A little over a year ago, I started wondering whether we had become too good at removing from our lives everything that inconvenienced us, even slightly. I can no longer remember exactly what prompted the thought. Some ideas simply settle somewhere in the background, then return from time to time without our quite knowing why. This one kept returning.
Over time, we have done away with waiting, boredom, and much of uncertainty. We have learned to plan our routes, order food before we are hungry, know whether a restaurant is worth going to before we step inside, check the weather before we look at the sky. We can fill almost every empty minute, find an immediate answer to almost any question, see a place before we have ever set foot there. All of this is, of course, very convenient.
But I sometimes wonder whether, in removing so many small frictions and in-between moments from our lives, we have also removed, almost by accident, some of the conditions that allowed the world to surprise us. Perhaps enchantment depends on some of the very things we have spent years trying to eliminate: waiting, uselessness, mystery, slowness, surprise, imagination, attention.
There is a concept that has stayed with me since my student days: Max Weber’s idea of the “disenchantment of the world.” Very roughly put, it describes the way modernity made the world more rational, more explainable, more calculable. I would be hard-pressed now to reproduce everything I learned about it then, but the phrase itself has never quite left me.
The disenchantment of the world.
For a long time, I thought of it as a historical idea, something almost abstract. Now I sometimes wonder whether something similar has happened on a much smaller scale, in our own very ordinary lives. We have made them extraordinarily predictable: we can know, check, anticipate, optimize. And whenever we do not quite know what to do with the few minutes left between one thing and the next, there is always a screen to look at.
I do not think the answer is to give all of this up. Nor do I believe that a less convenient, less organized, more complicated life is necessarily a richer one. But perhaps it is worth asking whether an entire life really needs to be run like a well-oiled machine.
The question that interests me more is this: can a life remain fundamentally the same and still contain more mystery, pleasure, beauty and depth?
I tend to think it can. But I am beginning to suspect that it may require less adding and more removing.
We have perhaps become accustomed to thinking that a richer life is built by accumulation. A new place, a trip, a book, a dinner, a ritual, something to look forward to. These are often the very things I love most, and I do not think there is anything wrong with them. But it is surprisingly easy to move from enjoying their arrival to feeling that we always need more. Even pleasure can start to feel like something to manage.
And perhaps, in trying so hard to enrich our lives, we end up asking a great deal of them. We expect a day to be interesting. A trip to change us. A dinner to be memorable. A book to teach us something. A purchase to improve our lives. Perhaps some things become disenchanted simply because we ask too much of them.
Over the past few months, I have found myself wondering what happens when I do the opposite. When I allow certain things to become small again. When I do not necessarily try to know everything. When I protect my attention a little more carefully instead of letting it scatter across everything that presents itself.
I have begun to value curiosities that lead nowhere, things done without a project in mind, moments that produce nothing. Reading something without immediately asking what I might take from it. Walking without needing a destination. Leaving a question unanswered. Doing something simply because I enjoy it, without having to find another purpose for it.
There may be a kind of freedom in allowing some things to have no use beyond themselves.
And I think that has also made me more attentive to what was already there. A house. A meal. A season. A street I know by heart. A coat I bring out every year. For a long time, I associated wonder quite naturally with novelty. Now I wonder whether another kind of wonder appears with time: not the wonder of discovering, but of recognizing. Seeing something you already know and still being able to notice it.
Perhaps that requires less novelty than attention.
And really, there may be nothing very dramatic to do. That is part of what I like about the idea. A life does not need to be transformed in order to feel a little larger again. Sometimes it is enough not to fill the space the moment it appears, not to reach immediately for the next thing, to let something hold our attention for a while.
The world may not need to be extraordinary all the time in order to remain mysterious. A day does not need to contain a story in order to have been a good day. And wanting to feel enchanted all the time may simply be another way of making our lives feel insufficient.
Since this thought began following me around, I have tried a little less often to add something. I remove some noise. I leave some questions unanswered. I keep a few minutes empty. I return to the same places. And I am a little more willing to let some things remain ordinary.
I do not know if this is how one re-enchants a life. Perhaps there is not very much to do after all.
Only to let, from time to time, something useless, unexpected or unexplained happen to us without immediately trying to turn it into something else.
And see what happens.
Léonce
