Disillusionment is a threshold
Jan 20, 2026
When the ground starts to slip
Something old is ending.
Not suddenly.
Not cleanly.
And not in a way that makes for a satisfying headline.
It’s ending the way things usually do in real life: slowly, unevenly, with long stretches of denial punctuated by moments where the floor gives just enough to make you stop mid-step and say, oh…
For a long time now, many of us have been carrying a low-grade sense that the world is sliding sideways. Not collapsing outright — not yet — but no longer behaving the way the stories promised it would. Institutions feel brittle. Assurances feel thinner. The future feels oddly unavailable.
In response, most public conversations offer one of two flavours:
panic — “everything is doomed!”
or reassurance — “next election cycle!”
Neither one is much help.
Panic exhausts us. Like an explosion, energy dissipated in all directions.
Reassurance asks us to keep pretending. Exhausting in its own way.
What I want to try here is something different.
I’m not interested in predicting what will happen next, or convincing anyone of a particular political diagnosis. I’m more interested in a simpler, more direct question:
What helps ordinary people stay grounded, capable, and connected when the ground beneath us starts to slip?
Because the part that is really exhausting isn’t what’s happening out there.
It (mostly) comes from the effort of maintaining our bearings when old expectations no longer match lived reality.
Something we were leaning on is no longer holding our weight.
And the strain of pretending otherwise is starting to show.
Disillusionment is a threshold
We use the word disillusionment as if it names a failure — a loss of hope, a slide into cynicism, a sign that someone has “given up.”
But disillusionment is simply what happens when illusions dissolve.
And illusions, by definition, were never doing the work we asked of them. We hoped they would shield us from the pain of reality, instead they made everything worse by encouraging us to organize our lives around stories that couldn’t survive contact with the world as it actually is.
The ground isn’t shifting to punish us.
It’s shifting because it was never as solid as we pretended.
For a long time, our shared arrangements rested on a set of quiet assumptions that rarely had to be spoken out loud:
- that someone else was in charge;
- that if we followed the rules and voted at the right times, things would more or less take care of themselves.
- that the costs of our comfort and convenience could be deferred, transferred, or ignored;
- that nature would absorb whatever we asked of it; and
- that the people adversely affected by these arrangements would remain largely invisible.
These assumptions were woven quietly into the structure of everyday life. They just weren’t as easy to see when conditions were easier — when growth smoothed over contradictions, when abundance masked extraction, when distance allowed consequences to land “over there” and to “those people.”
None of this required conspiracy. It only required maintaining the status quo — and a shared willingness not to look too closely or ask uncomfortable questions. In exchange for convenience, comfort, and a sense of safety, we gradually handed over something more fundamental: the ability to govern ourselves.
Democracy, in this context, functioned less as collective self-rule and more as a kind of story-management system. It offered rituals of participation and the language of justice, while leaving the deeper operating assumptions largely untouched. As long as the outcomes felt tolerable to enough people, the distinction didn’t matter much.
Now it does.
As material limits press in and long-ignored inequalities sharpen, the system is forced to show its priorities more plainly. And what’s being revealed isn’t especially new — though it is sobering.
When push comes to shove, the machinery is remarkably good at protecting concentrations of wealth and power and remarkably indifferent to the rest. The shock that most are feeling right now is finding out we were part of the “rest” all along.
Systems built to maximize extraction and control don’t suddenly change under pressure. They become more explicit.
And those assumptions weren’t just political. They were physiological. They shaped how we moved through the world — how much responsibility we took, how much agency we practiced, how much uncertainty we learned to tolerate.
When the assumptions are challenged, the resulting distress can look like fear, anger, or numbness. But underneath all of that is something simpler and more precise: a mismatch between expectation and reality.
Disillusionment is what happens when expectation finally loses the argument.
There is relief on the other side of that — but it doesn’t arrive first.
First comes grief.
Grief for the beautiful dream we were promised, that never quite materialized.
Grief for the idea that someone was in charge — someone who would keep us safe.
Science. The Wise Politician. The Big Guy with a Beard on a Cloud.
Grief for the idea of progress — that the system would cheat nature and give us immortality.
Grief for the hope that we could fix things simply by electing the right people or “liking” the right memes.
What’s being lost here isn’t the world.
It’s the story we told ourselves about how the world works.
And stories, once they stop functioning, don’t need to be defended. They need to be mourned — and then released.
This is where many conversations go off the rails. Some people double down on the old narrative, treating any challenge as nihilism or betrayal. Others swing toward rage, searching for villains to carry the weight of their disorientation and sense of betrayal.
But disillusionment, properly met, isn’t a dead end.
It’s a threshold.
We can let disillusionment do its work. Mourn and move on.
That doesn’t mean celebrating collapse or pretending the losses don’t matter. It means allowing ourselves to feel the sadness of realizing that the dream we were sold was never really real.
And then noticing what’s left, once the fog begins to clear.
What becomes possible when we stop pretending
On the other side of disillusionment, something unexpected appears.
Not optimism.
Not certainty.
But sobriety.
A quiet steadiness — like putting down a weight you didn’t realize you were carrying until your shoulders finally let go.
When the illusion of external rescue falls away, something else becomes visible:
the actual capacities we still have;
the limits we can no longer ignore;
and the fact that self-government — personal and collective — was never meant to be outsourced in the first place.
Seen clearly, the system we’ve been living inside doesn’t look “broken” so much as revealed. It did exactly what it was designed to do — and one of the ways it managed that was by encouraging disconnection, isolation, and chronic dysregulation.
That realization can be strangely clarifying.
It suggests that learning to find balance, connection, and integration isn’t just a matter of personal well-being. It’s also a quiet refusal to keep supplying energy to arrangements that never really served us.
You don’t have to fight the system to weaken it.
You don’t have to defeat it in some grand, heroic sense.
At a certain point, simply refocusing your energy to what’s really real — rather than around the stories that kept you compliant and exhausted — does more work than outrage ever could.
This isn’t about restoring a past that never really existed.
And it isn’t about waiting for a future rescue.
It’s about maturation.
When the ground gives way, the question isn’t who to blame.
It’s how to find your balance.
Not panic.
Not persuasion.
And not an excuse to wait for someone else to take responsibility.
Just an invitation to notice what’s actually happening — without flinching — and to ask what becomes possible once we stop expending so much energy on maintaining illusions.
We have a choice.
We can fight reality — tense our bodies, hold our breath — stomp our feet and shake our fists — exhausting ourselves trying to make everything stand still.
Or we can find our feet, widen our stance, and begin learning how to ride the waves together.
Once we stop pretending someone else is in charge, we don’t lose much and we gain agency.
Disillusionment clears the fog.
It doesn’t tell us what to do next.
But it gives us permission to stop believing the lie.
And that turns out to be a necessary starting point.
Our greatest hope: Less alone than the system expects
The systems that are stumbling now draw much of their power by keeping people isolated, exhausted, and waiting.
Waiting for clarity.
Waiting for permission.
Waiting for someone else to step in and take responsibility.
The antidote to that isn’t heroism.
It isn’t optimism.
And it isn’t clinging to stories that no longer match reality.
It’s relationship.
Not as sentiment, but as infrastructure.
Not as idea, but as capacity.
Not as nostalgia, but as something practiced — imperfectly, locally, and in real time.
We don’t meet this moment well by figuring it out or fixing is.
We face it by knowing that we’re not facing it alone.
That’s where coordination begins and where our real power comes from.
When the illusions fade, what remains isn’t nothing.
What remains is us —
still here,
still capable of learning,
still able to widen our stance,
and still able to stand together on what’s real.
That may not be the story we were promised.
But it’s one we can live with.
Link to : Part II, Learning to stand together.