Why Can’t We Stop Thinking About Someone?

Your imagination needs ground.

jWe all have that one person we think about all the time. This person may be close to us, slightly familiar with us, or not know us at all. It makes sense if a friend, family member, or partner is the subject of our thoughts and reveries. We love and care about the aforementioned individuals, and they love us back, so it is natural to have them on our minds all the time.

But what about people we’ve never met? Or people we’ve heard about or seen a couple of times but never interacted with? Why are we so enchanted by these people that they come to dominate our nights and days? There is nothing significant about them. They’re just random people we’ve incorporated into our lives, and convinced ourselves that they mean the most to us. Our obsession with a specific individual is linked to nothing but our aspirations and wildest imaginations.

We all want a life so different from our present realities that even the thought of it is tantalizing. We think about golden times, free of affliction and full of auspice. We picture ourselves standing next to people we love but who don’t love us back. We envision ourselves as owners of mansions and fabulous vehicles. We excite ourselves with the idea of having our name appear in Time 100.

But the thing is that it’s hard to daydream without a touch of reality to it. We need some substance, some sort of solid ground, to buttress our fountain of fantasies. It is impossible to dream about something unless we have a tendril of reality to incorporate into our dreams. It’s like adding a vicarious touch to our fantasies so the latter seems real. This is where our obsession with real-life individuals emerges.

Have you ever noticed that you think about individuals who have or represent what you want the most in life? For example, you catch a glimpse of a handsome stranger on the street, and then you can’t stop thinking about them? Your obsession doesn’t mean that you want that specific person to fall in love with you, but you want someone like them. You want someone sharing a specific trait with that person, but not exactly them.

Similarly, you think about your friend all the time. You idolize her to the point of insanity. This doesn’t mean that your friend has a huge part to play in your life or that life would end without her. It means that there is something about them that you use to cement your fantasies. You use a tincture of their life to inject some degree of reality into your imagination. Remember it is hard to harbor wild imaginations unless we have something to make them seem more real. That is exactly why we fuse our thoughts with a wisp of real life to delude ourselves into believing that our fantasies aren’t just a fool’s daydream.