I think interdimensional travel exists. Not wormholes, spaceships, alien planets. I mean the kind of travel that happens inside your own mind. The kind that takes you out of the ordinary world and drops you into a universe that feels entirely your own.
That’s how I feel every few months when I get super obsessed about something.
It doesn’t matter what it is. A hobby, an idea, an object. Something random pulls me in, and suddenly I’m gone. It’s like I’m living in a different dimension of life.
Like this one time I was looking for a writing desk.
It took me 3 days to decide on the material. After a hundred considerations, I zeroed in on wood. Then I spent 3 weeks obsessing over types of woods, desk sizes, the number of drawers I needed, durability, the shape of the desk, beauty, aesthetics. And a another rabbit hole on what desks great writers used.
And of course, I watched somewhere between 200 and 300 YouTube videos about desks.
And finally, I bought this: a simple, minimalist, vintage-style desk.
On the surface, it’s just a piece of furniture. But for me, everything I buy is an expression of me. It’s not just wood and screws, it’s me rearranged into a different structure of atoms. So I can’t just go out and pick up anything random. Especially if it’s a desk that I’ll be using to write letters like these for perhaps decades.
Maybe you feel this way too. Maybe the things you choose to surround yourself with feel like extensions of who you are.
To other people, these phases may look like insanity. But to be honest, it’s in these little moments of life that I feel most like myself.
But you can’t manufacture obsession artificially.
You can’t just wake up tomorrow and say, “today I’ll go super nerd on V12 engines”.
You don’t make them happen, they happen to you.
Let me share another example.
When I was fifteen, I discovered Hemingway. He became my favorite teacher.
There were others too, like Murakami and Marquez and Vonnegut and Bukowski. But Hemingway was a different breed.
Not just because he was a master of his craft, but because he gave me one of the greatest gifts of my life: an obsession for writing well.
Hemingway once wrote to his personal editor and publisher, Charles Scribner in a letter:
“I have to write to be happy whether I get paid for it or not. But it is a hell of a disease to be born with. I like to do it. Which is even worse. That makes it from a disease into a vice. Then I want to do it better than anybody has ever done it which makes it into an obsession.”
When I read that, I said to myself: I want that.
I wanted the disease. The vice. The obsession.
Not because it sounded glamorous, but because it sounded like freedom. Like having a reason to wake up in the morning that was bigger than you.
And I doubt if I’ve ever wanted anything more than that.
Why obsession is good for your soul
People who feel too much and think too deep – we crave obsession. We crave it like child craves play. Like a 2-year-old obsessed about putting everything into its mouth and banging it on the floor.
Because obsession revives the part of us that starts decaying in adulthood. The part that still remembers the excitement you felt the night before a school picnic. The butterflies before a performance. That tingling that made you feel like something good was about to happen.
History is filled with quiet souls who lived in these dimensions of obsession.
Stanley Kubrick, for example, once shot nearly 100 takes of a single scene. Can you imagine 100 takes? It’s a lot. Just to capture the precise detail he had in mind. People called him controlling, perfectionist, even mad. It wasn’t madness. It was obsession for his art.
Hemingway rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms 39 times until it felt right. Until they revealed what he knew was there.
Emily Dickinson rarely left her home, but inside her small world, she wrote nearly 1,800 poems. Many were found in drawers after her death, scraps of paper carrying fragments of her obsession with language, immortality, and the mysteries of the soul.
Obsession is addictive like drugs.
Obsession makes you jump out of bed. No hitting snooze. No external motivation. No pep talk, no calendar system, no coach. You just do it. Because not doing it would feel unbearable.
The intensity may vary. Some days you may do it for hours, some days for minutes. But the itch to do it never goes away.
Obsession is good for the soul because it makes you forget you exist.
You stop being a separate person doing a thing. You become the thing. The artist becomes the brush, the canvas, and the art.
And for a few hours or days you travel light-years away from the dull, heavy routines of everyday life. Like you’re in a different universe. That’s why I called it interdimensional travel. It throws you into a universe that is yours alone.
It fills you up with excitement. Excitement that’s real. That feels nourishing. That makes you feel like a human again.
It makes you feel like you’ve grown a little. A reminder that life is still worth being curious about. And that, at least for me, means everything.
And then… that beautiful phase ends. The wave pulls back into the ocean. The obsession burns out. The void returns. We try to fill it with substitutes — scrolling, distractions. But nothing tastes the same.
Deep down we know: we don’t make it happen, it happens to us.
And, that’s life.
A long time ago, I became obsessed with unlearning everything that kept me from being myself. All the masks, the expectations, the ways I diluted who I was just to fit in. It lasted years. And when it finally gave me back my own voice, I wrote a book about it.
It’s called Born to Stand Out.
It’s for introverts who want to be seen without becoming loud. For deep feelers who want to stop hiding. For the ones who’ve always known they weren’t meant to blend in
Get your copy HERE.
Because obsession is fleeting. But the person you are when you stop pretending? That’s forever.
Stay blessed,
Karun