The Santa Claus disappointment: Holding on to old beliefs
Channel: Quest for a Meaningful Life
Date: 2021-02-21

The Santa Claus disappointment.
We've all had that moment when we learned, one way or another, that Santa Claus isn't real.
And it was a moment of shock and surprise, and kind of it's disappointing.
It's like wow, I believed in this magical thing, but actually it was just my parents pretending that there's this magical thing that happens on Christmas Eve, and it's all pretend.
And I think that there's some kind of lingering effect that comes from that.
Of course it's all happened, for most of us, I imagine, it's happened at a very young age, and we're all many years beyond that, and we don't wake up thinking about Santa Claus and cursing the fact that it isn't real or whatever.
So we've all moved on.
But there's something that lingers, I think, when we have these moments of disillusionment, when an illusion is lost.
Of course there's the Easter Bunny, there's the Tooth Fairy, these kinds of childhood fairy tales that are broken.
And I always remember professional wrestling.
That was these these epic wrestling matches.
And then on the schoolyard, there was just that one moment when the kid was like "Hey, you know that's fake.
That's not real."
And there's just that moment of not believing.
What?
Like I was so into those fights, it's like this is like an epic battle, and now it's all staged.
It's all just made for my entertainment, and it's all just manufactured.
So these things that I thought were real, and they're really not.
So these are all childhood things that we're all far beyond.
But it seems to me like this same kind of process is something that happens throughout life.
It never goes away.
And at each stage of life, there are always new things that we learn.
Just as a part of growing up, growing older, we learn new things.
We develop a new view of the world, and our old view of the world is, well, we decide that it's wrong.
And we used to believe something, and now we get the feeling that it was never true all along.
And that's a difficult feeling to get used to.
I think it leaves some kind of sense of disappointment, a disillusionment, a kind of a shock that sort of is there at some kind of deep level, that we kind of want it to be true.
We we don't want to let go of the dream.
And this can happen in so many different ways, like matters of our personal life, maybe if it's the end of a relationship, where a dream has died.
And we can look at it in our political views, our views of the world, that these things change, what we thought was true, we no longer believe.
And just our whole view of what life is.
That's just part of getting older, that we change our understanding of what life is.
But it seems like even as we, at the level of our thought, we can understand completely "This is not real.
I no longer believe this."
There's some part of ourselves that is holding on, that wants to still keep believing the dream.
And as much as I think we've all let go of Santa Claus, I wonder if there still is some little place inside us, all of us who grew up with the Santa Claus story, there's some part of us that wants to believe in that magic.
And if not Santa Claus, then there's always something.
There's some kind of story like Santa Claus, I think, for each of us.
We each have our own Santa Claus, our own Santa Claus disillusionment.
The Santa Claus disappointment.
That thing that we learn wasn't true, and that feeling of having that dream taken away from us, that it still lingers somehow.
So I wonder, for you, what is your Santa Claus?
What is that thing that was taken away that still some part of you is holding on to?

#disillusionment #disappointment #santaclausisfake