The future does not demand anything of you; only narratives do.
Natural selection is cheap at the population level, but brutal and expensive at the individual level. Responsibility doesn’t disappear; it is redistributed. In biology, the organism “pays” through death and failure rather than through cognitive burden. In conscious organisms, the cost moves inward: deliberation, regret, second-guessing.
So no, disillusionment does not magically remove cost. It only removes illusory cost. You don’t get relief from having to act. You get relief from thinking that action must justify itself cosmically or narratively. You still have to plan. You still have to calculate time and effort. You still have to choose ergonomics. This is unavoidable because local goals are not final causes. They are control parameters. Cleaning the basement is not “for a reason” in the metaphysical sense. It is a short-horizon optimization under constraints such as energy, time, future inconvenience.
The crucial distinction that dissolves the apparent paradox is:
Final causes answer the question “Why must this make sense?” Local goals answer the question “What reduces friction next?”
You don’t set goals because God doesn’t care. You set goals because systems without control variables collapse. This is not responsibility in the moral sense; it is regulation in the cybernetic sense.
And this is why Catholicism feels like relief. Not because it removes action, but because it removes meta-responsibility. You act, but you don’t have to account for why acting itself is necessary. Slavery is tragic but energetically cheap precisely because it eliminates second-order evaluation. Spinoza does not offer comfort. He offers accuracy. You are not responsible for the world. You are responsible for local adequacy around yourself under partial information. No more. No less.