The Art of Detachment: Flowing Instead of Forcing

I once had a close friend, Olivia, whose life seemed like a perfectly scripted success story. She had it all—prestigious clients, a thriving photography career, endless adventures. From the outside, she was living the dream. Yet, behind her curated social media posts and the gloss of glamorous photoshoots, something was unraveling.

She called me one night, her voice quivering with exhaustion. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she said. “It’s like I’m drowning in all the success. I thought if I just kept pushing, kept achieving, kept climbing higher… eventually, it would feel like enough. But now, I feel like I’ve lost myself in it all. I’m not happy. I feel empty.”

I could hear it—the desperation in her words, the suffocating pressure that had been building up for years. Olivia was living proof that the pursuit of success, the obsession with climbing higher, wasn’t the key to happiness. It was suffocating her joy and creativity.

At that moment, I remembered a British man I had met during my travels in Bangkok, someone who had taught me a powerful lesson about the art of detachment.

His name was Marcus. He was a gifted artist, but like Olivia, he had been caught in the trap of success. He poured every ounce of himself into his work, trying to make a name for himself in the art world. He obsessed over his exhibitions, his gallery sales, the approval of critics. But after years of grinding, his success was hollow. The harder he tried, the emptier he felt. His art had become just another means to an end, another way to prove his worth.

One day, after a particularly crushing rejection from a gallery he had worked years to impress, Marcus finally snapped. He realized he had been suffocating his creativity, forcing it into a box that fit someone else’s expectations. So, he walked away. He stopped trying to control everything, stopped forcing his art into the world’s mold.

He didn’t quit painting, but he let go of the need to impress, to make money, to prove anything. Instead, he painted for the sheer joy of creating. He embraced the unknown, the messy process of art that didn’t come with guarantees of sales. It was then that something remarkable happened: his work flourished. Not because he was suddenly “successful,” but because he allowed himself to flow. His art became more authentic, more personal, and strangely enough, more sought after.

When I shared Marcus’ story with Olivia, I could hear her processing it. “So, what do I do?” she asked, her voice cracking. “How do I let everything I worked so hard for - go?”

It wasn’t an easy answer. Detachment isn’t about just throwing everything away. It’s not about avoiding reality or abandoning our responsibilities. We need to make a living, and sometimes that means working hard, playing the game, and meeting deadlines. But somewhere in the process, we have to find a way to detach—to step outside of the rat race, to disconnect from the constant pressure of “more, more, more.”

And that’s where Olivia’s journey began.

For weeks, she struggled with the idea of stepping back. She felt guilty for taking time off. She worried that she would fall behind, that the opportunities she had worked so hard for would slip away – and someone else will take “her jobs.” And “her clients.” But as she started to detach from the expectations, something began to shift inside her. She realized that true fulfillment didn’t come from forcing things into place. It came from giving herself permission to breathe, to create without the weight of performance hanging over her.

She went on a solo trip to the mountains, not for a photoshoot, but for herself. She wandered through forests, sat by rivers, and watched the stars without worrying about what photo would get the most likes. She let go of the need to control. For the first time in years, Olivia was truly present—in the moment, in her life, in her own skin. And she did not take a single picture.

When she returned, it wasn’t that she had abandoned her photography career. Far from it. But she had reconnected with the why of it all. Why she picked up a camera in the first place—to capture the beauty, to tell stories that mattered. Her work became more personal, more intimate, and most importantly, more meaningful – less commercial, more artsy.

She stopped chasing clients. Instead, she let them find her. She stopped obsessing over her portfolio, and her creativity flowed more naturally than ever. The work she did was no longer about external validation. It was about something deeper—about joy, about authenticity, and about being in tune with herself.

Olivia’s story, like Marcus’, wasn’t about quitting, but about creating space for life to unfold naturally. It’s a paradox: while we must live in reality, we also need to detach from it. The very things we push ourselves to attain—money, success, validation—aren’t what bring us peace. The art of detachment is about stepping back from all of that and trusting that everything we truly need will come to us when we’re aligned with our true selves.

The hardest part is letting go of the illusion that we have to control everything. But when we do, when we detach just enough to let go of the constant striving, we find that life can be more beautiful than anything we could have forced.

In the end, real success isn’t in the things we achieve—it’s in the space we create for ourselves to flow. When we flow, we really live in the moment.

Let’s carve time in our busy lives to detach from reality and bills and look at the world with a child’s eye. Love, Szilvia