Defeated by the sheer power of your need

Broken hearts come from emotionally over investing.

We decide that someone or something is the one. This is going to complete us and make us whole and change everything, so we place a dangerously high level of importance on it in our lives.

This over investment gives that person or thing complete power over our emotions.

But the joke’s on us. Because we are the ones who break our own hearts, not them. Heartbreaks reveal our possessiveness, which almost always leads to suffering. No sense of proportion or perspective. It’s all shoulds, musts, deserves and other expectation driven language.

In the area of interpersonal attachment, over investing is defined as devoting too much of our emotions in a losing situation the risk of draining away our resourcefulness. The investment we put in is disproportionate to the value of what something is actually worth and the probability of its reciprocation.

Like the unrequited love of my college years.

I spent months writing letters and leaving messages and picking up that girl at the airport, so why wasn’t she coming around and realizing that the two of us were meant to be together forever?

Woops. Turns out, she didn’t feel the same way. So much for that romantic venture paying dividends.

Speaking of dividends, in the world of finance, over investing has a slightly different meaning.

It refers to the practice of putting more money into an asset than what that asset is worth on the open market.

For example, people will make additions to personal consumables like houses and cars and trailers, and it devalues the asset so that it is worth less than what has been invested in it.

Like my friend in high school who bought a used car for two thousand bucks, then spent four thousand more bucks installing a subwoofer so loud it could blow a woman’s clothes off.

Woops. He couldn’t give that car away five years later.

Both over investment illustrations lack perspective or proportion. They’re inappropriate, inefficient and unhealthy attachments.

Koontz writes about this behavior in his psychedelic book about parallel universes:

Sometimes you can want a thing too fiercely. The excessive passion of your yearning blinds you to the mistakes you made, so that in the end, you were defeated by the sheer power of your need.

Have you ever made that mistake before? Where you wanted something so much, that it took over your emotional life?

It happens more than you might realize. Particularly when it comes to media consumption. We now live in a world where the average person spends a minimum thirty hours a week binge watching television.

Shows are slick, engaging, well written, beautifully produced and full of gorgeous actors. And so, it’s no surprise that viewers over invest hundreds of hours of their lives in fictional universes and stories that are, lest they forget, not real.

Funny thing is, when their favorite actor gets killed off or divorced or, god forbid, the show gets cancelled or reaches its series finale, viewers are outraged. They write essays about how they’ve been betrayed, cheated and devastated.

And those emotions are very much real. One article from a viewer said:

Watching shows sent her on an intense emotional rollercoaster each week. She felt every emotion that the actors felt. The show give her amazing characters but then hurt them or took them away, breaking her heart. She audibly rejoiced when characters succeeded, physically grieved when they died and dwelled on the feelings for days after. And in fact, still devastated over one character’s death that first aired months ago, she had to remind herself that the show was fictional and her relationship with the characters was one sided.

Wow, talk about poor dividends. That’s not a hobby, that’s a full on unhealthy attachment. This woman is a clear example of someone who needs to manage her emotional investments in healthier ways.

And it’s not a takedown of television. People should watch whatever they want. But don’t blame some sexy television doctor for your real life heartbreak.

He’s merely playing a role, you’re not.

You have to protect your heart. You have to find completeness from within.

Otherwise disappointment will be your constant companion.

Are you making investments that are disproportionate to the value of what something is actually worth?