What would you say this is?

Post Reply New Topic

I obsess over a new thing every month or so. My obsession, if that may be the correct word, is with research. I will find a topic that interests me and I just delve completely into said topic. I'll be like a sponge, absorbing every little bit of information I can find about the topic, be it the Holocaust or corsets or piglets. During these times, I will feel ecstatic or high on knowledge, and I will sleep very little because I'm too busy discovering new things about the topic. A little piece of my heart will be put into that topic, emotion. But of course, every topic runs out of information eventually, and there will be nothing more for me to read on the subject after a while. At this point, I will become quite depressed and feel a sense of loss and emptiness. It will remain this way until I find another subject that interests me, and I will reach that high again, then depression, then elation, then depression, etc.

I like to give things labels and terms, so I've been trying to come up with a word to describe this. Is there a good word for it, or is it too obscure to properly identify? Has anyone else experienced this?

"Logophilia"

"Logos" - Knowledge

"Philia" - Fondness; or more recently, Attraction


You are a logophile.

I'm not sure what it's called, but plenty of people on here (myself included,) do the same

My current interests/obsessions are woodwork, guitar and conspiracy theories (cults, 'Monarch' programming, electromagnetic frequencies and their effect on the brain. I'll have you know that I'm completely sane, thank you )

i'm not sure how old you are, but this is somewhat normal.

during adolescence, it is normal that your special interests fluctuate heavily before settling into what it will remain for a long period

This is extremely common for people on the spectrum: studies show that 99% of autistics/aspies have some form of special interest, and it's extremely normal for those interests to change. I identify with putting a piece of my heart into all of my subjects of interest; whenever anyone makes even passing mention of them in conversation, I feel good inside. I have stayed up literally all night absorbing facts about my interests, or, as in the case of Star Trek, one of my current obsessions (not that my username gave me away or anything), watching episode after episode without being able to stop. My trekkie friend and I once finished an entire season in one night.

What's that? I have to wake up and get ready for work in five hours? Screw that, I suddenly need to learn everything there is to know about Mongolia now.

My special interest is girls.

What heterosexual dude isn't obsessed about girls?

Yes, and I miss it. I guess, that´s why people used to say :"My gosh! You know something about everything!"
We become "specialists" in very short time that way.It´s pure joy!
My life has been very turbulent these last years and I´ve lost that focus, but one day...

Me. It could be argued that I'm obsessed about my partner, but as for the rest of them, their sexuality just bores me these days. I'm very interested in relationships though, particularly what makes them work and what makes them fail.

I've been obsessed with music most of my life, and that's never completely gone away, though I've shelved it sometimes when it's not been developing in a rewarding way. You never get to the end with music, it's infinite.

I can't think of many interests that would have a definite end point. I suppose if they're narrow enough, they might. But mine have usually been wide.

I've sometimes flipped and come to dislike a special interest, especially as a teenager when I wanted to see myself as grown up. I started out as an obsessional Doctor Who fan, and built a life-size cardboard Dalek, but didn't like the change to Jon Pertwee, ceased to worry about missing the occasional episode, got more interested when Tom Baker took over, but then the plots became hard to follow, and I didn't know that even Baker rarely knew what was going on, and the difficulty made me uncomfortable because I was generally worried about my brain which was having great trouble following schoolwork at the time. I abandoned it for a while, then my son got into it so we tended to watch it together. It never fascinated me like it did when it started, but I still like good pictures of Daleks.

The Beatles fascinated me for a long time, but when they split up and started doing solo albums, there were too many to collect, so I stuck to John Lennon, so when he died it was pretty much over. Even so, I've never felt uninterested in Beatle stuff, and still love to sound like them when I perform music. Later I found tons of out-takes and unreleased recordings, and tried to make a perfect collection, but stopped short of total obsession. Last thing I did was to create a mashup called "Eight Hammers A Week" a few years ago by isolating and merging some of the vocal and instrument tracks of two Beatles songs. I don't think I have much left to do for the Beatles obsession though. I know a lot of the history, I've seen most of the pictures, and heard most of their recordings. To try to make it complete would bog me down.

There were enjoyable spinoffs from the Beatles. Ravi Shankar, Ivor Cutler, Victor Spinetti, peace, even Yoko Ono once I'd got over the shock. I had an obsession for 78 RPM records because of McCartney's interest in vaudeville songs. I first went for 20s dance band music, then found ancient records from the WWI era. More recently I've collected most of what I want from YouTube, and hope to tidy it all up one day.

I've just ranted for ages about special interests I've done nothing about for some time, so I guess for me, the interests are still there but I don't have to work on them all the time, so they're more like normal hobbies now. I've had little problem in putting promising social stuff before isolated stuff. It annoys me that I don't get many "solo" things done when I'm with people, but I like to be with people if I like them, and it's hard to share these really specialised things with them. When I was younger I'd get totally fixated on something geeky, then after a time I'd realise how lonely I was making myself.