I’ve spent the past year circling the concept of re-enchantment.

Apparently it’s illegal to get your PhD without reading a shit ton of Max Weber (and Foucault, that cue-ball head mf’er is always popping up when you least expect him, jump scare!), and even though I’d been familiar-ish with Weber’s Theory of Disenchantment, I really spent time with it for the first time this year.

Weber’s ideas still hit 100 years later because he’s sort of the blueprint for aspiring haters everywhere — a crotchety ass hoe, god love him — and because his critiques of modernity and technology have remained relevant. In his essay, “Science as Vocation,” Weber floats the theory that scientism demystified the world. Alongside this newfound positivist view (with science, there is a rational and positivist answer to every question) communal identification was replaced by bureaucratic connections; these combined forces sucked the magic and mystery from our lives. Booooooo! The world was formerly an unknowable, brimming-with-possibilities place. Now every question has an answer.

I think we’re going through another era of disenchantment, thanks to the algorithms that run our lives. Even though we might not know how exactly they work, we understand that if we feed the machine inputs, it will spit out a logical (if not mysterious) output. The proliferation of AI everywhere isn’t helping.

Operating in a disenchanted world is deadening to the spirit.

And I’m convinced many of our icky feelings that we spend hundreds of dollars and hours trying to “cure” are actually rooted (or at least influenced) by drudging through a disenchanted world:

• burnout

• overwhelm

• general malaise and ennui

• existential dread

• feelings of not-enoughness

• feelings of being washed up, not far enough ahead

• ambiguous life purpose

• lacking inspiration

• lack of focus or discipline

The thing is, it’s so easy to be disenchanted by the world. At least it is for me. It becomes a habit to see the world a certain way. But to re-enchant the world for yourself is a habit, too. (The new habit crowds out the old one)

I’m calling this the Summer of Re-enchantment. Instructions to come…