Item — HN Reader

One of the big moments of enlightenment I've had was the importance of emotionally detaching from the world.

What does that mean? If you see your ex on the street, emotionally detached is not running away from her and not running toward her. If she says, "I'm going to Hawaii for vacation," it's not asking which island or deep details. It's saying, "That sounds nice." You care but you don't really care. You're emotionally detached.

Doing this for the whole world sounds easy but it's one of the hardest things you can possibly do. Imagine if a million people suddenly loved you. It's almost impossible not to feel elated. Now imagine if a million people suddenly hated you. It's almost equally impossible not to feel devastated. But you can do it; and if you do it, you can unlock true happiness, true freedom.

It's like this article says, but I don't see it about being an adult -- it's about being truly free.

5 comments

>If she says, "I'm going to Hawaii for vacation," it's not asking which island or deep details. It's saying, "That sounds nice." You care but you don't really care. You're emotionally detached.

That's not really "emotional detachment", though. It's not very different from actually running away the moment you see her, it's just less obviously cowardly. If you were really emotionally detached you would ask for as much detail as you could and it wouldn't affect you in the least.

Incidentally, not asking any follow-up questions to such an announcement is an obvious sign of disinterest. It's just a more polite "I don't care in the least about this thing you're telling me and I don't want to hear any more about it". Everyone knows you're doing it because that's exactly what they say when they don't want to hear about some topic.

It was just an example. Hopefully you can imagine your own, better example.

It's the only example, and you gave it in lieu of a definition. Do you mean the same thing I mean by "emotional detachment", or do you mean something different?

I think you got it; I think the term is clear. It's not having any additional emotional response beyond what you find in an interaction with an acquaintance you see a few times a year. There's no additional emotion.

Agree, it's a hard thing. Question I'd pose: is the detachment borne out of avoidance, or conserving emotional energy so you can deploy it where it is useful? There's a difference.

I latched onto something like this for my digital self, and it mostly broke traditional social media for me. After all, what does it matter if people you probably won't meet approve of what you post? All that time and energy for what...a slightly higher number in a database somewhere? For all the "humans are social animals"-type platitudes that try to explain the necessity of social media, it always ended up being a huge net energy loss.

But, my life is better when I am emotionally engaged in multiple spheres simultaneously: marriage, family, work, friends, hobbies. It's impossible for things to be going well in every sphere at once, so you spread out your emotional involvement among it all such that the inevitable dips are easier to deal with.

I might be misunderstanding. Are you saying that the secret to true freedom/happiness is to feel no emotion and care about nothing?

Is this just another way of saying, "accept the world as it is and as it happens and be content for it is kismet"?

No, you can care passionately about more things if you don't let the world influence you.

The philosopher Rene Girard talks about it better than I ever could. Basically, when we reach a certain age, we start to want to fit in with the world. This is a natural and important process -- for a while. We'll often choose attributes of ourselves to extol and expand, in order to fit in with our selected strategy. We will imitate behaviors and attributes of those in that group. And during this time, we will find that subgroup that we're integrating with will want certain things -- and we will in turn want those things. He says we subconsciously start to desire what others desire because we imitate their desires. He calls it "Mimetic Desire."

The problem is that as a bunch of us are all desiring the same things, we become rivals, reaching for the same objects. Worse, we may not ever really want what we're reaching for.

I'm saying, "Divorce the world" -- an amicable, emotionless divorce. Just as you moved into a group, move out. Just as you imitated, stop. And that will free you to find your true passions, your true desires, your true opinions, your true self. And what's shocking is that now attaining things you desire will often be a million times easier because everyone isn't hunting these same things alongside you.

Thanks, that makes more sense. The whole 'true passions, true desires, true opinions, true self' is a bit wishy-washy for me, but I appreciate the idea of thinking twice about whether you actually want something, or if you are just blindly wanting what the world has told you to want (especially in this age of ubiquitous advertising and mass media).

> Doing this for the whole world sounds easy but it's one of the hardest things you can possibly do. Imagine if a million people suddenly loved you. It's almost impossible not to feel elated. Now imagine if a million people suddenly hated you. It's almost equally impossible not to feel devastated. But you can do it; and if you do it, you can unlock true happiness, true freedom.

I don't understand the paragraph at all. Are you saying detachment is like being hated? If yes I have no idea why. If not why would it be so hard?

No, it's not "liking" being hated, it's that it doesn't deeply disturb you.

Imagine you and a buddy have been arguing lately but you still go out hunting together. A bear appears out of nowhere and charges at your friend. You shoot and miss the bear but hit and kill your friend. There's not enough evidence to convict you of murder, so you walk free, but literally everyone around and whom you know thinks you murdered this person.

The trick is to let that wash off of you. You know you were trying to save your friend; there's not much you can do to change that opinion. Just let it not affect you as much as possible.

> No, it's not "liking" being hated

"like" not "liking" Is similar to.

> The trick is to let that wash off of you. You know you were trying to save your friend; there's not much you can do to change that opinion. Just let it not affect you as much as possible.

I thought you were saying to reject the feelings of the masses or something, but you're saying I shouldn't care about what the people close to me think either?

I'm saying, "[ignore] the feelings of the masses," -- "divorce the world."

There is a tricky balancing act here. Detachment because you are at peace with yourself and untroubled by the vicissitudes of the world because they don't affect who you are is good. Detachment because you are avoiding negative feelings that you aren't able to handle and process in a mature way isn't.

Distinguishing those two can be very difficult and in practice it's often a mixture.