Obsession

Humans are and always have been obsessed with the idea of obsession. Our tendency to find a source of attachment and find some meaning to the different things in life leads us to project our feelings onto and external object- be it a thing, feeling, or a person. And think and overthink about it till you eventually become obsessed with it, and think and overthink it again, till you lose interest and find another object for our obsessive needs. To be obsessed with something, one needs passion and commitment. Humans however are people with faltering and fleeting interests and thus major commitment issues. We as a species have subpar attention span and focus, and so our focus keeps shifting. Our areas of interests keep changing and our passion keeps faltering and so after a while as we change so do our objects of obsession. These objects can be anything from toys to books to food to ideas and of course the classic- other humans.

               However, humans I think, are most obsessed with the idea of the unknown. We as a species cannot stand not knowing anything. Curiosity killed the cat sure, but also left the human deranged and impaired. This is why we keep reading and reading and trying to discover what is and what could be, formulating theories to explain the unexplained. Look at our obsession with the black hole, the Bermuda triangle and everyone’s favorite: death. We are obsessed with the unknown and the idea of knowing. Perhaps our main goal is omniscience and to defeat the unknown. The unknown can be a scary thing; you never know what to expect. And so our obsession leads us to formulate ideas and explain the unknown, give meaning to something we cannot and do not understand. Try to formulate a logic with science so as to know what to expect or at least tell ourselves that we know what to expect. And where science does not work, imagination flies. So comes the idea of monsters and parallel universes and life after death. We do not like losing control, we like having control over things, a grasp on reality and knowledge about things because we like having an upper hand. Knowledge is power and we weaponise our knowledge. Now when we don’t have knowledge about something, we become powerless and the unknown thing becomes scary, so we personify that unknown into a horrid creature- the personification of fear creates monsters- creatures we don’t know about and who are seemingly undefeatable and incomprehensible. This incomprehensibleness then becomes a way of understanding the un-understandable. Humans in the end, have this incessant need to give meaning to everything, even if the meaning makes no sense, we give sense to these meaningless meanings to calm the chaos in our minds and to bring structure to an otherwise horrendously messy world.

               Here in also comes the idea of life after death. When people fear death, what they truly fear is the unknown. We have no idea what comes next after death, or if anything comes at all. We don’t know if death is an abrupt end or another beginning- and this not knowing, this mystery, kills us (pun intended). The paradoxical nature of humans can be seen here as we fear dying and we hate living, and yet, even after death, we imagine a world where we continue to live.