The world was never disenchanted. We were.

Reflections on beauty, and learning to see again.

“The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”

Eden Phillpotts

The image doesn’t come close to capturing the beauty of the stormy sky.

Last week, I was standing on my balcony as a typical late-afternoon Highveld thunderstorm blew past. Lightning flashing between the clouds, swallows dancing on wind currents, sheets of rain. And suddenly, the whole eastern sky turned a vibrant orange-pink, so bright that the full rainbow that suddenly appeared was almost invisible.

I was awe-struck. I grabbed my camera to attempt to capture the beauty, and I thought to myself: When did we forget that the world is enchantingly alive?

Not alive in the way we grudgingly admit — biology, ecosystems, the mechanics of life. Alive in the way that invites wonder and that asks something of us. That offers orientation. That speaks, if we remember how to listen.

What we lost (and what it cost us)

A book I recently discovered is Jason Josephson-Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment. The title gives away the central argument.

We’ve been told a story about modernity - that as our knowing became more sophisticated, we traded magic for mechanism, wonder for explanation, meaning for efficiency. That the belief that “once upon a time, the world was enchanted” belonged to less sophisticated times, there was no magic to drain away.

The problem is: this isn’t what happened.

The world is enchanted. Perhaps not in the sense of fairies and spells, but in the sense that it exceeds our frameworks. That beauty stops us. That meaning finds us. That living systems behave with an intelligence we can sense but not fully explain. We know this, and new sciences are starting to catch up to that knowing. We simply learned not to say it out loud for fear of being judged.

According to Josephson-Storm, many of the founders of modern science, sociology, and anthropology privately held enchanted worldviews while publicly advancing rationalist frames. “Disenchantment” became a posture. A way serious people were expected to speak. A performance of maturity that bore little relationship to actual experience.

The world was never stripped of its enchantment. We just learned to avert our gaze.

Disenchantment, then, is not a discovery about reality; it is a training of perception.

This matters more than we might think. Because when we taught ourselves not to see aliveness, beauty, mystery - we didn’t just lose aesthetic pleasures. We lost something essential to human functioning.

Aaron Antonovsky, the medical sociologist who studied why some people thrive despite hardship while others collapse, identified what he called “sense of coherence” - the felt experience that life is comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful. Without it, we get sick. With it, we can navigate almost anything.

Three aspects:

Comprehensibility: the sense that what happens is ordered enough to orient by. That patterns exist. That the world makes some kind of sense.

Manageability: the sense that we have sufficient resources to meet what we face. That we have capacity and support. That demands don’t permanently exceed our ability to cope.

Meaningfulness: the sense that life is worthy of engagement. That what we do matters. That there’s a reason to invest ourselves.

Right now, the world we live in has largely been stripped of all three.

And the disenchantment of our perception hollows all three even further.

It makes the world harder to comprehend, because it denies some patterns we actually perceive, dismissing beauty, intuition, and felt sense as “merely subjective.” It makes us reach for authoritarian leaders promising certainty, for conspiracy theories - anything to find some stable ground in a world that no longer makes sense.

It reduces our felt capacity by narrowing what counts as legitimate knowing to the analytical and explicit, leaving us unable to trust our embodied intelligence. And in a world where AI is hollowing out the value of knowledge and expertise, what remains?

It drains meaningfulness directly - because meaning requires contact with what exceeds our grasp. Mystery. Beauty. Aliveness. Exactly what disenchantment trained us to ignore and judge as fluff.

We are not thriving. And I don’t think this is incidental.

This question - how humans and organisations retain coherence in conditions of uncertainty - sits at the heart of my Waycraft and Waysfinding work.

Re-enchantment is not what you think

So what would it mean to re-enchant?

It is not an outright rejection of science or rational inquiry. Not romanticising the past or abandoning critical thinking.

It is: Restoring our capacity to perceive beauty, mystery, and aliveness as legitimate sources of meaning and orientation. And remaining curious and open to what we cannot rationally explain.

It’s not about adding beliefs. It’s about loosening a narrowing filter.

Or, to put it more sharply: re-enchantment is learning to see that what looks fixed is actually contextual, provisional, and alive, i.e. not mistaking stability for finality.

If disenchantment is a cultivated blindness - a story we learned to tell, a narrowing of perception we practised until it felt like truth - then re-enchantment isn’t about going backwards. It’s about dropping a pretence we’ve maintained so long we forgot it was a pretence.

Re-enchantment, in this light, is not nostalgia.

And it’s not optional. It’s salutogenic, a precondition for human thriving.

Beauty as Affordance

When we learned to look away, we lost something: beauty as a way of orienting.

I don’t mean beauty as aesthetic preference - the pleasant, the decorative, the optional. I mean beauty as epistemic, as one of the ways humans recognise what matters.

Think about what beauty does. It draws attention. Creates care. Invites presence. When something strikes us as beautiful, we slow down. We look more closely. We feel, before we can articulate why, that we’re in the presence of something that holds together.

Beauty is not purely subjective, a preference projected onto a neutral world. But neither is it purely objective - a property sitting in objects independent of any perceiver. I believe that beauty is relational. It arises in the meeting between a structure and a capacity to perceive it.

The structure has properties: coherence, proportion, complexity - even ambiguity, held within a form that doesn’t collapse.

The perceiver has sensitivities: a nervous system tuned to recognise patterns and a body that responds to aliveness. I think Beauty is what happens when they meet.

This is close to what the psychologist James Gibson meant by “affordance” - the properties that exist in the relationship between an organism and its environment. A path affords walking to a creature with legs. The affordance is neither purely in the object nor purely in the perceiver. It emerges in the encounter. Beauty works the same way.

A spiral affords recognition of coherence to a system attuned to coherence. A sunset affords awe to a creature capable of awe. Beauty isn’t projected onto the world, nor is it sitting there independent of any perceiver. It arises in the relationship.

Affordances are about viability. They’re about what actions and ways of living become possible in a given relationship. Gibson was interested in perception for action - how organisms perceive what matters for their continued existence.

If beauty is an affordance, then beauty is also about viability.

Beauty can therefore be seen as the felt sense of affordance at the level of coherence itself.

When we perceive something as beautiful, we’re perceiving its capacity to support and generate life. We’re sensing viable form before we can justify it analytically.

This is why beauty matters for our sense of coherence. It’s not decorative. It’s how we perceive comprehensibility at a level deeper than thought. A beautiful structure - whether a landscape, an organisation, or a life - is one where patterns can be felt, where orientation becomes possible, where the world makes sense to the body before it makes sense to the mind.

Mystery is not ignorance or naivety

There’s a resistance to re-enchantment that runs deeper than aesthetics, though. It’s the fear that mystery means giving up on rationality. That if we allow the world to be mysterious, we’re excusing ourselves from rigour.

But mystery and science aren’t opposites.

Every genuine inquiry begins in mystery - the felt sense that something exceeds our current grasp. And every genuine explanation opens onto deeper mystery. The more we understand, the more we recognise what we don’t understand. Ask any scientist who’s honest about their work.

What disenchantment did was mistake a particular kind of explanation - mechanical, reductive, and closed - for the whole story. It said: if we can’t explain it in those terms, it’s not worth attending to. Or worse, it doesn’t really exist.

This is how we lose access to meaning.

Because meaning doesn’t come from certainty. Meaning arises in our relationship with the ineffable. The experience of awe, of wonder, of beauty that stops the breath, of falling in love, of achieving a flow state at work - these aren’t decorative emotions. They’re signals that we’re in contact with something that matters. Something larger than our frameworks.

Mystery, understood this way, is not a failure of explanation. It’s a feature of living systems. Reality is inexhaustible. No map captures the territory. No model contains the system it models. There is always more.

This is Antonovsky’s meaningfulness: the sense that engagement is worthy, that demands deserve our investment. Meaningfulness doesn’t come from having everything figured out. It comes from felt contact with something worth engaging, something that transcends and calls us.

Leaders who cannot tolerate mystery collapse complexity into control. They flatten the world to fit their frameworks. They optimise for what can be measured, not for what actually matters. And then they wonder why the life drains out of their organisations, their strategies, and their people.

The Cost of Optimisation

Disenchantment is not neutral.

It might seem neutral, rational even. It presents itself as simply “seeing things as they are.” But it carries an implicit claim: that the world is essentially a machine, and our job is to manage it efficiently.

This is where optimisation becomes a kind of violence.

When we treat living systems — organisations, communities, ecosystems, ourselves — as machines to be optimised, we strip out exactly the signals that guide responsive movement. We eliminate the “inefficiencies” that turn out to be essential slack. We standardise what needs to be diverse. We accelerate what needs time. We force what needs to emerge.

Disenchantment doesn’t just thin meaning, it undermines the very conditions Antonovsky identified as essential for human health, making the world harder to orient to, harder to cope with, and harder to care about.

Optimisation, pursued without wisdom, is pathogenic. It generates the very conditions that make thriving impossible.

Then we wonder why things break. Why burnout has become endemic. Why our strategies fail as soon as conditions change. Why meaning has become so scarce.

The disenchanted stance pretends objectivity. But it’s actually a stance of control. Of protection against uncertainty. Of refusal to be affected by what we encounter.

Re-enchantment, by contrast, is the courage to remain open to what cannot be fully explained — without abandoning discernment. It’s choosing to ask “what is possible from here?” rather than “how do I survive”, or “how do I win this round?”

Waycraft works at this different level. It is less concerned with better answers than with cultivating the human capacity to stay present, perceptive, and responsive when answers are partial or unavailable. This is important because I’ve seen how leaders who can stay present to mystery - who can hold uncertainty without rushing to resolve it - create conditions for coherence. They leave room for what they didn’t predict. They attend to signals that don’t fit the spreadsheet. They recognise that sustainable solutions rarely come from forcing, and often come from listening. They create conditions in which life can create more life, and humans can thrive.

That’s not naïve or a regression to childish wonder. It’s the recognition that being adequate to a living world requires capacities that disenchantment has trained us to dismiss.

What re-enchantment makes possible

What does this mean in practice?

A “beautiful business” is not one with nice aesthetics. It’s one with an underlying coherence - where people can comprehend how things work and where they fit, where capacity matches demand, where the work feels worthy of engagement. It’s an organisation that affords a sense of coherence to those within it.

This isn’t soft. It’s structural.

It means designing for comprehensibility - avoiding overcomplicated structures and processes that force people to work around the systems to function; appropriate visibility to ensure people can orient themselves; and honest communication – ironically, being honest about what we don’t know is better than pretending that we do, or staying quiet.

It means designing for manageability: matching demands to resources, building in slack, creating conditions where capacity can develop, fostering human connection, collaboration and support.

It means designing for meaningfulness: meaningful work (vs what David Graeber calls bullshit jobs), leaving room for difference, creativity and emergence, not reducing everything to metrics. This last aspect is becoming increasingly important as AI takes over tasks that used to give our work meaning.

It means asking Christopher Alexander’s question as a serious design criterion: How can we create more life? More life for the people who work here; for the clients that interact with our products; for the suppliers in our eco-system; for the societies and ecologies we are embedded in?

A re-enchanted organisation is one in which beauty-as-affordance becomes possible, and the conditions for thriving are built into its structure.

More about Waycraft

Beauty and coherence have always been organising principles for me, and similarly, they are core principles of Waycraft.

Waycraft emerged as a set of practices and a stance that assumes we’re living through a threshold - personally, organisationally, culturally - where familiar landmarks are shifting. Where the strategies that used to work no longer do. Where we cannot plan our way to safety, and we need to craft new ways in unfamiliar terrain, or make paths by walking, as Antonio Machado writes about in his famous poem.

In such conditions, we need the capacity to read living fields. To sense what’s emerging. To recognise viable form before we can justify or explain it. To hold uncertainty without collapsing into reaction or paralysis.

That requires re-enchanted perception.

It requires recovering our sensitivity to beauty, as an affordance, not decoration, the perception of coherence that orients before thought.

It requires tolerance and appreciation for mystery, as the felt sense that we are part of something bigger than us, the condition for meaningfulness

It requires seeing the world as alive with potential, not as a fixed situation to be optimised, but as a field of possibilities to be navigated.

Waycraft cultivates the capacities to craft ways towards alive futures, creating the conditions for coherence to emerge in ourselves, our organisations, and the systems we’re part of.

I am reminded here of Sam’s admonition to Frodo in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, “There’s some good in this world, Mr Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for”.

I am tempted to rephrase: “There’s beauty in the world, and it is worth fighting for.”

The discipline of looking again

I want to end where I began: with what we’ve been taught is worth our attention.

Re-enchantment is a discipline of attention. A practice of looking again and acting on what we see, rather than hiding behind abstraction. Of noticing again what we’ve learned to dismiss. Of feeling what we’ve learned to numb. Of staying present to mystery without rushing to resolve it.

It’s not easy. The disenchanted stance is habitual by now. It’s embedded in our language, in how we structure our organisations, and how we define credibility. It takes genuine effort to perceive differently. And it takes courage to open yourself to the criticism of those who police rationality.

But here’s what I’ve come to believe, through years of complexity work and my own threshold crossings: a disenchanted world is not more accurate. It’s impoverished. It’s a world stripped of potential, beauty, aliveness and wonder.

We cannot thrive in such a world. And neither can our other-than-human kin.

Thankfully, we can choose to see differently.

We can remember that perception is participation, and that how we look shapes what we find.

We can recover our capacity to perceive and orient around beauty and aliveness.

We can cultivate humility, stay present to mystery and cultivate our sense of wonder and awe.

The world was never disenchanted. Only our ways of seeing were.

Perhaps the work, now, is to learn to see again.