Moving into adulthood is such a weird phase. And the further you move into your life, you start getting more and more disillusioned. It’s a feeling that grapples you and doesn’t let go.
It starts when you finally move out of your house and adolescence. Maybe you joined an uni/college at another city, or maybe you started a job. That is, when life forces you to move out of your comfort zone and tackle the Other[1].
In my opinion, disillusionment is the feeling of disbelief when you notice the misalignment of your beliefs and ideas to the world’s. When you see how fragile your mental models are. It’s when you truly notice that society, economy, politics really exist and are not mythical creatures of some book. In other words: you thought the world was nicer, but now you’re starting to see that it’s not, and so you feel disillusioned.
There’s no “orientation” or no ice-breaking session to this new phase of life. Everything you do is ad-hoc, with whatever cognitive, mental, social resources immediately available to you. You suspend your existing mental models and build new ones from scratch, often at the cost of mental health and energy that could’ve been used somewhere more important.[2]
School plays a big (negative) role in setting up for this. “School life” is a completely isolated game, where the rules of “real life” don’t apply. As long as you obey the institution and the machinery that supports it, you’re settled. You don’t have to worry about your political allegience, the country’s future, when that aunt in the neighbourhood will snap at you, career and salary, and so on.
In hindsight, twelve years of my school life was a façade, to stall the impending doom of having to confront the actual nature of life. It made me a bit too comfortable; something that I am regretting as of now. It taught me how to be dependent on resources, structures, support systems. I don’t exactly know the reason why school must be different than real life; perhaps because it’s a method of social control, and not really a medium to instill knowledge?
Anyhow, people (including me) get so used to this “easier” school life that they start believing whatever they experience in their school life must be true in real life when they graduate, leading to increased sense of disillusionment. This is why young adults yearn to live their school lives again. To experience that innocence again, to not be corrupted by the absurd nature of the world.
At the other end of the spectrum, children who can’t attend schools (because of various reasons such as poverty, unavailibility, etc.) have better approximations of how factors like money, societal norms, etc. can affect the quality of life of an individual and a community, and thus, they better optimise for that quality of life. In a sense, their whole life becomes an optimisation game, mostly full of despair, which is not really nice either.
Then, what lies in the middle? Is there a bridge between a fantastical, safe “bubble” and the harsh Tartarus we call “adulting”?
And how do you really cope with disillusionment? What most people do is escape. For one, it’s drug abuse, alcoholism, internet pornography, video game addiction, etc. For another, it’s creation, traveling, and that sort of thing. Writing this blog is my way of escaping from despair, by way of trying to understand the phenomenon itself.
I think some schools of thought, like absurdism and existentialism are made to counter this sense disillusionment. I can’t help but notice that my definition of disillusionment very closely relates to what absurdity means to Camus. (Perhaps, I am describing a subset of absurdity, with a mixture of Han’s “Otherness”; I am really loving this.) But aligning oneself to a philosophy/virtue ethic is much harder than it seems.
Now, I should make it clear that I am not saying that there shouldn’t be any disillusionment. It is, in fact, necessary to propel mankind in a new direction. There must always be an anti-thesis to a thesis, to form a synthesis[3]. I think these moments of disillusionment, despite being dreadful, could very well serve as datapoints that we can use to improve ourselves and re-evaluate our own values as well as the values of our community.
My only problem is that why the fuck does it have to be this bad? Why the fuck does it want to choke me to death? Couldn’t it be less daunting?
But on the bigger picture, maybe this is what life really is- about disillusionments and coming to terms with it. About surviving; which all animals do, but because we are humans, we have more flexibility on how we should survive. Maybe disillusionments are the modern equivalent of a tiger chasing the hunter-gatherer.
As I am writing this, I have a feeling, a conviction, that the human condition is complex (and beautiful), that to understand it whole, I have to spend an eternity studying a ton of things- sociological studies, economics, behavioral science, philosophy, history, and so on. And I very much want to do that after I am out of the Kafkaesque machine called “formal education”.
I feel better when I think of studying the fields of humanities. Because when I study, I escape.
Here I am referring to Byung Chul-Han’s concept of “The Other,” which can be better understood in his books The Expulsion of The Other, The agony of eros, etc. ↩︎
But the good thing is that these newer mental models often makes living easier in the future. So it’s something like an one-time investment. ↩︎
This is the Hegelian Dialectic ↩︎