Acharya Prashant responds to a question about how the understanding of life's temporary nature can lead to both detachment and demotivation. He explains that detachment and compassion must come together. The one source of all misery in the world is taking the ephemeral as permanent. We seek permanence and timelessness where it is not, which leads to the great misery and violence we see around us. You are detached because you see that things are ever-changing, in flux, a process, a stream. This is a perspective from the Buddha. But does everyone see this? If not, where is your compassion? Is detachment only for your own benefit? Are you detached from everything in the world but not from yourself, like a child hiding fruit for themselves? Detachment means you would not build castles in the air or expect sweet results from fallible things. However, everyone around you is doing exactly that. You see their attachment, which is the misery of this world. This presents you with a project: to bring the same light that helps you be detached to others. The power of work without motivation is immense. We usually only know the energy from motivation, which is petty and limited. What is rarely seen is immense action without any motive. There is a demotivated mind, a motivated mind, and then the state of motivelessness, which is the state of highest energy. Because you are motiveless, you cannot be frustrated or defeated. To be motiveless is to be desireless, and because you are desireless, you can never be called a failure. Desire is fulfilled when its object is attained, but if there is no object to be desired, then desire is unending. This is a special desire for the immense, which lends meaning and purpose to life. When you are after something unending, the scriptures say you get immortality. This is immortality: to immerse yourself in that which never ends, which can only happen through motiveless action. Motivation must be seen as something very petty. In the Bhagavad Gita, when Arjun is reluctant to fight, Shri Krishna tells him, "Arjun, I have nothing to gain from anything, but look at me, I keep continuously working. Then how can you avoid action?" People work to fill their own pockets, to become famous, so that their little personal self can be made happy. If you understand life deeply, you work not for self-gratification, but out of compassion. See what the world needs, and today the world needs a lot. The world might be false to you, but it is not false to everybody else. And when the world is not false to people, they suffer in the world.