[Ed note: This post relates to photography, I promise. It is not about what it seems to be about at the beginning! As you must often do on TOP, hang in there.]
For some strange reason I suddenly seem to own about 17 more cheap ballpoint pens than I did a week ago. How did that happen? Many are duplicates, because you're forced by the packaging to buy two, three, five, or a dozen pens in order to try just one. It's been interesting. I'm coming around to liking gel pens more and more, and I made at least one self-discovery: with the new instant-drying inks, I can write with the heel of my hand resting on the paper and thus on the desk as I write, without smudging the ink on what I've just written. All my life I've written with just the knuckle of my pinkie on the paper and the rest of my hand suspended above it, to avoid smudges. (I'm a leftie.) I wish I could say that this new discovery instantly improved my handwriting, but it did not; instead, it immediately gave me cramps due to the new and unfamiliar position of my hand.
But enough about pens. I'm going to admit here that I think I suffer from mild obsessiveness—and that's the subject here. [CORRECTION: At the suggestion of Aaron in the Comments, I'm going to change some of the instances of "obsession" in this article to "fixation"—"a strong, perhaps excessive, interest in something, not necessarily negative."] This pen thing is not OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) despite the everyday currency of that expression. I used to think I had OCD, but then I read a book about real OCD, and—oh my, do I ever not have it. Saying you have OCD when you're temporarily perseverating or fixating on an interest is like saying "I'm starving" when you're a little peckish or "I'm so depressed" when you're feeling a bit on the low side. No, no, and no. In common usage, used casually and non-technically, these are intensifiers. Intensifiers, like the way we have a hundred exaggerated ways to say "good," are an all-too-human tendency in speech—emphasis by overstatement. A recently popular intensifier for "good" in American English is "insane." I have a general rule not to amplify ordinary "dislike" into "hate"—a common intensifier—but I have to say, I hate that one.
But yeah, a little fixated. I'd say I'm going to quit buying and trying pens, but maybe after the six that are en route as I write this get here. Heh!
Settle down, Mike.
Here's the thing, though: I've long been aware that I've put my obsessiveness, or whatever you want to call it—"excessive focus"? "Unhealthy preoccupation"?—to good use. For instance: I never could have kept up my interest in photography for so long if it were just a casual, superficial source of interest and pleasure. And I never would have been able to write a more-or-less daily blog for twenty years if I hadn't been more than a little bit excessively focused or unhealthily preoccupied.
For instance, I re-wrote Tuesday's post on Wednesday morning, adding several hundred new words and an illustration. Why? Because it's the way I am. And in that post, I mentioned that Richard Nickel died documenting Chicago buildings that were being torn down (I have not one but two magnificent books of his I never look at—who can stop at one?—both notated by Amazon as "Purchased Jan 2011"). And Jamie Livingston's PAD project was only ended by his death. How could they possibly have kept those activities going if they weren't in some sense obsessions? Sometimes, I think I see signs, in others, that fixations really are rising to the level of OCD. I could name two examples I know of—one a stereo guru and one a coffee nut—but it would risk insulting real people in public and I'm unwilling to do that.
Cavemen and -women
I've always thought that subject specialization is an innate instinct of the mind, because the primordial tribe in the ancestral environment, ten thousand years ago, needed specialists. One guy is great at chipping rocks into sharp edges; he makes the tools. A woman knows all about turning animal hides into robes. Someone else teaches the children. There's the medicine man, who plays the placebo effect for all it's worth and knows how to comfort the sick and dying. Another guy is the best tracker. Another has a knack for leadership; another is strong, competitive, and a psychopath, and feels no fear in battle nor much compunction about killing the group's enemies. (The Sioux in their natural state had separate chiefs for peacetime and wartime. The UK did that in WWII, letting Churchill be their war leader but booting him out as soon as the war was over.) All these tribal specialists are needed. In an evolutionary-biological sense, that's why modern society has grown-up men who are fixated on NFL football or the Marvel Universe, chefs, Jay Leno, the guy who made the biggest ball of string, serial killers, and a guy I met when I worked for Model Railroader who had turned the whole second floor of his house into a giant HO train layout and organized every aspect of his life around model railroading. (When she came to the door, his cheery wife—clearly a victim of Stockholm Syndrome—was wearing an engineer's hat and striped denim overalls like an old-timey engineer. Instead of "come in," she opened the door wide and said, "all aboard!")
And what of my interest in photography? Not truly obsessive, I suppose, by the clinical definitions. But it's also not normal or balanced in the usual sense. I've been into it for most of my life. I've "harnessed" my naturally fixating or obsessive nature in the service of that interest and involvement, you might say, and put it to good use. If you can turn it to good use, a little obsession helps. It helps you get the work done.
The biggest change in my involvement with photography that's happened over the past handful of years is that this longtime preoccupation or fixation has begun to subside. More and more sub-topics bore me now. It's harder to get excited; I've seen it all before. Over the years I've witnessed several friends and acquaintances "emerge" from formerly vigorous fixations. I knew an audio equipment importer once, for example, who had followed his audiophilia to extreme lengths. He eventually simply tired of it all. He stopped chasing perfection, de-accessioned everything except a small but high-quality system that was not very expensive by his standards, and settled down to listening to music.
The moving ballpoint, having writ, moves on
As for the cheap ballpoints, well...they're all just pens. Yes, I'm "looking into it" at the moment—demystifying the subject, to use Oren Grad's term. I did the same thing with quartz watches a few years back, and came away with one watch I really like and wear every day. I did the same thing with shaving a while back, and settled on a simple routine that satisfies me. I did it with keyboards, trying your patience in the process, and ended up coming back around to the current version of what I've always used. (I had a wiring problem—I couldn't rewire my mind and my hand-eye co-ordination.) I'll do the same thing with ballpoints I'm sure. I'll learn about it for a while, settle on one or two products I like best, and that will be that. That's not obsession even in the colloquial sense. It's just "buying-and-trying"—a somewhat more involved version of shopping.
I'll leave it behind. I'll bet money that if you ask me a year from now, months and months will have gone by without me buying a single new pen. It's not going to remain an interest.
Not that there's anything wrong with it if it did. To each their own. But for me, these little shopping interests come and go; they're fun, because I like learning, and I like trying things for myself. Obsession, however—that's on another level altogether.
Mike
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Featured Comments from:
Jeff Sprang: "Interesting take on obsession. My experience with a model railroader's wife was completely different. On assignment to cover the guy who had converted his entire basement into a model railroad layout, I was greeted at the door of the home by his spouse who waved towards the basement door with a curt 'he's down there' and went back to reading her romance novel. Did another photo story on a guy who restored old Silver King tractors. His very nice ranch style house had been taken over completely by parts and tools. He cheerily told me that his wife with the kids had left him over it, like that was a good thing—to him it apparently was."
Rob de Loe: "There's a nice intersection between this post about obsessions, and your previous post that focused a lot on projects. To do a big project well, I think you have to be a bit obsessed because you may need to work at it beyond the point of common sense. I know when I've reached that stage when I'm obsessing about things that I know with certainty that nobody else will notice or care about. As a side note, my answer to the question someone asked, 'How do you know when the project is done?' is, "Big projects are never finished—only abandoned.'"
MikeR: "I'm glad you wrote that about OCD. My firsthand experience with true OCD came from living with it, embodied by my late first wife. It is a sad and horrifying thing to witness, as though a person has been possessed. Not even remotely funny, the way it's been depicted in Monk and As Good As It Gets. And by the way, I've seen a Venn diagram that illustrates an overlap among OCD, ADHD, and Autism. I think obsession is too strong a word for what you describe. But, it's more than curious, or interested. Open to suggestions."
Mike replies: I modified the post slightly to include the word "fixation." I wonder if that serves a little better.
Tony: "Sometimes obsessiveness can definitely be useful in photography; there’s a bunch of prints I have lying around that couldn’t have been possible without me going all-in on learning the ins, outs, and quirks of my system of choice. However, my current obsession is flash bulbs—a particularly expensive and insane thing to be diving into in the 2020s—and while I’ve had some successes that couldn’t really have been done with electronic flash, the jury is still out whether this obsession is going to be worth the hours of research and testing I’ve already sunk into it!"
Stuart Hamilton: "The late Kurt Stier, a brotherly friend for 60 years and a professional photographer through the annual reports years, worked in his early photo career as an assistant and darkroom printer for Irving Penn. He once told me, quoting Penn, that nothing great is ever achieved without obsession."
Sean: "People who say they're a little bit OCD will be cured by reading David Adam's The Man Who Couldn't Stop: OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought."
Moose:
"Pens In Mug (mug by high school art student.)"
David Comdico: "Scorsese has said, paraphrasing a bit, that Art is making other people care about your obsessions."
David Dyer-Bennet: "The study of psychology seems to have identified a lot of things that everybody does to some degree, which if done to excess can be problems. Fixations and ADD come to mind. Even bipolar disorder is a cycling between exaggerations of normal states, rather than something entirely unique. We talk about autistic people as being on a spectrum, and part of the deal is that neurotypical people are at one end of that spectrum (or towards one end; there's variety among the typical). The clinical definitions nearly all include a requirement that it interfere with functioning (caring for yourself, holding a job, maintaining relationships are all part of 'functioning'). The difference between 'focus on your professional work' and a 'fixation' is...kind of subjective, really. Not at all sure that successful professionals can reliably turn that focus on and off on demand.
"At least to some extent, we all make lemonade with the hand we have been dealt. The hands differ, and what society rewards is somewhat arbitrary, and there's also a lot of luck involved."
Eric Brody: "As a physician who spent many years training young physicians, I found that the best had a bit of obsessiveness or whatever you choose to call it; the worst were in a word, cavalier. Those who would meticulously review a chart and find what others had missed were my heroes and in my other role as a recruiter for my medical group, I sought them out and invariably they were successful. This is true so long as they also had the most important characteristic of a great physician: empathy."
