The Art of Detachment
Being an observer in the chaos I made on my mind
ִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִִI’ve been seeing a psychological therapist lately. In the past month alone, I’ve been into four sessions, and the experience has been equal parts liberating and unsettling. Liberating, because it gives me a kind of map for my worries and anxiety. Unsettling, because having that map means I can now see exactly how real those worries are, and there’s nowhere left to hide from them.
One day I asked my therapist whether she sees other designers in their 40s going through the same career confusion I am, this constant searching for meaning in everything, this craving for some kind of stability and psychological safety that I couldn’t quite name before. She said she didn’t have specifics, but that there’s a theory that tends to explain a lot of it. She told me that people generally seek different things in each decade of their lives, and when she laid it out, something genuinely clicked for me.
Your 20s, she said, are defined by one sprawling, exhausting question: who am I, actually? You spend most of your childhood being handed a set of rules to follow, a kind of inherited script about school and grades and stable jobs and being a good person. Then you step into the real world and the script stops working, and you’re left holding all these instructions for a life that doesn’t quite match the reality in front of you. Philosophers have a word for this feeling. Jean-Paul Sartre called it radical freedom, the terrifying realisation that there is no predefined path and that you are fully responsible for creating your own meaning. Albert Camus called it the absurd, that uncomfortable gap between how desperately we want life to mean something and how stubbornly the world refuses to hand that meaning to us on a plate.
Buddhism points at the same discomfort from a different angle, through the concept of “anatta“ or non-self, the idea that the fixed, stable identity you’re so anxious about building and protecting was never really solid to begin with. Your 20s are often the first time you feel that instability in your bones, even if you don’t have the vocabulary for it yet. Every bad job, bad relationship, and wrong turn is quietly doing something useful though, stripping away the borrowed identity you grew up with and slowly replacing it with something that actually belongs to you.
By the time your 30s arrive, something in the texture of life changes. The wide-open possibilities of your 20s start narrowing into real, specific choices, and you find yourself building rather than just searching. Career, relationships, responsibilities, the shape of your daily life, these stop being abstract and become concrete. The Stoics understood this transition well. Marcus Aurelius, who somehow managed to govern the Roman Empire while quietly writing one of history’s most honest philosophical journals, kept returning to the same discipline: focus only on what is within your control and release everything else. Seneca made a similar point when he wrote that most people fritter away their lives in anxiety over things that have already happened or may never happen at all.
In Confucian thought, this decade maps onto the idea of “self-cultivation“, the active, deliberate practice of shaping yourself into someone better over time, not by accident but by intention. The 30s are when that kind of intentionality starts to feel not just possible but necessary, because you begin to feel in a very practical way that your energy and time are genuinely limited, and that spending them without direction is its own kind of loss. You also start to care less about performing your life for other people, not entirely, but noticeably less than before. You’re building something real, and real things don’t need an audience the same way.
And then there are the 40s, which is exactly where I am right now. My therapist described this decade as the era of clarity and acceptance, and I haven’t found a more accurate description since. By this point, philosophy stops being something you read about on a Sunday afternoon and becomes something you actually live. You’ve accumulated enough experience, enough failure and loss and unexpected survival, to know the difference between what’s real and what’s just noise. The struggle shifts too. It’s no longer the raw identity panic of your 20s. It becomes something quieter and in some ways harder, the question of whether you are actually living in alignment with what you believe, or whether you’ve been sleepwalking through someone else’s version of a good life.
Carl Rogers, the humanist psychologist, called this state “congruence“, the alignment between your inner values and how you actually show up in the world. When that alignment exists, there’s a feeling of wholeness that’s hard to describe but unmistakable. When it doesn’t, there’s a low-level sense of wrongness that follows you around, and no amount of achievement makes it go away. Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust and spent the rest of his life writing about what that experience taught him, argued in Man’s Search for Meaning that human beings can endure almost anything as long as they have a “why.” Your 40s are the decade when you finally stop borrowing other people’s why and have to sit down honestly with your own.
That therapy session was one of the most clarifying hours I’ve spent in recent memory, because it gave language to something I’d been feeling but couldn’t articulate. Of course I was searching for meaning in my work. That’s not a personal failure or a sign that something is wrong with me. It’s just what this decade asks of you.
Being laid off, going through mismatches in corporate and organisational culture, these weren’t just career setbacks. They were, looking back, my life refusing to let me keep ignoring the question of what I actually value. And the answer that’s been slowly emerging has surprised me, because it’s led me somewhere I didn’t expect. I’ve become more spiritual, in a genuinely religious sense rather than a vague Instagram-wellness sense. I find myself going to mosques more often now, sitting alone in the quiet between meetings, not out of obligation but because it gives me something I can’t seem to find anywhere else: a sense of refuge, a kind of clarity, and a small but real detachment from everything pressing in on me.
That detachment has become one of the things I value most, and I think it’s one of the most underrated capabilities a person can develop, because we’ve been trained for so long to do the opposite. Corporate culture, in particular, has spent decades teaching us to be “all in,” to make our job titles the answer to the question of who we are, to breathe our work and treat total immersion as a virtue. And for a long time that felt like purpose. It felt like drive and ambition and being serious about life. But the cost of it only becomes visible when something external breaks, when a layoff happens, or AI reshapes the industry you spent two decades building a career in, and suddenly the thing you’d built your identity around is gone, and you realise you don’t quite know who you are without it.
I know that feeling from the inside now. In Stoic philosophy, there’s a practice called “negative visualisation“, where you deliberately imagine losing the things you’re most attached to, not as an exercise in pessimism but as a way of loosening the grip those things have on your sense of self. Buddhism calls excessive attachment “upadana“, identifying it as one of the primary sources of human suffering. The Bhagavad Gita, one of Hinduism’s most profound texts, builds an entire philosophy around “nishkama karma“, the practice of doing your work fully and well without tethering your identity to the outcome. In Sufism, the mystical tradition within Islam, the concept of “fana“ describes the dissolving of the ego, the gradual release of the self that clings to status and recognition and external proof of worth. These traditions come from entirely different cultures, different centuries, different ways of understanding the universe, and yet they keep arriving at the same place: the version of you that requires external validation to feel okay is the most fragile version of you, and the one most likely to fall apart when life gets hard.
When I pray, I’m not expecting an instant resolution to my problems. That’s not what I’m asking for and probably not how it works. What I’m doing, I think, is practising something, practising clarity, practising acceptance, practising the kind of quiet strength that lets you keep moving through things rather than being buried by them. In Islam there’s a concept called “tawakkul“, which means something like trusting in God after you’ve genuinely done your part. It’s not passivity or resignation. It’s the deliberate release of the need to control every outcome. The Psalms in the Bible point at the same thing in a different register: “Be still, and know that I am God.” Stillness not as giving up, but as a form of deep trust. In Buddhist mindfulness practice, the whole discipline of sitting quietly and observing your thoughts without immediately reacting to them is training the same muscle, the ability to be a witness to your own life rather than a hostage to it.
I’ve been learning, slowly and with a lot of resistance from my own habits, to become that kind of observer. To watch my problems without immediately being consumed by them. It doesn’t come naturally and it requires real practice, but it’s the most genuinely freeing thing I’ve discovered in a long time.
Two years ago, this version of me didn’t exist. I was so completely identified with my work, my output, my status in my industry and in Singapore, that I had no real distance from any of it. My whole sense of being okay in the world was conditional on how things were going professionally, and I’d built my life so tightly around that condition that I never stopped to ask whether any of it was actually mine, or whether I’d just absorbed someone else’s definition of a life well lived and decided to call it my own.
The layoff cracked that open. Therapy helped me look at what was inside. The quiet hours in the mosque gave me somewhere to sit with it. I don’t have it all figured out and I’m genuinely not sure I ever will, but I’ve also stopped believing that having it figured out is really the point. Your 20s spend their energy asking who you are. Your 30s spend theirs asking what you’re building. And your 40s, if you’re paying attention, ask the question underneath all the others: what actually matters? I’m just glad I’m finally taking that question seriously.