"Disenchantment refers to the gradual draining of meaning from systems that once helped us make sense of the world. Its symptoms were first diagnosed in the aftermath of the Enlightenment. By the 18th century, Europe was suffocating under the weight of its own rational success. Knowledge had been fractured into disciplines, as universities divided philosophy, mathematics, theology, and the natural sciences. God was dead, or dying, and industrialisation had pulled people from the rhythms of nature and placed them inside factories. The air thickened with soot and existential dread.
The intellectual air had gone stale; people needed to breathe. Artists and scientists alike began to re-humanise the world. It was scandalous to read science and philosophy together, but they did it anyway. They began to rebel against their professors, insisting that imagination and feeling were also forms of knowledge. They met in cafés and salons, wrote pamphlets, painted, composed, and argued late into the night. They rediscovered meaning through community and creation.
The age of reason gave birth to its own Romantic revolt — a slow, collective exhale spanning 60–80 years across multiple parts of Europe. A whole lifetime for some.
It’s tempting to believe we’re approaching a similar inflection point. The Enlightenment had its factories; we have algorithms. Theirs were powered by steam, ours by stolen data. Both promised liberation but delivered monotony, both reduced life to what could be measured, optimised, or monetised.
Maybe the next Romantic era is already germinating in the cracks of our disenchantment?"
