The Law of Detachment is a Crock of Shit

The Law of Detachment is lowkey, a crock of steaming bullshit. The Law of Detachment states that the more mentally, physically and emotionally detached you are from a desire, the better the chance of attracting that thing. By that logic, a person shouldn’t desire anything. How do you desire something without imprinting on or attaching to it in some way?

The frequent motto of this bullshit law is that one should be connected to everything but attached to nothing. Attachment and connection are literally synonyms of one another, so what is this law trying to fucking say lmao?

As somebody who is neurodivergent, I struggle with rejection-sensitive dysphoria. Being rejected makes me feel like shit about myself and about my life. It literally burns bullet holes in my confidence and self-esteem. Being rejected makes me feel worthless. Being rejected makes me feel like there is something fundamentally impaired within me that disqualifies me from having what I want. The problem with detachment, especially in the context of being neurodivergent, is that it often manifests as apathy. This may be because being told to detach from something that one desires implies that one shouldn’t want that thing in the first place. If one has to constantly mentally and emotionally remove oneself from a desire, what is the point of desiring it in the first place? Personally, every time I’m told to detach from a desire, I literally just stop wanting it. It’s not even that I stop wanting it; I just give up on it because I feel like I’m being punished for my desire.

It is within human nature to desire something and pursue it based on that feeling of desire. You eat food because that is a desire that you are inclined to pursue because you are hungry. If I just sit in one spot and ‘detach’ from my desire for food, am I going to feel less hungry? Better yet, is my detaching going to bring that food to the spot where I am sitting? This metaphor is potent because it encapsulates perfectly what desire actually is. That is to say, that desire is a hunger, a spiritual hunger at that.

Detachment is never going to work for me. I consider myself a person profoundly attached to everything around me. I find deeper meaning in everything, even if that meaning was never intended to be present by the presenting party or entity. I’m too observant for my own good. I make patterns and connections between seemingly arbitrary things. These qualities seem to be innate to my own nature and character. Trying to detach is gradually making me more apathetic to stuff that I want. I have a longer list of things I’ve become apathetic towards than I do stuff I’ve achieved by detaching. Is that how I’m meant to live my life? Forever accumulating a list of stuff I’ve given up on because consciously desiring it is the reason I don’t have it? What a crock of fucking bullshit.

Obviously, a person’s character is dynamic and subject to change for any number of reasons. For me, at least, for better or for worse, there are certain qualities about myself that seem to persist regardless of the season of life I’m in. The more I live and experience that world, the more I’ve come to realize that trying to fight these qualities in hopes of replacing them with another that is ‘more beneficial’ is like fist-fighting a fucking mirror. Unfortunately, in such a fight, I shall never win.

It’s also commonly thought that being overly attached to one desire is a by-product of being generally unproductive in other aspects of life. But that isn’t true for me, lmao. I’m athletic, I have hobbies, I have friends, and I’m an academic. But despite all of this, I never feel detached from a desire. The only way for me to detach is for me to literally lobotomize myself. All this to say, detachment is fucking bullshit. I always have been and probably always will be mentally and emotionally attached to my desires, and honestly, I think that people who preach detachment have never been intentional about anything a day in their fucking lives.