Finding Meaning and Purpose in Disillusionment

Life is beset with challenges, and some of these can utterly break you. Tough relationships, persistent injustice, struggles with personal issues that do not seem to improve – all of these and many others can make doing life and enjoying it feel nearly impossible.

When you face obstacles, when your struggles seem intractable, when it seems like you are not making progress, or when you are deeply disappointed by someone you respect, you may feel you are drowning in disillusionment.

The meaning of disillusionment

Disillusionment occurs when we find that something or someone that we believed was good or possessed good qualities, is less than we believed. It might be an unfulfilling marriage or a job that is not satisfying as we thought it would be. It might be that the American dream, the idea of the white picket fence, family, and a life of pleasant diversions just has not delivered what you thought it would.

When you feel disillusioned, life feels purposeless as do relationships. It is losing the wind out of your sails. It is hard to keep going or to even know where to go if you were to move. Disillusionment can make you pause and ask yourself why you are even doing what you are doing in the first place.

Often, these discouraging feelings are closely connected to stages of life, such as midlife, after graduating from college, or having just had a baby. You may have followed the script, and done everything that society said you should have done, and you are expecting your due reward. However, once you get there, it does not seem worth it, or the rewards do not come.

Disillusionment can set in on the back of success. That success feels hollow because it does not deliver what you thought it would. However, disillusionment can also occur when you reach certain milestones and have not achieved all that you thought you would have at that point. You can therefore settle into disillusionment, feeling unhappy and disappointed that what you had hoped for has not happened.

Why we get disillusioned with life and in life

Hope is one of the defining characteristics of human existence. Though we do not always know what is ahead, we live with an expectation that good things will come. Sometimes, these expectations are set by society, or by our families. The people around us have hopes for us that they figure indicate thriving and flourishing in life. When we take these messages in, they shape how we live, and for what we think is worth living.

Often, the message we receive is that the fullness of life will be indicated by certain external markers and achievements. These are often associations, accomplishments, or material objects that supposedly indicate that we have arrived in life: the corner office, the beautiful spouse, the fancy car, the Instagram-worthy body, vacations, and the like.

When those do not deliver on the promise of happiness, we often blame them for it, seek to find newer and shinier objects, or different people, to find the happiness we are looking for. It is important for us to remember Jesus’ words: “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.” (Luke 12:15, NIV) Life is more than just our stuff, and the path toward happiness and out of disillusionment does not lie in acquiring more things, whatever they may be.

Meaning and purpose rediscovered

When you experience disillusionment, it can have a deep and devastating effect on your life. It can make life seem purposeless, values and principles meaningless, and it can make trying to seem pointless. Disillusionment can also have the effect of sending you on a mad scramble toward acquiring more and different things and experiences, all in the hope that maybe, this time, you will find what you have been looking for.

However, disillusionment can be addressed, and your sense of equilibrium, meaning, and purpose can be rediscovered. Moving beyond disillusionment lies in reassessing your foundations and your assumptions. Perhaps the rules you have been living by, and the hopes you have been nurturing, simply cannot deliver what they promise.

From a Christian perspective, we know that idols promise much, and they exact much from us, but they yield little in the way of true happiness.

Disillusionment can be dealt with by changing your outlook on life and realigning your goals and expectations. It may be valuable to embrace that disillusionment because it is better to see the world for what it is than to chase an illusion of what it is not. The late pastor and author Tim Keller explains it brilliantly.

Have you heard God’s blessing in your inmost being? Are the words, “You are my beloved child, in whom I delight” an endless source of joy and strength? Have you sensed, through the Holy Spirit, God speaking to you? That blessing- the blessing through the Spirit that is ours through Christ- is what Jacob received, and it is the only remedy against idolatry.

Only that blessing makes idols unnecessary. As with Jacob, we usually discover this only after a life of “looking for blessings in all the wrong places.” It often takes an experience of crippling weakness for us to finally discover it. That is why so many of the most God-blessed people limp as they dance for joy. – Tim Keller, Counterfeit Gods

Your experience of disillusionment is not necessarily negative. It may be God’s firm but gentle way of making you alive to the reality that we often look for blessings in places where all we will get is pain. True blessing can only come from God, and often our disillusionment is because we have sought that blessing in good, but not ultimate things.

Further, while disillusionment can foster apathy and a deep sense of life’s pointlessness, it can also be used to fuel positive action. When you find yourself feeling disillusioned, you can do the necessary work of understanding why you feel that way and turn that disillusionment into an impetus for action.

If you are disillusioned about the state of the world, for instance, instead of being caught in either apathy or impotent anger, you can move toward a deeper understanding of the issues, and work to find lasting solutions for them in the strength the Lord provides. Take whatever small steps you can to act according to what you know and do so with gentleness and empathy toward others.

Disillusionment as a hidden blessing

Being disillusioned is, in some ways, seeing reality for what it is. Your hopes can be dashed when you realize that what you had hoped for, and thought would bring you some measure of joy does not do so. This does not mean that your desires and hopes were meaningless; it may simply mean that they were misplaced. Disillusionment can foster a process of rediscovering what truly matters, and what can deliver the happiness you seek.

The famous Christian author C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity that when people get disillusioned, they can make the mistake of settling, not expecting much, and repressing the parts of themselves that yearn for lofty things. Others assume that the objects they placed their hopes on are the issue. Thus, a mad scramble ensues to try a different romantic partner or go on even more expensive holidays to capture the mysterious something that we are all after.

In contrast to these approaches, Lewis says:

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud.

Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage.

I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same – C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Getting help for disillusionment

If you find yourself feeling disillusioned, you can walk alongside someone to start climbing out. A professional Christian counselor can journey with you to discover and understand the sources of your disillusionment. Reach out to us today and we will connect you to a trained therapist from our directory who can walk with you as you rediscover your life’s purpose.