their lines, terrified of ad-libbing. Tradition, for all its romanticized warmth, is fundamentally a mechanism of control. It is the institutionalized ghost of generations past, projecting its anxieties, prejudices, and logistics onto the present. Stripped of its gilded framing, tradition is just peer pressure from dead people.
To understand the absurdity of our devotion to the past, we must look at the anatomy of a ritual. Most traditions were never consciously designed as eternal laws; they were practical solutions to forgotten problems. A social hierarchy was a crude system of agricultural survival. A patriarchal naming convention was a method of tracking lineage and property. Yet, long after the problems have rotted away, the solutions remain, calcified into moral imperatives. We are like surgeons meticulously sterilizing a wound with leeches, simply because our great-grandfathers did it that way. We live inside architectural structures,both literal and psychological, that nobody alive chose, carrying the mortgages of decisions made centuries before we took our first breath.
So, who gave the past so much authority over the present?
We did.
We surrendered our agency because the dead offer a very specific, seductive commodity: certainty. The present is a chaotic, terrifying ocean of choice. We must decide who to love, how to work, what to value, and how to endure the weight of our own mortality. Tradition acts as an anchor. It tells us exactly who we are, what we should want, and how we should behave. It relieves us of the agonizing burden of inventing ourselves from scratch. We grant the past authority because the alternative—radical, existential freedom—is too heavy to carry alone. We call the wound identity. We frame the cage as belonging. We tell the children: this is who we are, as though who we are was decided before we had the chance to weigh in.
But the cost of this borrowed certainty is our own authenticity, and the toll for defying it is the visceral sting of betrayal.
Why does it feel like such a profound treason to simply say, “No, I won’t do it that way”? Why does refusing to pass down a family prejudice, or choosing a path untrodden by our ancestors feel like a violation of a sacred oath? It is because we have been conditioned to conflate love with compliance. When we break a tradition, we are not just discarding an old habit; we are breaking a link in a chain that stretches back into the dark abyss of time.
The living become the unofficial enforcers of the dead. When a parent gasps at a child’s rejection of a custom, it is often because that parent has sacrificed their own autonomy on the altar of that same tradition. To see a child walk away freely is to be confronted with the realization that their own compliance was a choice they didn't know they had. Your rebellion shines a harsh light on their submission. The betrayal you feel radiating from them isn't just anger; it is grief.
To question the inherited structure is to be exiled from the familiar. It is to stand in the cold outside the house of history, looking in through the frosty windows at the warm, dead hearth. It is a lonely, terrifying thing to realize that the compass you were handed at birth is magnetized to a pole that no longer exists.
Yet, this betrayal is the ultimate act of aliveness. We cannot grow if we are forever kneeling at the graves of our ancestors, waiting for their permission to stand. We owe the past respect, but we do not owe it our servitude. We can study the blueprints they left behind without being condemned to live in houses that are collapsing under the weight of the modern sky.
There is a profound difference between honoring the dead and being haunted by them. To honor them is to recognize their struggles, to carry forward their wisdom, and to lay down the burdens they could not. To be haunted by them is to let their fears govern our joys.
The dead do not need your compliance; they are beyond caring. It is the living who need your honesty. And in the end, they were never asking for your obedience, that was always the living, speaking in their name.
Jazz is a poet and writer whose work explores memory, longing, identity, and the complexities of human relationships. Drawn to poetry, prose, and emotionally resonant storytelling, she writes about the moments that linger beneath the surface of everyday life. Her work seeks beauty in vulnerability and examines the ways people love, lose, and remember.
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