The Disintegration of Materialism
And a return to enchantment
We live inside a story. And the funny thing about stories is, once you've been in one long enough, you forget you're in it.
Our current tale? Materialist reductionism.
By materialism, I mean the worldview that reduces life to matter, mind to brain chemistry, and meaning to illusion.
By reductionism, I mean the tendency to break complex, living systems into isolated parts and assume that by understanding the parts, we’ve explained the whole.
And by materialist reductionism, I mean the fusion of both. A dominant cultural lens that treats the world as dead, mechanical, and ultimately devoid of intrinsic meaning. It’s the story that says only what can be measured is real, and everything else—intuition, spirituality, emotion, mystery—is either irrelevant or delusional.
Materialist Reductionism is the background hum of our culture. The wallpaper of our minds.
It’s our cultural story that says the world is just stuff. Consciousness is the side effect of having a brain. Meaning is something we invent to make peace with our cosmic insignificance (ok this I could pontificate on and potentially do agree with, but not in the way materialism tells us).
If this doesn’t sound like a very good story, I would have to agree. Except, what we forgot (or never realize in the first place) is that this story isn't universal.
It's not eternal.
It's not even particularly old.
For most of human history, people didn’t see the world as dead matter. They saw it as alive, ensouled, sacred. They didn’t compartmentalize spirit and science, self and other, human and nature. They lived in relationship with the world (mostly because they had to), not in domination over it.
Materialism, by comparison, is the new kid on the block. It’s culturally specific and historically recent. And yet we treat it like it's the final word on reality. We forget it's just a lens we’ve inherited. We’ve mistaken the map for the territory. The finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself.
So…where did it come from?
Our materialist worldview didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It grew up alongside industrialism, colonialism, and capitalism—and it served those systems extremely well. After all, a worldview that treats the Earth as a stockpile of resources and human lives (and bodies) as units to be managed fits neatly with economies built on extraction, exploitation, and control. It’s been remarkably effective at building empires and hitting quarterly targets.
…and less effective at fostering meaning, connection, or joy.
Which might explain why so many of us feel spiritually starved. Materialism doesn’t just flatten the world. It flattens us. It shrinks us into roles that make us easier to manage. It reduces us to being simply consumers, workers, tax payers, and algorithms.
It teaches us to look outside of ourselves for worth, meaning, and the divine.
Materialism rewires our instincts, feeding on the very human need to belong and twisting it into mimetic desire. So we end up fretting over things we never actually cared about: our salary, our pants size, our fancy new car or how pretty/new/big our house is.
These aren’t your dreams. They’re just the most socially acceptable ways to ask “Do I matter?”
And when that scream into the void echoes back unanswered, we’re handed another product, another dopamine hit, another promise that this one! this new fashion trend, this new gadget, this new hobby, this thing is going to do the trick.
We are trained to look outward for love, worthiness, and belonging, only to find that those things aren’t sold in stores (or even available outside our meat suit).
But instead of rethinking the premise, we double down. Because to fight against the collective current can be really difficult, and lonely. So we trudge onwards to the next purchase.
In this way, consumerism and materialism have become a kind of substitute religion. They offer rituals (shopping), beliefs (you are what you buy), and even temples (helloooo Target). We are lulled into complacency, swaddled in comfort, quietly trading depth, truth, and purpose for surface-level ease. Which works. Until it doesn’t. Until the ache becomes too loud, the hunger too sharp, the questions too persistent to ignore.
Materialism doesn’t persist because it’s fulfilling. It persists because it’s convenient. It’s tidy. It keeps our minds small, our egos manageable, our spirits dimmed just enough to keep us from revolting.
But it also keeps us lonely. It keeps us disconnected from each other, from the divine, and from the wild, radiant spark at the center of who we are.
What we’re left with is a kind of metaphysical hangover. We ache for something more, but we don’t know what it is or where to find it. So we open the phone and continue to scroll and shop and hustle. Keeping ourselves busy chasing goals we didn’t choose. We outsource our meaning and value to the algorithm, our peers, and strangers on the internet. And when that doesn’t work, we wonder what’s wrong with us.
But maybe there’s nothing wrong with us. Maybe we’re just trying to navigate an outdated operating system. An old story. One that doesn't match what we actually know to be true.
Quantum physics, for instance, has already pulled the rug out from classical materialism. Matter isn’t solid. Particles are also waves. Observation changes reality. At the tiniest levels, things get weirdly (and awesomely) poetic. Turns out, consciousness might not be a glitch in the machine.
…and that starts to sound a whole lot like what ancient, mystic, and indigenous traditions have been saying all along. That everything is connected. That the world is alive. That meaning isn’t something we manufacture. It’s something we participate in.
Humans are wired for spirituality. Our brains constantly seek out patterns and deeper meaning. Is it any wonder people are turning (or returning) to spirituality, mysticism, and ancestral wisdom? Not because we want to abandon reason, but because we’re starving for depth.
Despair is a good thing
This collective despair we all feel right now isn’t a bottom. It’s a beginning. It’s a sign our soul is done with whatever role we’ve been playing and is ready for something new. It’s a sign post of imminent expansion. We are ready for a new story.
This time with magic and mystery. One where we don’t have to pretend the universe is a giant vending machine and we’re just here to press buttons.
And, of course, all of this shifting is right on time. With all the cycles currently turning over, we are being offered the opportunity to re-enchant the world, and ourselves. To remember what we’ve always known deep down: that we belong to something vast, mysterious, and alive.
This isn’t a guaranteed transition. We will have to choose it again and again (paradigm shifts are inherently messy and long winded). But the energy is there. The timing is ripe.
What comes next isn’t about rejecting science (as a tool…scientism can go though) or even our five senses. It’s about expanding our frame. About integrating what we’ve exiled. It’s about remembering that reality is weirder and wilder than we were taught.
That we’re not alone in the universe, or even in ourselves.
Materialism had its moment. It told a story that served the empire. But that story has lost its chokehold on reality.
And now we get to dream bigger. We get to remember the sacred. We get to build a world where spirit and science, matter and mystery, intellect and intuition all have a seat at the table.
Because the world isn’t dead. And neither are we.
Til next time,
Marissa