Episode 12: The Fruit and Fury of Obsession

What was I looking for again?

Hi friends,

This month was filled with challenges, including trying to deal with my sleep apnea and the related lack of energy that comes with it. But that got me thinking about obsession and its many faces.

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Vivek.

When you get obsessed with something, you go to wikipedia, youtube, online forums, AI, and even the people around you. Unless you don’t want others to catch wind of your obsession because it is private, something that only you want to look at and think about and wonder about and crank through and spin up and down exclusively in your mind.

I often opt for privacy either because I want to figure things out on my own or I have some shame about how much energy I am putting towards whatever problem I’m trying to solve.

With this problem, you look for a kind of answer and because every video or article you consume provides a version of the same answer to this problem, you develop more questions. But ultimately, with every search, you are not looking for an answer, you are looking for the answer.

Obsession can be clean and focused when people see you in the middle of it. But it’s never like that in the actual cavities of your mind. It’s messy, impossible ideas coming close to possible which hitches you onto yet another deep dive, yet another tangent. Until you’re looking for the answer but that is contingent on so many things that you create other questions, which necessitates other answers. You dig and find, dig and find, until it’s not productive anymore. Or sometimes you keep going because it’s not productive anymore. The very definition of productive shifting with each passing article, each digested video.

In other words, you open up yourself whole just to sate this obsession. In these bouts of searching fury, I don’t bother taking notes, I just go and go and go - entirely foregoing my note-taking system until at a certain point I realize that I should probably take some notes.

And the obsession itself? It could be for anything. From understanding the nature of UFOs to learning how to get better sleep when you have sleep apnea. I’ve done all of these and more, and my latest one being related to the latter.

According to Merriam-Webster, obsession is “a persistent disturbing preoccupation with an often unreasonable idea or feeling.” But I disagree with the words “persistent,” “disturbing,” and “unreasonable” since I think my various obsessive research dives have been fruitful and productive - to a point.

When the obsession sits with you for too much time, it becomes unreasonable and possibly disturbing. It can become unhealthy, especially for those around you. Sometimes I only realize its unhealthy when my partner A tells me to get out of my head and pay attention.

That’s when I should realize that its become that bad, but sometimes I just keep going.

What is an obsession then? Other than curiosity weaponized? Which can go either way, depending on how you wield this strange artifact of our minds; is obsession a byproduct or a feature of who we are as people? I think its probably all of these.

By the way, I finally started taking notes regarding my sleep apnea obsession project, and I think that one’s done (for now).