How to Obsess (A Bit)?

Question

Hello Hacker News!I've read an interesting thread some time ago called "How to find what I am really good at?"(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33077489)I have a similar personality and I have accepted that I simply am unable to choose one or even two things, I simply have too many interests that are just equally meaningful to me as all the others. ADD doesn't help, of course, but I'm not entirely sure it is that relevant. The problem is of course that I cycle through all of those topics and because the surface is really large, I'm not making too much of progress on any of them - at least when measured externally by comparing to other people who are focused on one thing.Today I saw a petition about bringing back Henry Cavill to Witcher TV series and it dawned on me. I surveyed my past, I surveyed people who I know that are really good at something. And there is a pattern.All those people are more or less obsessed about their fields, whether software engineering, photography, jazz guitar or whatever. Some people are clearly obsessed even by things like TV shows. In my life, however, I was never obsessed by anything. This realization is quite shocking to me.I would like to at least try and see what is it like to be obsessed by something. Maybe that is a missing ingredient in my life.So my question is: how to trigger a mild obsession about something - and if possible, how to do it in a controlled way so that I don't get lost in the rabbit hole. What are sources of your obsessions, people of HN? Is it possible to trace the reasons back to some root causes?Thanks!

PaulHoule · Accepted Answer

I think of how early studies of autism struggled to explain the "special interests" of autistic people because Freudian and post-Freudian (say Klein, object-relations, attachment, self psychology) theorists didn't seem to think children could have any motives other than impressing their parents... which is the last thing that would motivate an autistic child.
I think what you're looking for is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecstasy_(philosophy)
that is, when you are really interested in something, I think, you lose some of your socially determined sense of self.
There's an interesting meditation you can do.
I haven't been able to find a good description of it online because online texts on meditation are dominated by "spiritual materialism" such as burning candles, reading sacred text(s), etc but you do find it in the meditation manuals that are concerned about what you do in your head when you meditate.
Specifically you start out in an "alpha state" meditation (that could be paying attention to your breath, progressive relaxation, autogenic traning, etc.) What's different is that you choose some object to meditate on (could be one of those burning candles) and whenever you notice you lost your focus you put it back on the object and tell yourself "that is interesting... but this is more interesting".
For some people, like myself, this creates a very intense state.