the.com/mania
the engine that builds empires at 4am, then crashes them by noon
means An excessive, often irrational enthusiasm or compulsion for something, or a clinical state of abnormally elevated mood and frenzied energy.
from Straight from the Greek 'mania,' meaning madness or frenzy — itself rooted in the verb 'mainesthai,' to rage or be furious. The Greeks linked it to a whole family of words about the mind and its undoing, possibly a cousin of 'menos' (spirit, force) and even distantly of 'mind' itself. It passed through Latin into the medical and literary languages of Europe, where it kept its double life: a diagnosis on one side, and on the other a suffix of obsession — bibliomania, tulipmania — naming every crowd that ever lost its head over a single shining thing.
- sleep optional
- Mania can run days on near-zero sleep, no fatigue
- word root
- From Greek mania, sharing roots with mind itself
- manic spending
- Episodes can drain savings in a single afternoon
- creative surge
- Linked to bursts of art, music, and invention
- -mania suffix
- Lent its name to tulips, Beatles, and pyromania
tulip mania — dutch golden age bubble where tulip bulbs sold for more than houses, 1630s amsterdam
south sea bubble — british investment craze that collapsed in 1720, wiping out thousands of investors
dancing plague of 1518 — strasbourg outbreak where 34 people danced uncontrollably until collapse or death