OCD and meaning

7 August 2026

We often assume compulsive behaviour must mean something — that if we could decode it, the symptom would explain itself. So we ask the OCD patient who counts lampposts on his way to work: what do lampposts mean to you? Wrong question.

The meaning isn't usually in the content of the ritual. It's in the commitment to it — the

way counting lampposts structures the walk, hands the day a shape, manufactures a feeling of control and direction where none was guaranteed

Seen this way, OCD can be less a puzzle to decode than an answer to a much older problem: what do you do when nothing more convincing offers itself as a purpose? Sometimes it's what happens when a child is never quite given the message that