A Short Letter on Obsession

I have just recovered from an extended period of having lost myself, and by all accounts, lost my own mind. It was not an unpleasant experience, it was actually quite productive. Internally, I was a changed person; one I could hardly recognise—possessed by an entity outside of my control. And in this state, I would eventually encounter fear; for the void I was enclosed within would all but consume me.

Image: Ida Kendall

Sometime in December 2015, a friend phoned me up, and exclaimed with excitement: “I have built a drone!” Indeed he had. Cascading factors of microchip miniaturisation, lithium battery improvement, and the ruthless efficiency of Chinese manufacturing; now meant that what a decade ago, might have weighed 200kg, and cost as much as a car—now weighed half a pound, and costs less than a skateboard. The process of designing and building from nothing, what was essentially culminated to be a flying robot, was a great percentage of the fun. Indeed the learning experience was as much an end goal, as simply having a new toy to play with.

I started asking myself, “perhaps I will get into drones too?” and within a week, I was already ordering parts. The entire month of February saw me lost in a world, that seemingly had very little to do with anything else but drones. I would wake up and eat breakfast, and immediately begin building and tinkering, and when I wasn't doing this, I was researching and ordering parts.

Do I want a 25mW or a 200mW for the Video? What kind of range can I get? How much range to I want?

Every single question resolved itself with more questions, and every one of these had its answer within some domain of engineering or physics of electronics or signal analysis; which had some community somewhere on the internet, where these questions were being hotly debated. I would spend 12 hours a day researching the technical theory that helped get these curious inventions airborne. I watched video tutorials and trawled though forum discussions, and when I wasn't doing that—I was putting my knowledge to use, by making orders for parts that suited my grand design, teaching myself to solder, and cautiously modifying parts that were starting to arrive.

In the space of a single month, terminating just last week in early March, my creation was complete. I had fully assembled and configured all the components, and researched everything there was to know about what they all did, and made sure each part compliant with best practice standards from the hobby community. It was no easy task—I had brought myself about 85% along a journey of expertise, that had been accumulating within the hobby community for some thirty-or-so years. And I had done it using 15% of the necessary effort, and virtually overnight.

Such an internal transformation was not without its toll. I had neglected just about every other aspect of my life, and my once immaculate apartment was now a warzone of empty boxes, stripped wires, components in various stages of modification, and loose sheets of paper with schematics scribbled all over. I had woken every morning to this chaotic, and almost schizophrenic mess; and would immediately swallow down a feeling of pain and regret and resolve myself to clean it all up, and take a break, but before long would find myself sitting down and continuing where I had left off the previous day.

Over time, I came to associate the various tools and shibboleths of my hobby, with a deep sense of foreboding; for I realised I was truly trapped. The soldering iron and wire stripper came to resembling the discarded syringe, the burned teaspoon, the rubber tourniquet of another human addiction; and I would on occasion, gaze upon these items with a revulsion, but not survive long. For this captivity was pleasing beyond my wildest dreams, and I had but to re-indulge for a mere second, for all the cares of the world to simply drain away; and render me the happiest person ever to have lived, for yet another day.

Soon the little invention was finished, and these tools slowly got packed away. All that horror was replaced with a beaming joy, at having given life to the world; having produced an object of astounding beauty. It weighed 600g including battery, and produced 1,900g of thrust. It had a 2.8mm lens, transmitting low-latency video to a pair of receiver goggles I would wear, with up to 2km of range. It had a raft of autostablisers and balancing controls, that went so deeply into Bayesian statistics to predict its own errors, even I could hardly understand how it achieved its smooth motions; how it could interpret my commands, as would an limb from my own body. All ready to go, I took it out to fly.

As I took off, in the back of my mind, I wondered whether all those countless hours and sleepless nights were worth it. I had snapped out of my zombie-like state, whereby I had sacrificed almost every aspect of my existence, and handed it all over to the service of making this invention real; and was finally lucid of my own obsession. I had, for the first time, the slightest sense of regret. Shame at my own powerlessness, at my own short-sighted impulse. But as these thoughts came into focus, my attention shifted to the rolling hills, the trees and surrounding houses, I was now encircling. I was looking at the world from about 80 meters altitude, and cruising at 70km/h, while performing gentle swooping arcs and banking turns, to loop around the field from which I had launched. And ever so occasionally, would get a glimpse of myself in the 3rd person, far down on the ground, controller in hand and video systems encasing my head.

I felt like I was dreaming, and I could now remembered the dreams I’d had, so much like this. They started in early childhood, and continued weekly or monthly, well until contemporary adulthood. I could remember waking up with tears in my eyes, at how real it had felt, how intense it had been; unwilling and unable to accept a return to reality, so dull and so empty. These dreams would even cause me question, whether I had even been asleep? Or for a briefest period—truly woken up—and how one could objectively know. And I realised why I had been driven so deeply, to build this mechanical thing; it was because I had experienced this exact sensation—when flying in my dreams—and that these same forgotten memories were driving me still.

What remained a mystery, is how my unconscious mind had so much foresight. Had my own dreams of flying, existed to seed within, an implicit understanding of what this all would feel like, at the purely theoretical level? Had these feelings simply accumulated, until the point where my obsession would snap shut like a bear trap, upon activation? Or had I unconsciously and unknowingly, been seeking my way back to that ephemeral, that protoconscious state, from which all freedom and creativity emerges; seen only in my dreams, long in forgotten in utero experience. That this invention even represented an unconscious gateway, back to that state, an invention to transcend my own existence; and to finally escape the host biological systems in which my consciousness is trapped.

That of course is another debate. But on the question of whether I felt any shame or guilt at so mercilessly succumbing to my own obsession, after taking that first flight, I can only say that I felt wonderment, joy and peace.

It felt like my waking reality, had been substantially upgraded.

ROBOCAT 270mm: Fully assembled
(Many mistakes were made in the design and construction phase, but it flies solidly)

Alphington Park, from 35m up!
(Telemetry is overlayed on the video transmission, which I view in real-time as I fly)