Meanwhile, uncertainties about the economy tend to feed through into a preoccupation with health care.
And the theme fits into his preoccupation with past legacies haunting the living, like some Wagnerian ring.
Into this preoccupation with his mother's furtive sex life he pours all the emotional energy that could and should be going into his own nascent one.
This flowered into a preoccupation with the money supply and a lifelong conviction that governments must be prevented from debasing the currency.Not all of Mr Paul's positions are unpopular.
These horses, he says, tap into our preoccupation with "old things"; they are a reminder of a simpler time and, in their workmanship and longevity, an alternative to a culture enamored of mass-produced ephemera.
"If they are not quite dead, the cinema and the movies sink deeper than ever into their preoccupation with dying," he wrote, his one caveat the result of having actually enjoyed a few "humane pictures made modestly on absorbing stories with a feeling for fictional lives that can be overwhelming", including Winter's Bone, The Arbor, A Prophet and Inception.
World mythologies, the arts, not to speak of actual historical events, provide more than glimpses into our preoccupation with this problem.
But without a diagnosis, she was forced into a preoccupation with her health that took an enormous emotional and financial toll on her and her family.
Extended interviews with several artists draw us deeper into dance, and into the preoccupations and desires of those who have made it their lives, and points up the reason that Jacob's Pillow exists in the first place: because people felt it was necessary.
They can't fit themselves back into everyday preoccupations: whether to wear a winter coat, whether to go to a party, whether to eat lunch.
