Disillusionment is what happens when we discover that something we believed in isn’t as real and as vital as we thought it was. It’s the realization that the rules we’ve been following came from a game that never existed outside of our own imagination. It’s an awakening to the painful truth that our sacrifices have been meaningless, achieving nothing but loss.
The trouble with illusions is that it’s impossible to tell if you’ve really escaped them. Once you’ve realized that what seems to be real can just be a convincing simulation, it’s difficult to believe in the reality of anything with a whole heart. One disillusion tends to lead to another.
Some people push away from the deeper insight that disillusionment provides, and find struggle to find something new to believe in, not really caring whether the foundations for this new attachment are real. A more stable, if less emotionally satisfying recovery from disillusionment comes through the realization that, although certain knowledge of reality is impossible, it is possible to get through life with working models of what’s going on, with an eye always open to the possibility that those models are wrong.
