One-Track Mind

It's often said that men have only one thing on their mind, and that everything eventually leads to it.  That one thing is usually sex.  I've been thinking about the idea of having a "one-track mind" and what it actually represents.  I decided to take a moment and think about the people in my life, friends, family, and people I have worked with, and thought about their thought patterns - insofar as I can with the limited exposure to their thought processes as I can get from a distance.  I've realised that most people actually have a one-track mind, not in terms of sex specifically but in terms of driving forces and essentially, synaptic links.  Now this is speculation, I can't examine their minds to actually confirm that but the evidence seems to point in that direction.

Take a moment and think about each person in your life, and think about the one thing you tend to associate with them more than anything.  What topic of conversation does everything eventually lead back to?  What belief or guiding principle do they relate everything else to?

There was a time when I was a moderator on an online forum, and although I never made the connection before, I have realised looking back that most members had a "thing" that they were known for.  I've taken that realisation and looked at various social media platforms and I've been noticing a pattern that emerges.  Whilst people have a wide range of hobbies and interests, there is always one thing that is prominent more so than any other.  There is no general answer to the question of what that is, it varies from person to person.  What I find fascinating about this revelation is that it doesn't just apply to real life experience, it also applies to the character development of fictional characters on TV shows and Movies.  Whether those characters are meant to be believable or not is irrelevant.

This made me think of a cartoon series called My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.  In the series every pony has a symbol on their rump called a cutie mark.  The cutie mark represents whatever they are best at, or if you will, whatever their "calling" is or vocation for lack of a better explanation.  I had a humorous thought of what the world would be like if people actually had cutie marks.  What would they be?  For some people it's rather easy to answer that question.  As I said above, I came to the realisation that most people both real and fictional all seem to have at least one obsession that everything else in life can be related back to and even when you think it wouldn't be possible to link the two, they still find a way.  What's more than this, for some people a 'cutie mark' does in fact exist in some way through the tattoos that they choose to get, which are usually representative of their passion or their interests.

The idea that every man thinks only about sex might actually be indicative that sex is actually the default obsession, and that those who have moved on to other obsessions are people who have moved beyond that primacy.  This has led me to a rather amusing conclusion, that those people who seemingly have no defining interest or no obsession that you can immediately associate with them, are actually obsessed with sex, whether they express that openly or not.  There is of course an extension of that theory which would say their obsession is actually something taboo or something they don't feel comfortable talking to other people about, which still may or may not be sex.

So, what is my obsession?  What can I relate almost everything in life back to in my mind?  For me that's hard to pick just one thing.  Although I would say I can relate almost anything to politics or philosophy I wouldn't say either of those are really my obsession.  I'd probably say if I had a cutie mark it would likely be something that represents writing, as that's something I have done for as long as I can remember.  When I was kid I wrote on my computer although the first PC I had, my Amstrad CPC 464 didn't have any way to save what I wrote so none of it was preserved.  In later years I got another desktop and eventually a laptop of my own.  That laptop I would spend hours at a time sitting writing elaborate stories.  Sadly due to hardware failure and general loss of disks and CDs over the years not much remains of what I wrote on it.  On more than one occasion I accidentally formatted the hard drive without backing it up and lost quite a bit.  You would think I became better with age but as recently as 2 or 3 years ago one of my external HDDs died and I lost hundreds of GB of data none of which was backed up.

In terms of the internet and blogs like this one, I have had many over the years.  I ran websites on Geocities back in the day - I completely forgot that existed until a few months ago.  I ran many others, each in their iterations served a purpose when I wrote them but all were deleted in the end.  Services either closed down or the blogs I ran came to a natural end for me.  Narrative composition is something of an interest that is growing on me even now as it gives me a way to start, process, and conclude ideas without the need to leave them open ended or return to them in future, in essence the finality of their self contained nature is their most appealing aspect for me right now.  I'm continuing to explore this interest to see where it leads.