Obsessing About Obsessions
An ongoing examination
I was at a loss for what to write about a few weeks ago, and Dames Margaret & Karen came through, as they always do, with a fun and fruitful suggestion: abiding obsessions. Margaret asked, “when you feel the spark of enthusiasm you felt for 1D and Formula 1, how do you fan that into an eternal flame?” and Karen took it a step further by saying “I don’t really have abiding obsessions and therefore am especially intrigued by them!” Well. Two of my best friends asked me for advice/assistance, and flattered me while doing so. Who am I to reject the call to service? The cultural Beacons of Gondor have been lit and I must attend!
Of course, the second I started to think about this topic, I found myself with a surprising-to-me list of routes to eternal flames, so I’m taking a page from Dame Karen’s book and turning it into an ongoing series on ways that keen delights have developed into long-term investments of time and thought and care, resulting in equally long-term, rich, and often-but-not-always giddy delight.
The biggest thing for me has been being raised and surrounded by role models of cultural devotion. Both of my parents are wholesome fanatics about their long-term favorite things – the history of architecture, fine and decorative arts, music (classical, folk, and the Great American Songbook for my mom, jazz, pop, rock, and folk for my dad), reading (my mom is a retired librarian, they belong to three libraries, and my dad volunteers at one of them) – so as far as I was concerned growing up, that’s just how people are.
And that’s not too far off the mark, really. Look at sports – they’re incredibly popular and durable abiding obsessions for hundreds of millions of people. As I write this, the greater Philadelphia area is vibrating on a frequency best described as exhilarated dread, due to tomorrow’s home football game where the Eagles (go birds) will face the Washington Commanders (again, go birds) in the last playoff round before the Super Bowl. Many local parking lots are now open-air bootleg merch boutiques! A fan & knitter (ooo, two obsessions working in tandem) has published a patt
ern for a really cute & toasty Eagles hat! My timeline is flooded with tweets saying things like “Well, this certainly has been a week. Now, my entire sense of self and well-being are in the hands of a bunch of burly men in South Philadelphia” and “omg this Eagles hype video has me ready to run through FIVE brick walls!!!” My brother-in-law sent Seb a Kelly green Jalen Hurts jersey! Those are words whose significance I mostly understand!
I’m not immune to this. Enthusiasm is a helluva drug, and I relish the contact high that I get from inhaling its second-hand smoke and from tuning into the frequency of the vibes. I’m not immune, but sports didn’t get me into its clutches until the pandemic hit and I found myself watching (and then re-watching and re-re-watching) the ESPN series The Last Dance, which led to my getting very into the Sixers and watching lots of basketball documentaries and attending basketball games and listening to The Rights To Ricky Sanchez (the only Sixers podcast)
Anywayyyy, I think enthusiasm has to be the cornerstone of any long-lasting devotion, cultural or otherwise. The degree of that enthusiasm is going to wax and wane and wax again over time, and I think we tend to believe that if we’re not at Peak Enthusiasm at all times for the long-term obsessions we’ve cultivated, then we’re not really into that thing at all anymore. I think static, sustained Peak Enthusiasm is really difficult to maintain for many years, and is more likely to lead to burnout or just moving on.
So my other tip for obsession-seekers is not to hold onto them too tightly. Maybe they lie dormant for a while and re-awaken when an obsession-related or obsession-adjacent thing grabs your attention. For example, Formula One became even more interesting to me when I learned that Diana Mitford and Oswald Mosely’s son Max served for over a decade as the president of the FIA, which is international motorsport’s governing body. Mitfords + F1 = tell me more!
Formula One was an ambient thing for me for a long time, because my husband grew up watching it, but I didn’t pay much attention to the sport until Drive to Survive came around, and now I’m hooked on the incredibly dramatic interpersonal ups and downs of the sport. I can’t tell you a single useful thing about the physics and engineering aspects of the sport, but I have a strong tight five to share about the now-public reciprocal loathing between gossipy bitches (complimentary) George Russell and Max Verstappen. It’s also become a family sport; we watch races together when we can, and the group text among the three of us is as likely to be full of F1 gossip as it is movie trailers or photos or whatever. (In fact, Seb named it f1 gossip / family. Priorities!)
This stuff builds, is what I’m saying. It’s an accretive process. Some people get tattoos to commemorate major events in their lives, I acquire intense new interests (in the parlance of our self-diagnosing times, hyperfixations) and add layers as I go along. Go forth and obsess, friends! And hop on into the comments to tell us about your obsessions! What are they? How long have they been precious to you? What role do they play in your life?