Obsessions You Don't Actually Like?

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Spam. I moderate a large art forum with over 300k members (was 400k) and I've been whittling down the spammers, especially the old ones that joined before the forum had defences. I've been working on it since 2009, been through several sidekicks who couldn't last the distance. The only day I've not been there is when I buried my mother. I have spent an entire week's holiday just killing them. I research seos and whenever a list of .org forums for people to post back links, I expect a sudden influx as the forum is ranked about 70 in the world for google rankings. It annoys me that I can't turn off and spend that time better painting. I'm now senior admin, which I didn't really want as I have to deal with all the complaints. I've tried to resign several times, but there is no one who is prepared to put the work in, and as I like the place a lot, I carry on.

Imperfections in personal possessions drive me bonkers.

I have a cigar box guitar I recently built. The whole thing is made of junk, as it should be, that is the whole point. Does that stop me from seeking perfection in imperfection, nope not a chance. I have noticed that the fingerboard is not straight, I have tried to sand it out once and thought I had got it, well I haven’t and it’s going round and round in my head. I pick it up, put it down, look at it again. I had to sell my last one because of my obsession. I knew the bridge was wrong, I couldn’t fix it and it was driving me crazy, it had to go for the sake of my sanity.

I have had this problem for ever, fishing rods, telescopes you name it I obsess about it.

Correcting grammar and spelling mistakes too, I have had to edit this post several times already.

There have certainly been times when my special interest occupied so much of my time both mentally and physically that I wished I could just take it or leave it. Because I am so all or nothing about things if I try to adopt that attitude I just move on to the next obsession and repeat. I am a lost cause, although when I was younger I was definitely worse.

I'm obsessional about organising my stuff into perfect order but I hate the process of doing it because it's very boring and time-consuming, and I always seem to fail. Instead of working out a way of getting a reasonable result for a reasonable effort, I can't stop myself trying to make it absolutely complete (don't know how to do it in a time-efficient way), and then I get sick of the complexity and tend to abandon the project in an uncontrolled way, spoiling the ship for a ha'porth of tar.

A lot of what used to be fairly pleasant obsessions have become unwanted chores that way. I'm wary of the time I spend on them and I get anxious to get back to my life, which spoils a lot of the fun. I suspect working for a living gave me an aversion to repetitive stuff, because it was so often stuff I didn't want to do in the first place.

Right now I'm obsessed with thinking there will be a nuclear war when I go to sleep at night. Of course, that could happen any time of the day, but when I fall asleep I won't know until it's too late. Just like 9/11. The day before everything was "normal", and then I get up the next day to learn everything has been turned upside-down and will be that way forever. The only difference is that I wasn't directly affected by it. Badly yes, directly no.

I wonder how people get the money, time and supplies to build bomb shelters and bunkers, because I sure don't have either. Plus you have to supply it with oxygen because it needs to be airtight. The smallest leak could mean a horrible death. And why would anyone want to continue living in post-nuclear world, anyway? The planet won't be fit to support human life anymore. Meanwhile I see mushroom clouds and hear explosions every time I close my eyes at night.

Well, I'm a fan of long stories. Which is why when I write a story it tends to be a long one. With many chapters and such. So because of that, I have been trying to find a show that has a ton of episodes I can get into. One standout genre is soap operas. So I've been trying to find one that's been running for many years and has hundreds of episodes so I can go to the beginning and work my way forward up to now. I'm not really into soap operas so much as the long stories that they often have. Finding the episodes of one of those shows is the hard part. The easy part is watching it all until you wait patiently for the next one.

When I was young, I watched a lot of true crime on ID and CI. I read a lot of books about serial killers or just learned about forensics. It's not a topic which I could really discuss with other children or teens.