limerence with ideas

Youthful obsessions and searching for wholeness

Limerence is a state of infatuation or obsession over a person of romantic interest, usually caused by trauma and unmet developmental needs. There is a lot of discussion about this that is worthwhile to check out, but today I want to talk about it in a different context than relationships.

I discovered that you can have limerence over ideas, too. I jokingly called my partner a “purpose pilgrim” because he seems to always be looking for the next big idea to restructure his life around. A cause, a philosophy, a new theory of everything.

But I do this too. I chase mania and flow states, I try to induce them to get a glimpse of that state of total absorption. When I get obsessed with a new hobby or topic, sleep is the first to go. I haven’t had a consistent sleep schedule since I was 12 because I can get hyperfocused easily.

When I find a new hobby, my entire life revolves around it. I fantasize about making a living off of it and how cool it would be. If I get into writing, I get into the idea of hiding in a cabin in the woods, reading and writing in solitude, drinking tea by the fireplace. If I get into painting, I think about having a sun-filled New York studio with canvases and bizarre rugs everywhere. There’s nothing wrong with imagining adventures you’d like to go on. You can make things happen by visualizing what you want your life to be, and letting that vision inspire you, pull you towards it until it’s real. But if you’re so caught up in the idea of a lifestyle or career that you can’t tell if it’s really a good fit for you, you’re not doing yourself any favors.

This is not helped by the fact that I get into flow states very easily, and end up in blissful feedback loops that feel so good I am easily convinced I could do it forever at the cost of everything else. I forget to sleep or eat or pee, the basics feel secondary and optional. It’s like falling in love with every guy you meet, it’s hard to know anything past the current moment, you just know you want to be with them—Sure, let’s elope, why not?

I pulled my first all-nighter building a house on Minecraft, and had to stop playing the rhythm game Osu! because my eyes hurt from not blinking (on fast maps, if you blink you miss a beat and screw up your combo). When my friend introduced me to Genshin Impact, at my peak I could play for 16 hours a day without any stimulants. I fear what my Adderall-fueled self would be capable of.

I had a chess phase in high school and would stay up every night watching YouTube videos about chess openings, and carry around a homemade cardboard chess board to play with my friends at the lunch table.

I got into oil painting once and spent 25 hours on a reproduction of Norman Rockwell’s Girl At Mirror on a tiny 3” x 3” canvas when the other kids spent 5 hours and my art teacher accused me of lying. I did choose a difficult painting to reproduce, but my effort was way above the expected threshold.

(Rockwell’s original on the left, my version when I was 14 on the right. If you’re viewing this on the computer, the photo of mine is close to life-size as I was working on a tiny canvas. To get detailed highlights in the girl’s hair, I was painting with a single hair of a paintbrush. Also pretty proud of the seat shading.)

Or that time I got into modular origami and made a swan from 500 pieces of paper that I tediously cut and folded over the course of weeks:

(Time lapse of my 500-piece origami swan. If you look closely, in the background of one of the images is a stack of yarn. I was into knitting at the time as well. I have dozens of these obsessions and pictures to prove it, but I think you get the point.)

In the absence of religion, obsessions were my rituals for an otherworldly salvation, an escape from the mundane and bleak. I was hoping for them to complete me, the way one looks for the perfect partner to convince them they are whole.

When this happens, there can be a blurring of boundaries that isn’t necessarily healthy or desirable. When it works (whether it’s a relationship or new hobby) you feel like you’re on top of the world. When it doesn’t you have no idea what to do with yourself and things seem to be crumbling around you. It’s an unstable dynamic, and you live for the highs.

I’ve worked in marketing, business development, retail, graphic and UI/UX design, product management, curriculum development for startups, data collection and survey design, psychedelic research, and more. Pulled all nighter shifts at the hospital to monitor subjects for sleep studies, ran communities, organized social events. Sent cold emails, crashed on couches, juggled 3 jobs at once. All kinds of things, to varying degrees of enjoyment and alignment with what I want. Searched for new skills and purpose anywhere under the sun. Baltimore. Philly. San Francisco. Brooklyn. Palo Alto. Berkeley. The desert, the forest, the lake, the beach, I am trying to find myself everywhere I go.

I don’t regret any of the pivots I’ve made, because they brought me to where I am now. And I’m pretty happy, just momentarily lost and maybe finally getting tired of running around. Turns out if you look really hard you do end up finding more or less what you want, but to make the next step I need to change the way I do things. I need to grow up a bit.

I’m intellectually immature, and this instability has made it difficult to develop persistent fascinations or any semblance of a career lasting longer than a couple years. When I shared my research paper on Instagram, this is what a friend messaged me:

Much like how an emotionally immature person struggles to have healthy, lasting relationships and eventually starts to doubt, saying things like, “Am I really going to find love? Is that possible for me in this life?” If they never grow out of their immaturity, that sadly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They may go through life thinking they’re fundamentally broken or unlovable. I had this phase, and fortunately found I was wrong in these assumptions.

But I never thought to apply it to other areas of my life. I gradually started to doubt my intelligence and capabilities, drawing boundaries between different disciplines and distinguishing between the “more rigorous, difficult” hard sciences and the “fluffy, not real science” soft sciences. I published a paper in psychedelic research but after the initial buzz and hurrah never mentioned it, because I didn’t think it was very good. I think I just wanted to hang on to something certain about myself, I wanted to believe I wasn’t smart enough to do things I admired others for being able to do, because if that actually weren’t true, I would have to start wondering why I wasn’t doing exactly those things I wanted for myself in my life and career, and that’s hard. I created a false narrative to protect myself, and envied the people who knew early on what they wanted to do in life.

Like that “This Is My Hole” meme from The Enigma of Amigara Fault:

(The false separation I created between me and others was my drawing the boundaries of my “I am dumb”-shaped hole. I’m learning how to crawl out of it.)

It’s funny, because the post I was working on for months before this was a post about being curious enough to give up everything you know to end up transformed. But it’s not just about “being more curious”, like how “loving harder” doesn’t land you in desirable romantic situations. You have to be ready for that kind of paradigm-melting experience. You don’t give 5 grams of mushrooms to a beginner, that would be inappropriate, even abusive. I used to be an enthusiastic advocate of completely losing yourself in something. Obliteration of the self to discover something on the other side, “lose yourself to find yourself” kinda thing. I’m still an advocate of these experiences, I’m just more cautious and wise about them now. When in doubt, gentler and slower is the way to go.

I’ve been learning more about neuroscience these days, and feeling something new emerge. It’s a different feeling, it doesn’t sweep me off my feet. It’s more calm and stable, but compatible with what I want to do in this life. It’s too soon to call it, just like how you should let relationships reveal themselves over time instead of getting married impulsively, but I can say it looks promising and I won’t regret giving it a try.

I wrote this in my journal earlier today:

MON 07.25.22

I hope this works out. But I don’t know for sure. Because if I knew it wouldn’t be worth trying. That would be boring, there would be no journey. And if there’s anything I can get behind, it’s a crazy journey.