Cycle syncing to the root of humanity
I started to plan my outfits to accommodate my luteal phase better, but I soon started to feel like punctuating my cycle phases with clothes was about more than just making my life easier.
Cycle syncing your outfits has larger implications than you might expect. Traditions and celebrations that repeat yearly are an important part of humanity, in the context of trying to make sense of the meaningless nothingness that is understanding life.
Human consciousness is unique in that we’re aware of our own impermanence. This awareness brings both awe and dread, the sense of standing before an infinite, indifferent universe. Annual traditions and celebrations offer anchors in this vastness: recurring points that punctuate the flow of time and provide rhythm to existence.
Without them, life can feel like an undifferentiated continuum, a sequence of days without meaning. By repeating certain rituals, we create structure in the chaos, giving ourselves the illusion (and sometimes the reality) of coherence. Birthdays, solstices, New Year’s, religious festivals, and now wearing the same to mark your cycle, all turn the infinite into the cyclical, the unknowable into the familiar.
On a psychological level, repetition gives us continuity, a way to connect past, present, and future selves. By repeating an act, time is collapsed for a moment.
This continuity helps combat existential isolation, the feeling that you’re just a brief, accidental consciousness adrift in nothingness. Through shared repetition, you participate in something larger and more enduring than your individual life.
When a society gathers to celebrate, it momentarily suspends the chaos of individual difference. In that sense, traditions are not just quaint or decorative; they are meaning-making machines, communal bulwarks against nihilism.
At the deepest level, rituals and celebrations are acts of existential defiance. The universe doesn’t care about our calendars, birthdays, or fireworks. That act of insisting on meaning in a meaningless world is profoundly human. It’s how we participate in the absurd: to dance, feast, and remember, even when faced with cosmic silence.
Yearly/monthly traditions matter because they transform existence into experience, chaos into story, and nothingness into something, even if that “something” is fragile and fleeting.
They’re how humanity collectively whispers into the void: We were here. We remember. It matters — because we say it does.