If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it; that surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so... — William Shakespeare

If music be the food of love, play on, Give me excess of it; that surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die.

Author: William Shakespeare

Insight: There's something almost reckless about this opening line from Twelfth Night—the idea that we might cure ourselves of love by overdosing on it. Shakespeare isn't being romantic here. He's describing that frantic feeling when you're infatuated with someone and you want to consume everything about them until the obsession burns itself out. Play that song on repeat enough times, and eventually it becomes background noise. Drown yourself in the feeling, and maybe it loses its grip. What makes this surprisingly modern is how it captures a real strategy we use today. We distract ourselves, we scroll endlessly, we throw ourselves into hobbies or work, hoping that if we just lean hard enough into the thing that's consuming us, we'll somehow come out the other side free of it. And sometimes it works—saturation does dull the ache. But Shakespeare's darker implication lingers: excess doesn't always kill appetite. Sometimes it just makes us sick while the hunger lingers underneath anyway. The hope is there, but so is the doubt. The real insight might be that he's describing not a cure but a gamble we all recognize—the bet that if we feel something intensely enough, deliberately enough, we can exhaust our way out of it. Whether that actually works depends entirely on the day and the person.

Source: Twelfth Night, Act I, Scene I