Confucian ritual theory has an unlikely lesson for thriller writers. The philosopher Xunzi, writing in the third century BCE, argued that ritual — li — doesn't just regulate behavior; it actively constitutes the self that performs it. You are not a pre-formed person who then chooses to bow or mourn or celebrate. The bowing makes you the kind of person capable of certain loyalties. Strip the ritual away, and you don't expose a truer self underneath — you get a different person entirely. For science fiction thriller plotting, this is a more unsettling mechanism than any external conspiracy: build a protagonist whose identity is entirely downstream of a procedure they perform — a daily protocol, a professional role, a repeated gesture — and then systematically remove it. The horror isn't that something is taken from them. It's that they discover they weren't quite a 'they' without it. The reader watches a self dissolve not through trauma but through the quiet termination of a routine. That's a different register of dread than most thriller protagonists face.

What routine or role are you performing that, if removed, would leave you uncertain who is doing the remaining things?

Drawing from Confucianism — Xunzi (Xunzi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works, c. 3rd century BCE)