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Key points
- Disenchantment—the breaking of spells—is critical to the process of change.
- Disenchantment doesn’t end ambition; it creates a different kind of ambition—a relocating of one's center of gravity.
- Enchantments include stories someone may tell themselves, fixation on the past or future, infatuation, conformity, or professional identity.
- Spells are undone when one sees through an illusion, awakens to something, or feels disappointed with the pursuit of happiness.
In the decade following college, when I worked at a newspaper, I prided myself on having a sense of direction in life, being on the go, having goals, and going after them with a determination that once prompted a grocery store clerk to say, “You frown too much and walk too fast. Slow down. You’ll live longer.” (I was 22 at the time).
One day, I left work early and drove to a state park north of town. Instead of walking the familiar trails, though, I bushwhacked for several miles deep into the forest, and when I couldn’t hear the sounds of civilization anymore, I stopped and spun around in circles until I toppled over on the ground. When I got up and tried to get my bearings I realized I’d lost them. Happily lost.
The points on the compass were just ideas in my head. Retracing my steps was impossible. I couldn’t even tell from which fold in the forest I’d stumbled onto that spot, though I knew how I got there, to the point of wanting to lose myself, wanting to walk around aimlessly for once, free of ambition and the burden of purpose.
The experience of disenchantment
In his book Transitions, William Bridges describes “disenchantment” as a key precursor of change, a signal that things are moving into reappraisal and transition—which that day in the forest helped me begin. Disenchantment isn't necessarily disappointment, though that may be part of it. Rather, it's the breaking of a spell or trance; an enchantment in the archaic sense of being not so much captivated by something as held captive, occupied not as in absorbed, but as in taken over.
Disenchantment starts when you become disillusioned with some aspect of the status quo, awaken to something you were asleep to, question authority, fall out of love, experience the death of a dream, or find yourself disappointed with the pursuit of happiness. Inside you, a bubble bursts, and you begin looking beneath the surface of what you always thought to be a given.
And it can happen in a perfectly ordinary moment. For example, I recently took myself on a long beach walk and, as usual, found myself thinking too much—planning, problem-solving, processing, cataloging, brainstorming, hashing, and rehashing. Suddenly I caught myself. “Stop thinking!” I said out loud. Just be present, because this whole beautiful irretrievable afternoon is slipping by in a blur of mental chatter.
And suddenly there it was, the one-and-only Present Moment: the swirling blue ocean, the warm sand, cliffs trickling with recent rainwater, gulls wheeling by on the wind. And for a precious little while, I awoke from one of my default positions—up in my head—and was just being there now, my henhouse of a mind briefly settled, the tangled world briefly unknotted.
Enchantments that keep us spellbound
The enchantments that can keep us spellbound are legion: the stories we tell ourselves, the enthrallment of infatuation, fixation on the past or future, the principles of conformity, the reigning values, the denial of death, professional identity, the scripts handed down to us through parenting, schooling, gendering, and bibling—which can become the habits of a lifetime, if not forms of hypnosis.
And ones that are famously hard to break. A scene in the movie Papillon captures this convincingly. Steve McQueen plays the title character Papillon (butterfly in French), and in one scene he's released from a long stretch of solitary confinement, during which he'd gotten into the habit of counting off the number of steps he could take in any direction inside the cell, which was five.
The guard lets him out, and he begins walking slowly down the stone corridor, counting off the steps. On the fifth step, he stops, looks around bewildered, and for the first time in years takes a sixth step—on which he passes out cold. It was a perfect illustration of how literally overwhelming it can be to take even a single step beyond what’s familiar—even when what’s familiar is a prison.
Not that enchantment necessarily looks or feels like a prison. Sometimes it looks like paradise, a word that means a garden—though significantly a walled garden. An enchantment may be a fixation, a narrowing down of your attention and wherewithal, but it can help align you with your goals. If you value the material life, for instance, the compulsion toward consumerism will serve you. If you seek to protect yourself from difficult emotions, the trance of denial will serve you.
Still, the bonds of trance can be broken, leading you toward change if not liberation. And anything that helps you step outside of trances—self-reflective practices like meditation, journaling, and therapy, or even a radical idea whose time has come—can help you un-identify with them.
I remember an episode during which my ex-wife and I were having a fight and were stuck under the spell of it. At her bidding, we each filled a pot with water, sat on the ground back to back, and on cue began simultaneously shouting out our grievances. Not at each other, just out. Out of our systems. Then when we had momentarily exhausted ourselves, we stood up and poured our pots of water over each other's heads.
It’s very hard to keep a straight face under such circumstances.
In a single moment of snapping out of it—or being snapped out of it—you set change in motion, or at least the understanding that you can change. Whether it lasts an afternoon or a lifetime, you can kickstart the process of something coming to an end—a habit, a mindset, a career, a relationship, a lifestyle. Whatever is next may still be unknown, and you're in the trough between trapeze bars, between an ending and a new beginning. Bridges calls it the neutral zone, and frankly, it's a stinker, this uncertainty and not knowing—especially for anyone attached to the status quo, or to being in control.
Growth in the "third age"
Disenchantment can happen anywhere along the developmental track, but it tends to pick up steam in what's called the Third Age (60s and up). But the Third Age isn't like the first two, devoted to biological development, productivity, and empire-building, and presided over by the hungry ghost of ambition.
Its agendas are both more deconstructive and expansive—making peace with limitation, devoting yourself to generativity and service, celebrating the preciousness of life and love. And reports from the front lines have it that the courage to rise and meet the Third Age, or simply the demands of change—beginning with admitting to disenchantment and understanding that it doesn't mean something is wrong but something is changing—leads to a life more well-lived and gratefully embraced.
Disenchantment in the Third Age isn't about the end of ambition, though, but a different kind of ambition, a relocating of your center of gravity from what New York Times columnist David Brooks calls resume virtues to eulogy virtues—from those devoted to earthly success to those devoted to emotional and spiritual fulfillment.
It's typically a shift from me to we, work to relationship, competition to cooperation, money-making to meaning-making. If you continue to have a career, it's likely to be what's called an encore career—less about continuing to build the resume and climb the ladder, and more about meaning, purpose, contribution, and the call of eldering.
If you exit the career track at this point, it won't necessarily mean retirement but rewirement, a reordering of your priorities, toward ones equally worthy of your energies, equally compelling and valuable, if not more so: the building of community and relationships, helping those coming up through the ranks behind you, the enjoyment of nature and contemplation, the making of peace with yourself that may have so far eluded you.
This phase isn't just the continued repetition of your life's triumphs and achievements, but stepping onto roads less traveled, ones that may even lead you to completely redefine success, as I did not long after that dizzy day in the forest. I soon left my job as a reporter to become a freelance writer, and began to count myself a success not so much as a writer but because I was a writer; because I was following my calling.
(Granted, much of this will probably seem like a luxury if you're struggling just to pay the bills and keep your chin above the waterline. If your primary ambition is simply survival, you're unlikely to swoon at the idea of self-actualization.)
But the shift from resume to eulogy virtues isn't about relinquishing your attachment to results and goals. Growth itself is a kind of ambition, and the hunger to grow a built-in hedge against stagnation and entropy. It’s what stirs your interest in life, helping you awaken from everyday trances and torpors, and stay engaged with the world as a function of the primary calling of all creatures—maximum aliveness. I'm not advocating for any Buddhistic ideal of desirelessness. “The problem is not desire,” the Indian spiritual teacher Sri Nisargadatta once said. “It’s that your desires are too small.”
Enlarging them may mean shifting from material life toward spiritual life, competition toward collaboration, conformity toward authenticity, or infatuation toward real love.
So you might ask in what ways the status quo you inhabit has become too small for you, and what enlargement of it might look like? Much that's creative, adventurous, and life-giving in the human story—and our own individual lives—arises from acts of defying limits, seeing through illusions, and taking that sixth step.
