Ryu's Blog

The Economist reviewed a book on obsession. Below are some interesting bits:

Praiseworthy activities or eccentric ones? Science or madness? A bit of both, says Lennard Davis in this history of obsession. But there is more to it than that. As the scientific world view rose to dominance, and life became more specialised, standardised and mechanised,
behaviour that a century earlier, if it had occurred at all, would have been regarded simply as odd, became both more common and more commented on.

Obsession in particular, with its characteristic two-mindedness—a compulsive self acts while an observing self watches helplessly—proliferated as a result of this “democratisation of madness”……Mr Davis devotes a chapter to “graphomania”, the madness of incessant writing… These writers knew they were sacrificing their lives to obsession, but they accepted the price and others lionised them for it.

And so to the present, when obsession is both a common mental illness and a cultural ideal. The two are connected, thinks Mr Davis: twin results of a single process, and perhaps the inevitable consequence of modernity. In just a few decades “obsessive-compulsive disorder” has gone from extremely rare—affecting one person in 2,000 according to a 1973 estimate—to extremely common, affecting two or three people in 100.

And nowhere is the ideal more powerful than in love, where only the “can’t eat, can’t sleep” kind is seen as worth having. He describes, entertainingly, the way this spawns, in turn, yet further obsession, as couples peruse sex manuals that categorise and prescribe precise methods for love-making in a vain attempt to stop their ardour fading. An obsession with obsessive love leads to obsessive efforts to revive it: obsession to the power of three.

This sentence ‘and so to the present, when obsession is both a common mental illness and a cultural ideal’ rings true to me. There seems to be similarly between obsession and passion. And both are characteristics I wish I could have more of. Are they compatible with the quality of a zen-like style detachment? To what extent can we become more obsessive and passionate, and do we really want them given the trade-offs they entail?