Observation: Passion vs Obsession


As I read through the AG threads each night culling useful tips (there are many) it occurred to me that there is a difference between passion and obsession in our hobby, or anything else for that matter.

I feel that the desire to improve can take one of two paths.

Passion = You love what you are doing. You enjoy the process and you love listening to the music. You are creating aural art. You are becoming the master of your sound, like an athlete you are honing your skills. You are integrated with the process and the process gives you joy.

Obsession = The joy is destroyed. You have sabotaged yourself by telling yourself "I have to get it". All you want are results, it serves an end.

To me the truth is that there is no end, only the journey. Enjoy the passion, your system and what it is offering you.





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Showing 1 response by cd318

@larry5729,
"I have noticed how many in this group are obsessive and I think it can destroy what we set out to do and that is destroying our passion. I think we all need to be millionaires or be satisfied with what we have. I am thinking about upgrading my speakers, but do I need to when you are lucky to see two speakers in a room in your neighborhood.
Where do you stop?"


When it comes to obsessiveness, I’ll certainly hold my hand up here.
Hi-Fi is bad enough, but for me it’s even worse when it comes to computer hardware.

With so many potential upgrades it can be bewildering to know just where to go to next.
An i7 chip, i9 or beyond?
Or something from AMD?

Then what about RAM? DDR4? How much?
What about the hard drive - SSD or NVMe?
How big a power supply?
Is a Bronze one enough.

What about graphic and sound cards?
Are they really necessary in 2021?

And probably for me, the worst of all, fan noise and how to eliminate it.

Thankfully I found a great article on eliminating bottlenecks that restored some sense of perspective. The author made it clear that when it comes to hardware, for most folks it’s the hard drive that’s the main bottleneck.

A simple upgrade to a SSD quietened the nagging doubts, at least for a while. An upgrade to a Noctua fan quietened things a fair bit but the upgrade doubts never entirely go away.

I’m sure its the same for many car enthusiasts.

It’s just something in us, something that always wants just that little bit more.
Sometimes I find myself almost hating this tendency in myself, yet virtually powerless to resist it.

It’s definitely something that needs working on.

Life is finite and this is not the road to salvation.