Obsession

[rowyn]

'Everyone should work hundred-hour weeks. Find something you want to do for 15 hours a day. Make that your job.'

I can't find the quote on this, although I heard the sentiment attributed to Harlan Ellison.

I'm not sure how I feel about this idea. It's got two core assumptions: (1) that everyone can find something they'd want to do for 15 hours a day and (2) that it's possible to find someone to pay you for whatever (1) is. Just satisfying (1) is difficult: even on the weekends I sometimes find myself without anything I really want to do. Nevermind just one thing.

And yet there is a beautiful, appealling elegance to the idea. Recipe for happiness: find the thing you want to do, and do that. Why cast life as the quest to be happy with what you've do? Why not the quest to do what you'll be happy with?

Although "be happy with what you do" is an elegant answer, too. There are two business self-help books that my job has paid its employees to read in the time that I've been here: Who Moved the Cheese and Fish! I could summarize the former as "go find what makes you happy" and the latter as "be happy with what you have". Some people I know hate both books, which I understand, because both books are focused on playing by the rules of business and what some people really want to do are change the rules. But as general "rules to live by", it seems like one of them ought to be appropriate to any given situation. Either be happy with what you're doing or do something else. How hard is that?

Ah, so much easier to say than to do.

But back to my original quote: there's an implication in it that people can find one thing that they'll be happy doing forever. Oh, not necessarily, I suppose. A career can be a broad thing, spanning many different aspects. Even a job like "writer" or "artist" has wildly different parts to it: writers do outlines and research and revisions and summaries and query letters, as well as the actual "writing" part. Artists don't just paint: they have to get models and study anatomy and prep canvases and clean utensils and so forth. In theory, you could make a job out of doing just one part of those careers and have other people do the rest, although in practice that rarely happens. Likewise, in theory, you could make a career out of doing a bunch of unrelated tasks, all of which you enjoy.

But the implication remains: find that one thing you love enough to do exclusively, and you too can be happy.

I think I see that in the quote because some of my fondest memories are of obsessions. Times when I was absolutely obsessed with doing one thing, when I could do it for 15 hours a day and be happy, when I didn't want to do anything else. Like the fugue state I was in when finishing Silver Scales.

I don't know if it's common for my obsessions to bring me joy. There's an experiment I heard about with rats, where they put two groups in separate cages. One group got food pellets when they pushed a button, and the other got delicious treats for pushing the button. Once the rats had gotten used to this, the researchers deactivated buttons, so they didn't do anything anymore. The first group stopped pushing the button after a while, and looked for other ways to get food.

The second group kept pushing the button until they died of starvation.

Sometimes I feel like that second group, still pushing the button even though it's not working any more.

I've never been able to sustain that state of joyous-with-doing-one-thing for very long. Maybe a few months at the outside. After that, maybe I've finished the project, or gone on to a different one anyway, or keep working at it until it's done and/or makes me happy again (which sometimes does work: see Silver Scales.)

And I don't know which I should try to fix. Is the problem that I obsess, and the solution for me to stop doing it, to pace myself? Is the problem that I do try to pace myself, and I'd be happier giving my passions free rein? Is obsession part of who I am, and I need to find a way to make it work for me? Is there out there, somewhere, the one perfect thing that I can obsess over forever, and I need to keep looking for it?

I don't know. Pretty sure it's not that last one, though.

Comments

[detroitfather.livejournal.com]

I think there is something else at work here, too, which you kind of implied perhaps.

I will say things like: I wish I could paint all day long.

But during those few periods of my life when this was possible, I became very tired of painting, and wished I could do something else. So, it is a moving target.

These days, I'll say: I wish I had never ever painted. I just want to work on old/custom cars all day. But to do that lucratively, you have to deal with other people. And (as someone has famously said), hell is other people. I would quickly lose my patience trying to satisfy the demands of quirky custom car customers.

I don't reckon you can win at this game, no matter how you slice it.

[rowyn]

Yes, there's the "anything you *have* to do stops being fun" issue. Although some people do find jobs they love.

I don't think it's necessarily an unwinnable game ... I just need to figure out the right approach. Or get lucky. Or be someone else. Something like that.

[koogrr.livejournal.com]

Yes...

I need to think about this some more, but I see obsession coming in good and bad versions. The bad version is when it is functioning as a distraction from something that needs fixing. The good version helps one Get Stuff Done.

[rowyn]

I think of the good ones as those that make me happy, and the bad ones as those that I do even though they're not making me happy. Sometimes that's the rat-pushing-button syndrome, but sometimes I'm obsessed with something even though it's never been very rewarding. EverQuest comes to mind as an illustration of the latter. It wasn't a bad game, but it wasn't ever so much fun that it made sense to let it take over my life.

[koogrr.livejournal.com]

EQ, WoW, CoX do provide a degree of 'invested time results in visible reward'. As cargoweasel observed of his nephew, a video game also gave a sense of control to an adolescent who was in a largely regimented life.

They've got progress bars, life doesn't. Watching all those movies for me, it was measurable, I had a box to finish.

There's a link in my LJ, from Foofers, about an intellectual capacity that was masked by television for 50 years. I've always thought of MMOs as being a successor to TV in the distraction capability. What was, or wasn't happening for you such that EQ made so much sense at the time? That'd be something to think on.

[rowyn]

Yes, the illusory progress is one of the big draws of leveling games. It's also why I don't consider Puzzle Pirates a leveling game, because while its got measures of your skills that go up as you get better, there's no fixed upward progress on the skill-based ones. Your ranking can go up or down, and only goes up if you play the game well. There is fixed upward progress on the play-based ones, but no one cares about them and they don't affect much of anything.

The Foofers link was interesting. While I think the "WoW is better than watching Gilligan's Island" comparison is fair, I wouldn't say that WoW is better than, say, watching Schindler's List. Not all TV is a time-sink.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

What makes me happy is to have no responsibilities, or at least no responsibilities that I could be acting on right at that moment. If there's nothing more important that I could be doing, it doesn't matter if I'm riding rollercoasters or messing around with stuff or just sitting on the couch staring out the window.

So, to be happy with my work, I'd have to have money magically appear with no expectation of anyone getting anything out of it.

[rowyn]

I'm not sure if having no responsibilities would make me happy or not. I'm saving for early retirement with that idea in mind, but sometimes I think that having all the money I could want would make me feel purposeless. At the back of my head, a motivator for writing has always been "I could make a living at this, maybe" and I'm not sure if it'd still be there if I didn't need money.

OTOH, the RPGs I've run were with no expectation of ever making anything off of them, so maybe I'd just transfer the motivation to some other incentive. I'm not sure that's quite the same as 'no responsibilities'. It's more like the responsibilities have less serious consequences when I fail them.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

Oh I sorely disagree. When you make your life's pleasure your job, then it's no longer your pleasure - it's your job. Nothing kills the muse faster than telling her she has to come through if she wants to eat that month.

[koogrr.livejournal.com]

Yes, no, kinda.

I'm more like Terry, I want to do what I want to do and have money magically appear. Having to do art, writing, tedious comparisons of specs to shop drawings, kills all the fun, yes.

Sometimes I want to do the dishes, or clean, but apparently not as often as I should because the helpful kitchen ants keep trying to take over that duty. It's really, really bad when a bunch of insects feel they can do a better job than you. I know they're just trying to be give assistance, but...

[rowyn]

It's not that they don't think you can do a good job! It's just that, well, there's only one of you and there's hundreds of them, so the ants naturally figure that if all of them help out your kitchen'll be rid of food debris so much faster!

[level-head.livejournal.com]

Oh, I sorely disagree. I do work hundred hour weeks on a regular basis, and I've got more than a dozen thirty-six-hour-days in this year so far.

And I truly enjoy what I do -- partly because I decided to do so. I'm definitely in the Camp One and Camp Two category (from the groups that the Lady Rowyn refers to above): Arrange your thinking to love what you do now -- and then work to improve your situation even more.

I thought this way when I worked a hundred hours a week washing dishes and delivering auto parts. And when I had the same sort of schedule before that cleaning bathrooms in restaurants (that I later managed).

Life still offers challenges; this year has not revealed whether it will be poor or wonderful economically (not likely to be in between). But I'm enjoying my life, and it has a purpose. And I worked until 3:30 this morning and was back at it at 9 am -- this is why you're not seeing much writing from me here recently. (This is on my list to fix, in fact.)

I've spent on the order of 100,000 hours at my current job. If working at a job you enjoy makes it "no longer your pleasure", that effect would have certainly been true of me. And many people find their creative instincts honed by pressure -- quite a few authors described this as their primary inspiration.

It is just how you decide to think about it. And you make that decision.

Some people are afflicted with physical and mental challenges that prevent them from taking this approach. But in my opinion, the great majority could do it the way I do; such thinking is a skill set that is eminently learnable.

===|==============/ Level Head

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Recently, I've decided to enjoy:
(a) My work.
(b) Spending time with my family.
(c) Being social and hanging out with people locally.

...it didn't work, though. You can't decide to enjoy things or not, or to be stressed out by things or not, or to be interested by things or not. You don't get to choose your emotions, they just happen.

[rowyn]

I think I can influence my emotions, to some degree, by controlling what I think about and how I act. It's a lot of effort, though. Sometimes when I've been depressed I've had this cycle of "I should do x to cheer myself up" followed by "no, I deserve to be miserable" and so I just sit and stew instead. O_O

But even when positive thinking works for me, it's never been as easy as "just decide that I like it". It's the sort of mental effort that's hardest to make when I need it most. And at its worst, it just makes me feel more awful for not being able to do it better. It should be easy! They're my emotions, right? Why can't I tell them what to feel? Dammit, where's my owner's manual? >:)

[level-head.livejournal.com]

You can't decide to enjoy things or not, or to be stressed out by things or not, or to be interested by things or not. You don't get to choose your emotions, they just happen.

Well, it certainly seems to be a reasonable statement. But let's try it with a fairly trivial example:

A woman named Cheri -- let's call her "Cheri" for privacy reasons -- was highly afraid of reptiles. Her problem was that she worked directly for a man who kept reptiles in a large (300 gal) tank in his office.

The fearsome-looking male Jackson's Chameleon was perhaps scary enough, but she'd never seen it. She literally ran into the office and ran out when she had to drop off a piece of paper, and could not bear to look at the tank. She was anxious and agitated and obviously unhappy just to be near the door to the room where the tank was.

A bit of education, coaching, and exposure brought gradual familiarity.

By a year later, she had volunteered to clean the tank (a weekly chore) and could be seen on the little stepladder with the chameleons perched on her shoulder while she went about tidying up their space.

The same event -- exposure to reptiles -- now produced a completely different set of emotions. Over time, she learned how to think differently about them -- and that made all the difference.

I haven't kept the reptile tank since the Northridge Earthquake flipped it over, and Cheri has moved on more than a decade ago. But the story is true enough.

And it happened to me, at age 14, with another matter -- and that's when I learned the trick I'm talking about. My life was exactly the same the day before and the day after this decades-ago moment, but because I thought differently I went from miserable to happy. And, for the first time, gained control over my life.

I've never looked back.

Just think -- if there were some element of truth in what I'm saying -- if what I've done every day for forty years was possible ];-) -- wouldn't it be worth looking into?

===|==============/ Level Head

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

You do realize that
(a) you're using the psychiatric treatment of a mental disease as your anecdote (and talking about being desensitized to stimuli, which isn't the same thing as deciding to change your emotions at all), and
(b) You sound like you're trying to recruit people into a UFO suicide cult.

Right?

Also... no. I'm not even remotely interested in the sort of thing that would make me happy to work 100 hours a week in a thankless job. I know a lot of people who were 'happy' in that sort of situation until they died of stress-related diseases, broke down, burned out, etc. Pretending to be happy, or forcing yourself to 'be happy' using willpower, is a trap that leads only to death and misery.

[rowyn]

Hi, Terrycloth. Have I introduced you to my friend Level Head? I met him online in, um, 2002? And in person in 2004. I was came out to see him for his 50th birthday party, and the 30th anniversary of his company. He's a great friend, very intelligent, well-spoken, and well-versed on a variety of subjects. He's been really helpful to me in my writing projects, unfailingly supportive and encouraging.

...

And I thought I'd point this out 'cause you may not be getting the best possible first impression, here.

[rowyn]

Hi, Level Head. Have you met my friend Terrycloth? He's a good friend, although I only know him online. I met him at the start of the +Terrible Butterflies+ game last year, where his PC and mine wound up madly in love with each other. He was one of the players in the Honored game -- he played Kite. He's an awesome roleplayer, very clever and creative. We play City of Heroes together a lot, too. I enjoy his company a great deal.

Just thought you should know.

[rowyn]

Maybe you should teach a class on it, sir. I haven't really gotten the hang of the right Jedi mind trick myself.

[rowyn]

Oh, there's no one thing I know of that I'm sure I want to spend 15 hours a day doing for the rest of my life: not writing, not drawing, not even playing games.

But that's not the same as saying that no such activity exists. Maybe I just haven't found it yet.

Or maybe the key really is "do what I enjoy and enjoy what I do", and I just need to get better at that part. :) I have to admit, though, it doesn't feel right to say "anything you don't want to do 15 hours a day isn't worth doing". Some things are worth it in smaller doses, surely!

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

When I've found I am obsessed with something, it usually means I have to let it go.

[rowyn]

Mmm. Thinking about it, not all my obsessions have ended with me giving up the thing I obsessed over. Sometimes I finished with it naturally, and sometimes I kept it at a reduced intensity. Though if you define "letting go" to include anything that ends with "no longer obsessed", then those would count as letting go. :)

I'd be interested in hearing what obsessions you've given up (if that is what you meant by "letting go"), but I don't want to pry if it's not something you want to talk about.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

Well, being a successful writer and artist, for starters. :)

[rowyn]

For a particular definition of "successful", okay. :) But I do see your point, and the shift in focus is very noticeable.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

Well, for the definition of successful that I'd been taught and that I had internalized as the thing that I Wanted. To stay home all day and draw/write and be paid for it by other people in a particular way.

It's taken me this long to realize that life wouldn't have made me happy. Because it was about having my happiness hinge on external factors.

Anything external can be taken from you. If you really want to be happy, it has to come from inside.


Anyway, obsession can be a good stand-in for energy-to-accomplish if you can't find the latter, so I reckon it has a place. It's just a dangerous master.

[level-head.livejournal.com]

Because it was about having my happiness hinge on external factors.

This, I think, probably qualifies as a key insight into life. When you get control of your mind, your happiness no longer hinges on external factors.

===|==============/ Level Head

[octantis.livejournal.com]

I think the obsession theory is oversimplified and naive. Even if there's a guarantee that this obsession will stay fulfilling for the rest of one's life without burning out, it's going to make most people unbalanced. Some people can survive and even thrive that way, but being a well-rounded individual, aware of the world around them, seems a lot healthier by and large. Even the 100-hour weekly obsessions that allow for interacting with the world to some extent, building a business say, will take away something else, like family.

We love the idea of being able to stab one button for happiness over and over forever, it's such a simple answer. We make heroic characters that're driven, nobly focused on their one goal. Most of my characters are that way, it's cathartic, and I admire focus... but in the end, they can survive on their one pellet, satisfied with a caricature of a relationship or hobby, free from any constraint or responsibility for anything else. I don't think the majority of people can, though I imagine corporations would love such drones.

[rowyn]

It's the elegant solution: it sucks us in. 'Balance' is so complicated and messy.

[octantis.livejournal.com]

Sho' nuff. It's definitely appealing. I wish elegance was effective more often.

[kagetsume.livejournal.com]

In a not so amusing note, my workplace shifted from 'Work-Life Balance Policy' to 'Work-Life Integration Policy', so that all your waking time can be used to improve the company bottom line and the idea of a work day goes 'away'.

It's a total load of BS and all us employees know it, and frankly, mock it. There should be balance between a job and other things. I always use the phrase: I work to live, I do not live to work.

[octantis.livejournal.com]

WOW. Mind boggling. That is so completely garbage it's not even funny. I would, frankly, be insulted. You go to work, you do your job well, they've got no business either trying to get you to take more work home in your free time, making you think about work in your free time, or otherwise dictating what you should be doing in your free time. Even if they try to pull some sniveling "it's for YOU" turnaround... no. I ain't havin' that. Step the hell back.

[rowyn]

Eeyugh. That's pretty awful. :(