First, credit to Paul Kingsnorth and Mary Harrington for the topic. They are a wellspring of thought-provoking inspiration.

Now… The great post-Enlightenment revolution that promised to unshackle the mind from superstition and lead us into an age of reason has, in its end, given us a world gripped by its own decadence. We've spent centuries in a brave, frenetic race to divorce ourselves from a truth deeper than the mind's ability to comprehend, all the while building false towers of science and technology in our bid for ultimate control. The moment of "Enlightenment" became the moment when everything was atomized and reduced to measure, to numbers, to a dull, materialistic existence that only ever seemed to lead to greater alienation.

And yet, something is quietly, even powerfully, shifting in the modern psyche— something ancient, something true— quietly rising from beneath the hushed noise of the last few centuries of materialism. This great experiment, built on the Cartesian delusion that we can break the world down to parts, and rule it, has come undone. The fruit is rotten, and we are tasting it. In the places where God’s Spirit once spoke boldly, now we hear only hollow claims of progress, identity politics, and the fractured whims of individual will.

It is a decadence wrapped in high-minded idealism, filled with the weight of ideological contradictions, and riddled with deep uncertainty about the value of life itself. What does it mean to be alive, to breathe, to be rooted in the soil of a tradition older than our years? The materialist vision cannot answer this. It can only ask what we measure, what is efficient, what is quantifiable. The invisible world—the reality we once understood through myth, symbol, and holy ritual—is nowhere to be found. So what happens when we become too hollow and thin for the mind to live within? What happens when we’ve spent so long pushing all that cannot be captured and boxed away with our devices that we begin to lose the thread of meaning? We fall back into that original quiet.

The grand boast of materialism and its undergirding ideology of reason—that things can be measured, controlled, quantified—has fallen short. We see it on every front: in our politics, in our so-called “progress,” in the increasing unhappiness in even the richest corners of the world. Technology, once hailed as the liberator of mankind, has enslaved us— tricked us into thinking that convenience and speed will fulfill our deepest needs. It hasn’t.

The moment we thought we could measure everything is the moment we forgot to measure the things that truly matter: the things which can’t be touched, counted, or digitized. The things which seem absent, yet are alive—beauty, grace, spirit, and the truth that reality is filled with breath and meaning. There is more to the world than the observable, more than the definable. We've become trapped by a glass box, in which we try to describe a world we don’t truly know. We’ve severed the connections to what keeps us bound to the earth, to the sky, and to each other, yet, it is these very connections that once gave meaning and direction to all things.

Now, as the material world itself crumbles, we're awakening, though perhaps still blindfolded, to the return of the enchanted, the inspirited. What is spirituality if not this spirit—the anima of the world—that still beckons from the depths of every sacred moment and still cries for our awakening? There is nothing more real than this reality which encircles us but which we cannot measure.

Make no mistake, we are entering a second Reformation, one far deeper than the last. This Reformation will not only sweep away the dead husks of a religious world corrupted by doctrine and political authority; it will strip us of the hardened, synthetic shells of meaning we have so skillfully manufactured through modernity’s broken lens. This coming return is not a blind return to the old ways for the sake of nostalgia or tradition but a return to the living essence of the world itself. It is a return to the truth that things do indeed have a nature— a depth beyond appearance, a truth that reaches far beyond the shiny falseness we’ve pursued so recklessly in recent centuries.

Yes, nature speaks to us; it speaks without tongue but with thrum. There is a steady whisper carried on the wind, on the waves, in the forest’s hushed prayer— an enchantment buried within the hills and riverbeds, in the old myths of creation and destruction, woven through our ancestors' rituals and belief. It hums through us still, even as we have dismissed it for ages. And in time, just like the land’s reclamation after a long drought, so too will this truth reclaim what it never lost, never relinquished: its vitality.

This spiritual truth is no abstraction, but an ancient reality— a reality that calls us back to connection. It stands directly against the fragmented, isolated subjectivity we’ve deluded ourselves with. True liberty lies in participation— not in self-will, but in participating with creation, with the divine, and yes— with the community of beings that stretch from the rooted earth to the high heavens.

And at the crossroads where this battle is fought, we, who are bound together under the vast canopy of all-encompassing truth, must hold firm to a belief older than reason itself. A belief in the rootedness of the world’s soul, in its holy consistency even when everything is shaken. For the war between materialism and the spiritual reality of things is a great one— but in the end, it is not we who will make the final blow.

Here, beneath the weight of this upheaval, something is beginning to stir in us. Those whose hearts have long been scattered in search of meaning, lost amidst the vain promises of secular ideologies and blind constructions of the world, are awakening. And when the material system finally meets its end— as it surely must— we shall rise, like the returning spring, to breathe once again in a world both real and divine, where nothing is lost to us, and nothing is ever wasted. And as we rise again from the ash of this failed revolution, the chains of the modern world shall fall from us, undone by the very power they tried to dismiss.

In this second Reformation, we shall live, with eyes wide open to the light of what we were never meant to forget: That there is something more— much more— than what we see. And in that understanding, we shall begin to measure not by counting or dividing, but by receiving and participating. And so the Age of Enchantment shall return— and this time it will endure. —D.

EP050: Chris Backe, Established Author and Travel Enthusiast, Talks Airbnb in Thailand