I sometimes go digging for quartz. This includes camping out with friends the night before, then getting dirty, digging in the mud, and finding neat little things all day. All in all, I really enjoy the experience. But then I bring home pounds and pounds of the stuff and really only enjoy having a few of the pieces that really jump out to me as being exceptional.
Most people have never gone to dig for quartz, and don’t have nearly the amount of it that I do. On top of that, many of my friends attribute all sorts of magical nonsense to the stones. So, the way I enjoy the rest of it is giving it away. Any of the pieces I bothered to bring home seem really beautiful and amazing to people who don’t have endless pounds of the stuff cluttering up their room. I’m often told months/years after giving one out that the recipient still has it and cherishes it and keeps it in some special place where they always see it, which provides another little burst of me enjoying the thing.
Similarly, when someone comes into my room for the first time and is amazed by the collection as a whole, I get a little bit of joy out of their amazement. Every time I think I’ve run out of ones that are worthy of gifting, someone notices one in particular that they really love, and I say “you can have it” and they jump for joy and tell me I’m the greatest person ever.
I feel like this is a good example of “correctly having” something. Considering that in my whole life I’ve probably spent less than $50 dollars getting all of those crystals, and that I consider the experience of digging them up to have been easily worth that, it has proven to be one of the most effective ways I have ever used money (in terms of making myself happier). And all without actually believing that they have magic powers or anything like that.
I suspect that making it about rationality might be kind of a mixing utilitons with warm fuzzies situation, where you end up doing both poorly. However the person(s) leading the thing damn well better be rationalists. Probably everyone else involved as well.
I exist within a subculture where rituals are kind of normal, and other things I would expect to make this audience cringe. I violently rejected it all while reading the sequences because the value I had perceived in it was insane. Around the time I finished them I began to understand the actual value of it, and I really think the sequences provide more than enough to safely engage in this sort of thing.
My first few attempts at commenting on this turned into giant walls of text and I think I might have some things to contribute to the discussions in that mailing list.