I'm not sure I understand the premise at all - to me, the more I pay attention to the world and my senses, the less magical it becomes. Maybe that's why I'm miserable.
Ever since I heard that story, that's what I have aspired to. Is it disenchantment? I don't think so. The mystery is merely moved, from "how could this be possible?" to "how can a thing go from impossible to boring?" and "what currently impossible things will become boring in the next 50, 100, 500 years?"
The same happened to me when I studied Physics with great care.
More commonly, I refer to myself as a writer of executable poetry that moves the hearts of machines.
This is how I've come to feel about a lot of "computer things" I've learned over the years. Example #1: Game development - Them folks perform some real art and magic (and engineering) to create the amazing games we've gotten to enjoy over the years. Speaking of "art" - Example #2: Computer CGI (movies, TV, & game development) - Knowing how it works actually makes it just that much more amazing when you see it done really well. Matter of fact, it makes it easier to know when what you're looking at is "done well", and to appreciate how utterly magical a really good 3D artist can be. The more I learn, the more impressed I am at the folks who first did these things, and those who came after and improved upon them by "standing on the shoulders of giants".
The way photons behave in our universe seems pretty damn magical if you ask me. Sure, it's not Harry Potter, but we let fiction reset our expectations to a level where we'll never be happy.
Just an overwhelming sense of disappointment in how much sense it made that it worked that way and not a myriad of more spectacular ways I’d imagined when I was a kid taking apart ancient IBM color monitors for fun
A fun part of hiking mountains is getting to spots where you can look out and see the view from where you've gotten to, and maybe even (parts of) the trail you came up.
I believe that author is referring to things outside the scope of our daily routines, and/or routine acceptance of marvels we are taking for granted. That can happen for some things when we focus on them daily.
I'm finally reading machinist/engineer Dunn's 'Lost Technology of Ancient Egypt' and he notes that while people have been walking past its statuaries for centuries, immune to their details. When he started looking at them as an engineer that he noticed the incredible precision achieved worked the hardest rocks with unknown tools 5000 years ago. He remains gobsmacked by it.
I was struggling to comprehend some math concept, read the theory on my own and tried hard to get it for like 5-6 hours until I went to a colleague that scribbled a drawing and made me understand it in 5 minutes. Felt like I was in a wizard story
I've found it to be generally true, especially for activities one finds leisurely. For instance, understanding a game deeply enough to create a hyper-optimized "min-maxed" strategy ends up stripping the joy from it.
I feel you because I was like that too, but at some point, my brain bit-flipped to the other polarity. I wish you the same.
The more I learn the more I feel awed and amazed. "Reality is surprisingly detailed". The surprises are never-ending. Finding abstract and concrete pattern-relationships between phenomena is an unending source of delight. The universe is fractal and deeply interconnected. Being able to see / feel / imagine even the smallest spec of that is the magic of our moment in eternity.
Even my own personal struggles got re-framed as an exercise in observing what the hell is even going on between my ears. The otherwise-only-painful struggles have become equal parts horrible (lived experience in the moment) and fascinating (interpretation / hindsight / insight into one's mechanisms and traits). A person is a prisoner (of their conditioning) only to the extent that it ($Prison) binds them against their will.
Consciously and deliberately attempting said bit-flip is a difficult road and never complete, but it can be a road to progressive self-liberation. Like many other personal phenomena / belief change, it doesn't happen for a long time, and then one day it does.
(edit: add clarifying words)
If learning about technology makes it insufficiently advanced then it is distinguishable from magic.
If magic is enchantment, the world (as concerns the technology) is no longer enchanted.
So yes: Ignorance is bliss.
Somewhat related, I've also noticed that people who don't go out of their way to inform themselves (eg: watch/read the news) in general seem happier. I also feel happier the less I give a damn about the stuff around me and the world.
So yes: Ignorance is bliss.
Yeah, that's the main selling point of never-never land.
I remember learning about the inner architecture of CPUs for the first time and being amazed at the genius of early computer architects.
Maybe this will change in the future, but right now I feel this enchantment more, the more I learn about technology.
Makes sense, most of whats shown on the news is just daily misery, without any relevance. My wife watches the 8 o clock news daily and most days the only news of any relevance is the weather report. The rest is just a barrage of ''in some country (usually a million miles away) some people got stabbed/a bus crashed/a terrorist attack happened/some environmental disaster/a company made a bazillion dollars profit/a politician did a thing''. Its all completely worthless to know, its forgotten five minutes afterwards and all it does is increase anger, fear and/or anxiety just a little bit more every day.
I've been writing a Gregorian chant typesetter, and it's sort of magical to resize the window and watch the notes flow onto the next line. (Barring bugs; those break the enchantment)
Nature seems magical and that sense of magic intensifies when better understood. I've yet to meet a biologist who can describe the fundamentals of life without some hint of magic (whether they see acknowledge it or not).