The Liberating Power of Disillusionment

The shattering of illusion and the power to choose the world

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” Soren Kierkgaard

It’s a new year. 2025. I keep looking at that date in wonder. It sounds so futuristic. Can it really be now? Have we really already stumbled through the first quarter of 21st Century?

The future sure doesn’t look anything like it did in the brochure. If we’re being honest, it seems like a bit of a rip-off so far. And I’m not just talking about the absence of flying cars.

Things don’t add up. We’re told that the world’s getting richer, but our lives feel poorer. We’re advancing but regressing. Wealthier but in deeper debt. More connected but lonelier. Prospering but more unequal. Growing economically while shrinking demographically. Scientifically advancing but sicker. In it together but moving further apart.

The incongruities between the stories we’re told and the realities we experience are the source of society’s confusion, unease, and anger.

That gap—between our stories and what we’re able or willing to believe—is a very dangerous place. As it grows, it creates a vacuum that draws in all kinds of demons. It’s a place where trust dies and nihilism, hatred, and social breakdown are able to thrive.

The worst of it is the breakdown of trust. A world without trust is a world without a foundation. A world without a future. We’ve lost trust in our institutions, in each other, and in truth itself. We’ve lost our trust in education, healthcare, politics, and government. Most people feel that things are on the wrong track. No wonder things seem gloomy.

The breakdown of our stories has left us disillusioned.

We hear that word, disillusioned, as synonym for depressed, disappointed, and angsty. But perhaps we should reconsider? Why wouldn’t we want to rid ourselves of illusions? What would happen if we were able to wake up to our illusions and see them clearly? To become disillusioned is to see further and with greater clarity—to see things as they truly are and imagine what they might be.

This is our human superpower: the ability to imagine new possibilities and then work together—as individuals, families, communities, teams, organizations, and markets—to realize them. But the first step is always in the imagining. Our dreams make creativity possible.

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Choosing the future

We’re stuck between two worlds. The world as it has existed and the world as it’s becoming. The direction of this change isn’t pre-destined. Life doesn’t roll along on fixed railroad tracks pulling us along to some fated future. That’s just not how things work.

We create the world through the choices we make. We get to choose—and we get what we choose. Understanding how we choose is of paramount importance.

Understanding our choices is surprisingly hard to do. We're all constantly being bombarded by messages designed to influence our choices. To create desire within us. To seduce us, persuade us, influence us.

But the options presented by those messages aren't really choices. They're the illusions of choice. They don't require us to consider what we want. They only ask us if we want this thing or that thing.

True choice isn’t a shopping trip. It’s not picking between a catalogue of alternatives. Truly choosing is a creative act, not an act of consumption. It's about knowing who we are and what matters to us. It requires consciousness and self-knowledge. It takes creativity, imagination, and courage.

The billions of choices that human beings make every day can be understood is a struggle between the new and the old—two powerful forces pressing up against each other. The first is a deep craving for a better future—for ourselves and for those we love. The second—in direct opposition—is our tendency to cling to the comfort, security, and familiarity of the things that we know. The action between these impulses is the engine drives history.

The struggle between the old and the new is not a fair fight. We tell ourselves that we meet a changing world with enthusiasm and openness. The truth is that we are creatures of habit. Everything that has been has tremendous advantages over everything that might become. We prefer things that are familiar, and we distrust things that are new. Most of the choices we make are actually habits of choice.

We’ve been stuck with old stories from an old world. We no longer believe them, and yet we’ve not yet found new stories that could inspired us and unleash our energy and imagination.

Clinging to the past restricts our understanding. It limits us to thinking only about what’s been true, not what’s become possible. It confines our ingenuity, and hems in our drive to imagine, explore, and build. It keeps us blind to everything that has never been possible before this moment. It makes us comfortable settling for less.

To change the world, we first have to change our minds. We have to recharge our imaginations and revitalize our creativity. We have to scrap our old stories about what is and what is possible. We have to decide what it is that we really want. And to feel our own power to create.

Changing our minds starts with a tremendously liberating idea: that we’ve only begun to tap our reserves of creativity, ingenuity, and problem-solving and that new heights of progress and prosperity are there for us if we choose them.

Yes we are disillusioned. Let’s lean into it. Perhaps that’s the push we need to break through to the other side. To wake up to the power we have to choose and in choosing to change.