Between Progress and Presence: Learning to Feel in an Age of Efficiency

"A quiet reminder that meaning never fully disappears; it only waits to be felt again"

I rub my eyes, as if that could ease my tiredness. I smooth my trousers, take a deep breath, and open the door. For a moment I look back. It still feels like a dream that I’m here: the wooden bed with its delicate mosquito net, the sand-colored walls, and the mountains stretching out behind the window. The deep blue curtains with white stitches, the pink fringes by the bed, the pale green floor; all the colors form a quiet harmony in what will be my shelter for the night.

An hour ago, my guide Lee and I drove into a Dao village, after about three hours on the road from Ha Giang, in northern Vietnam. With a nervous but proud look, he told me we had been invited to dine with the village chief, to talk about their traditions connected to the land. The chief had prepared two huts next to his house for us, so we wouldn’t have to drive back in the dark. I felt deeply honored.

As I walk toward the house, I notice I’m a little tense; who does he think I am, really? I’m just a young researcher, and this is my first bit of ‘fieldwork’. I also suspect I’ll be expected to drink homemade rice wine (Rượu đế) - a gesture I’ve already made several times during previous conversations, to show respect to the elders. I now know that their so-called happy water can be surprisingly strong, and I silently hope I can keep up.

Inside the chief’s house, I see Lee already sitting at a low table. The smells of rice, tofu in tomato sauce, and Rau cải mèo - a spinach-like green sautéed with garlic - fill the air. Unlike my colorful hut, the chief’s house is made mostly of cement. There are no windows, only a doorway through which the light gently falls. Paper amulets in red, yellow, and green hang from the ceiling - colors that symbolize luck, fertility, and balance between the elements. When the wind blows inward and makes the papers move, it means good energy is entering the house. When it blows outward, bad energy leaves and the house is cleansed. Now, they hang still.

I sit down beside Lee and smile at the chief across from me. The evening feels almost magical: we eat, we drink, Lee chats and translates, and indeed, I raise my glass of rice wine several times, only to sip it slowly rather than drink it down. The chief tells us proudly how much the arrival of cement has meant for the village, how it made their houses stronger, the roads better, and transportation and trade easier.

A little later he adds, more quietly:

“We used to build with wood. The houses smelled of earth. Now it’s cleaner, yes, but also quieter.”

His words stay with me. Cement holds the walls upright, but it also closes something off.

In the days that follow, I begin to see how that “closing off” seeps through everything. The paths are now smooth and wide; animals no longer live beneath the houses but in separate pens at the edge of the village. Young people wear modern clothes, and the becoming of age festivities last one day instead of three. There’s less time, Lee explains, work is waiting.

He tells me some villages still try to preserve the old songs, but there are fewer and fewer people who know them by heart. The knowledge once passed down from parent to child is now partly replaced by apps. Some farmers check the weather forecast on their phones more often, while their fathers once read the clouds, leaves, and wind.

“It’s easier this way,” says Lee.

What touches me is not the disappearance of traditions itself, but the quiet inevitability of it. No one seems particularly sad. It’s just time - progress, as they say.

That night I ask Lee whether he minds that things are changing. He thinks for a moment.

“Not bad,” he says. “Different.”
Then, after a pause:
“We have to live, too. Cement keeps the house dry. And time… time is money.”

He says it without irony. But in his eyes there’s a tension I recognize: the pull between stability and the loss of what once gave it meaning - a theme that came up in many of my conversations with farmers in Vietnam.

In my notebook I write that night: balance between money, time, and tradition.
It looks like a small sentence, but perhaps it’s the essence of modernity.

The German philosopher Byung-Chul Han wrote in The Disappearance of Rituals:

“Our world lacks the lasting elements of earlier times, which were rich in symbols and rituals. Our fixation on production has made such endurance impossible. What we need is re-enchantment.”

In the Dao village, that sentence seems almost literal. The cement walls keep out the rain, but also muffle the sound of the wind - the same wind that once made the paper amulets dance and purified the house. Everything has become more efficient, but also quieter, smoother, shorter. Even holidays seem preserved in form but diluted in meaning.

Han calls this the poverty of modern times: not a lack of possessions, but a loss of resonance. Rituals don’t vanish because people reject them, but because the world that once gave them meaning has been compressed into usefulness. Rituals take time - and time, it seems, is the one thing no one has anymore.

Now, months later, as the dark season approaches back home, I often think of that village. Of its silence, and of our own rituals here - Christmas, birthdays, New Year’s - that once carried something deeper than mere coziness.

Last year, during dinner, a friend asked why we light candles at Christmas. No one really knew.

“For the atmosphere,” someone said.
“Because it’s dark outside.”

I smiled, but thought of how light once symbolized hope - the promise of the sun’s return after the longest night. We no longer know, and perhaps that makes us, unknowingly, a little poorer.

Maslow once wrote:

“Words can be repeated endlessly without touching the deeper layers of the human being. The same is true of symbolic acts. They gain meaning only when they are truly lived and felt.”

Maybe that’s exactly what’s missing. Not the rituals themselves, but the capacity to live them. We no longer experience them; we produce them. We organize Christmas down to the smallest detail, but forget what we came together for.

Rituals once gave shape to the ungraspable: time, death, seasons, dependence. They made life felt rather than explained - a way to meet what lies beyond control: time passing, loss, and the turning of the world itself. Through repetition, they offered a pulse to hold on to when meaning itself felt fragile. Perhaps the longing for rituals comes from a longing for repetition that isn’t empty, but sustaining.

In the Dao village, I caught a glimpse of how care for the land itself can become a ritual; a quiet rhythm that ties people to place. Sustainability wasn’t a concept but a habit. Respect for the land wasn’t a moral choice, but a cycle of giving and receiving. When I asked the chief what “sustainability” meant to him, he said:

“You take care of what takes care of you.”

Those words might hold more wisdom than any policy document.

Now, back in my own country, I see how we too are searching for that balance. We’ve translated sustainability into numbers and strategies, but not into gestures. We measure the temperature of the earth, but not the warmth between people. We know more and more, but experience less and less.

We live in a world rich in policy but poor in ritual. And maybe that’s why so many people feel empty, even amidst abundance.

At Christmas, when the candles flicker again and the room fills with sound and light, I’ll think of that village; not of what was, but of what changed. The scent of cement replacing the smell of wood; the silence between conversations where once hammers and animals filled the air. People build ‘forward’, and in doing so, something becomes both stronger and quieter. Progress shelters us, yet it can also soften the pulse that once made life resonate.

Rituals ask for repetition, but above all for presence; and in this moment - now rituals are disappearing - for the willingness to see what still moves within the stillness. Maybe re-enchantment doesn’t begin with retrieving what’s lost, but with learning to see what remains alive, even in modern walls.

It might begin there - not with grand resolutions, but with small rituals that remind us we’re part of something larger. Light a candle and take a moment to watch its flame before dinner. Step outside each morning, even for a minute, to feel the air on your skin. When you eat, look at who’s beside you before you start. Repeat it, not to be productive, but to remember: life is not a task, it’s a rhythm.

I think of the paper amulets hanging from the chief’s ceiling, once swaying when good energy entered the house. Even when the wind stopped, they held the memory of movement - a quiet reminder that meaning never fully disappears; it only waits to be felt again.