In the throes, the grips, the feral pit of: obsession!!

On obsession's power for good.

“Literally obsessed” is shorthand for liking something slightly more than usual, these days at least. Obviously, before we watered down our language so much that we found ourselves needing to constantly up the ante by filling up our sentences with “literally” and “deadass” and “obsessed”— the word had a touch of the negative in it, a la Ali Larter’s character in the Beyonce and Idris Elba film Obsessed.

The 2009 film Obsessed, lol.

I wrote recently about a podcast episode I recorded with former founder friends last September. I was at a weird crossroads in my career— I was stepping away from my job, though you couldn’t know that yet, I’d hardly announce it on air— and found a lot of the questions about the meaning and/or purpose of life to be… destabilizing.

I texted my groupchat. Do you guys know the meaning of life? Is it just me who has no fucking idea? Do you guys know what your purpose on this planet is, am I a freak for not really thinking we necessarily have a single one?