Dis-Illusionment

The word disappointment has a bad reputation. Nobody wants to be disappointed. We avoid it wherever we can. We buy insurance against it, we surround ourselves with confirmation, we consume content that tells us we’re right. Disappointment feels like loss. Like failure. Like something that shouldn’t have happened.

But if you break the word apart, there’s something else in it. Dis-illusionment. The end of the illusion. That’s not a negative experience. It’s the only way truth enters a system built on illusion.

For years, I sold something that may have rested on an illusion. Not a deliberate lie. A collective agreement not to look too closely. The customers wanted to believe. We wanted to sell. Both sides had an interest in keeping the illusion intact. And it held. For a long time.

Who buys something like that? Athletes. Homemakers. Executives. People with back pain. People who were exhausted. People who wanted an edge or just something that helps. No specific type. No specific demographic. A cross-section. And they all had one thing in common: the hunger for something that works.

That’s not stupid. That’s human. We all search for things that make us stronger, healthier, clearer. We all want it to work. And when someone puts something in your hand and says, this will help, you want to believe it. Not because you’re naive. But because the desire for something that works is stronger than the desire for truth.

I wanted to believe it myself. I wished for nothing more than for it to actually work. Not just for the business. Because it would have been easier. Because the contradiction would have stopped. Because I could have said: it works, people feel it, science will catch up eventually.

Science didn’t catch up.

The disillusionment came slowly. No single moment, no lightning bolt, no waking up. More like a layer peeling off. First small cracks. Then bigger ones. Then the picture you built for yourself collapses. Not dramatically. Quietly.

And afterwards you stand there and see things as they are. Without a filter. Without the story you’d been telling yourself. It’s not a good feeling. It’s a sober feeling. But it’s the first honest feeling in a long time.

What I’ve learned: we pay a high price for not being disillusioned. We pay with money when we buy things that don’t deliver what they promise. We pay with time when we stay in situations that don’t work. We pay with self-respect when we defend things we no longer believe in ourselves.

All of that we pay to keep the illusion going. To not have to look. To keep believing that what we tell ourselves is true.

This doesn’t just apply to bracelets with holograms. It applies to jobs we know are destroying us. To relationships where nobody has asked in a long time whether it’s still real. To political convictions we no longer examine because the examination would cost too much. To self-images we polish even though we know they’re not authentic.

Everywhere, we pay the price for not being disillusioned. And everywhere, disillusionment would be the cheaper path. Because it only hurts once. Maintaining the illusion costs you every day.

I carried the lie of that time inside me. Not as some grand conspiracy. As an everyday agreement. And the process of letting go wasn’t finished until I was ready to see the word disillusionment not as loss, but as what it is: the only way out.

Real change is only possible through disillusionment. That’s uncomfortable. That hurts. Nobody wants to hear it. But it’s the only sentence in this whole story I can sign without reservation.

We can keep paying not to be disillusioned. Or we can pay the price once and see more clearly afterwards.

I paid. It was worth it.