If you find yourself detaching, or being the opposite of an addict:

• Pushing away things you like
• Pushing away people you like
• Pushing the world away, in general

If you find yourself in that position, just a thought…

You know how addicts are trying to fill a perceived “hole” in their life, right? With food, drugs, or whatever else.

It may be helpful to think about the opposite, in the case of detachment.

Maybe you filled a hole. For someone else. Or for the world. And it didn’t work. Maybe your ideals were shattered.

(What is an ideal, to an INTJ? Big-picture ideas, concepts, promising more “good”, usually)

And so what if you give and give, and suddenly find your ideals shattered, again and again?

IMO, you continually detach, is what you do. You detach more and more, because your giving, your work for others isn’t working.

So I think it’s important to do things like:

• Identify which ideals may have been affected
• Ask—why?
• Develop alternative approaches

A sensitive area for INTJs?

If you aren’t willing to admit that you have huge ideals, or huge “big-picture-ideas-for-more-good,”

I think it might be easy…

• For someone to hurt you with a careless comment
• To keep things way too secret, for too long
• To give up on yourself too early

If you can admit you have huge ideals, if you can really walk through just how stratospheric your ideas may seem to be,

I think you may be able to bring those ideas down into the shit.

I mean dirt.

I mean, ground your idea. Anchor it.

Anyway, every idea needs shit. Anchor your idea in shit:

• Reasonable, human-scale timelines
• Small tasks that add up to big things
• Deadlines that bug you and challenge you
• Annoying meetings, even
• Annoying feelings you don’t know how to express
• Failures that you didn’t have on your radar, even your sharp, perceptive, intuitive radar

You will probably need to develop tools for living some portion of your productive life in a field full of shit like that, but you can do it. And dammit, after a while you might even start to appreciate the shit.

Maybe it’s because you found your way of making progress, and you saw your big-picture idea come REALLY close. WOW! A load of good stuff, within reach.

And maybe, partially because, at least, this stuff…

…is no longer detachment.

Filed in: Thinking /70/ | Energy /120/ | Control /110/ | Interests /111/ | Productivity /119/