detachment

08 Jul, 2025

This might be a temporary mood, but I feel truly done with caring about other people’s problems. It sounds harsh and needs some nuance; it’s not like I won’t help anyone at all forever. The rules are hard to exactly pinpoint. I think it depends on how close we are, and how much I trust that person to actually make a change, and depends on whether it threatens to harm me as well or not.

I used to care more about anyone’s problems than they did, but I thankfully slowly stopped over the years. It’s simply true that it’s their life, their responsibility.

You can’t make others do anything. You can’t learn lessons for them. You can’t teach them lessons that they need to learn themselves. You can’t give them advice that they need to come up with themselves. You can’t make it click. It would be great if we could all just share and accept wisdoms and life lessons that others had so we don’t have to go through it ourselves. But it’s not how most people work.

When people die by suicide, become heavily addicted to drugs and similar things, there’s always the guilt by others that they “could have done more”. The truth is none of us can do more. We couldn’t have done more and it sucks.

You can call the cops and they either do nothing or do more harm than good. You can get that person therapy appointments but then they don’t go. They get meds they don’t take or just stop taking. They don’t leave their abusers or get back with them again. They won’t cut their toxic family off. They don’t wanna go to the doctor to get that symptom checked out. They don’t accept job offers they should. They won’t stop overworking themselves.

You can cook for them, clean for them, pick up their meds, go grocery shopping for them, check up on them, offer your couch to sleep on, send opportunities their way - shit doesn’t matter. A waste of time for most cases, even more so if it burns you out as well.

Even with much less severe cases when people are just unhappy with some stuff in their life, they don’t care about actually changing anything or receiving advice or opportunities to change, they just wanna complain and for you to listen. To not question anything. Not even their behavior, even just asking questions to understand how their job works or clarifying something they said.

So genuinely I think I don’t give a fuck about other people’s shitty job, shitty apartment, shitty relationship, shitty sleep, shitty financial situation, or shitty back anymore.

The solution to your problems is almost always obvious and the root cause is you. Your unwillingness to change or do things differently, your unwillingness to seek help, your unwillingness to slow down and sit with your feelings, your unwillingness to listen and learn, your unwillingness to acknowledge your shopping addiction or junk food lifestyle or abusive relationship, the unwillingness to acknowledge your laziness or your recklessness.

I’m reminded of this right now because why do I take time out of my day to listen to someone vent and then catch a stray for asking how this aspect of their work works? Also my neighbor has intense BPD meltdowns every few weeks screaming at the top of her lungs that she’s gonna end it and can’t take it anymore and insulting her partner and slamming and breaking things, and I thought honestly about what I could do but really, nothing. Me ringing there doesn’t make her take her meds, have a success in therapy or go in-patient. Me ringing there doesn’t get her partner to do something or break up with her, probably. There are enough people in their lives that know the situation better and are more equipped to deal with it, anyway.

I have called the cops in the past due to domestic abuse somewhere else, and it was for nothing and the cops even belittled me. I called the appropriate parties for wellness checks when someone threatened to kill themselves online, and obviously they hate your guts for this every time. I’ve given people who were at risk of failing and being kicked out of school my study notes and homework and they were too lazy to use it and failed it anyway. I’ve given people contact details of therapists with open spots that they didn’t end up using. I’ve blocked people’s abusive LD partners on their phone for them and they just undid it hours later. I’ve shared all the apps and coping mechanisms I used against online addiction in the past with someone struggling with it and they did nothing of it because it would mean to take accountability for their own part in it and would limit their ability to complain about how “there’s nothing I can do about it”. These are just the things at the top of my head.

And it was all wasted! You’re better off helping yourself instead and elevating those around you that aren’t neck deep in this kind of shit and where you know they accept help, constructive criticism and have shown a willingness to change and face their problems. We aren’t required to stay in people’s lives that don’t do that and light ourselves in fire to keep them warm.