My obsessions are ruining my life
I think it started around seven years ago when I started worrying about sinning going to hell. For every little mistake I made I would often make a little prayer to God in my mind to ask for forgiveness for the things that I did, regardless of how minor they were. It quickly got to the point where I would even apologise for thinking things that I didn’t even mean (such as hating God, my family, my friends, etc) and ever since then not a day has gone by where I haven’t had these thoughts, as they’ve even evolved over time to encompass more horrible things that I don’t mean.
I wish it stopped there, but that isn’t the only obsession I developed. Roughly five years ago, I began obsessing over certain conspiracy theories, with the one taking up the most of my time being the “dinosaurs never existed” theory. This one got to me because dinosaurs are my favourite animals, and have been a pretty massive presence in my life ever since I was a child, so I took some serious issue with the idea that they never existed. Most people around me would likely just ignore this kind of theory, but I just couldn’t let myself do that. Instead, I spent so many hours of my life looking as deeply into this conspiracy theory as I could just so I wouldn’t be closed minded to any potentially mind blowing evidence that would shatter my preconceived notions. Needless to say, five years later and I have turned up nothing, yet for some reason still sometimes make myself sift through this information in order to see if there is anything if worth which, 9/10 times, there isn’t.
But in a weird way, this led to my latest obsession which has taken hold over the past two years, and especially so over the past few months. I’ve made myself go down numerous rabbit holes regarding “human nature” which have led to me discovering some pretty terrible claims made about women, people of colour, LGBT people, and so on. Unlike the situation with the dinosaurs, however, I don’t know that much about human psychology and behaviour, so I mostly relied on the words of others regarding these topics. Sometimes people would put forward scientific articles that supported claims such as “women only loving men for their looks/money,” or “people of different ethnicities having lower or higher iqs.” I also managed to find scientific articles which provided evidence against these claims, but I would then make myself check to see if anyone had criticised these articles (sometimes they did and sometimes they didn’t), which just confused me more.
I understand that it is important to be open minded to other evidence, but this has just been exhausting. It’s even bled into my personal life as well. I’ll sometimes just be doing something I enjoy, such as drawing or bike riding, when suddenly a little thought enters my head relating to a specific group of person. Sometimes I fight against it and it goes away, but usually I cave into this urge, look up a specific claim, and try to address it the best I can, which can sometimes go on for hours. In the end though, I’m either left worried, numb, or somewhat dissatisfied, because I know that there are hundreds of sources out there making specific claims, and I know that I don’t have the expertise to thoroughly analyse them all or the time or patience to even try to go through them all.
I know that this might not be as serious as some of the other posts on this thread, but I feel like this has genuinely negatively impacted my life, and this has really been weighing down on me for a long time. I just want everything to go back to how it used to be when I wouldn’t become so worried about all of this, but I just can’t stop ruminating on this stuff no matter how hard I try.