>But never have I experienced this kind of mental strain/obsession as I do now with lisp.

That's why it's so valuable as a right of passage. If you've spent your career writing simple iterative imperative loops, suddenly you're a newb again with map/filter/reduce this, partial that, and recursion and lambdas and closures and finally after your 20th time staring, dazed at 3 measly lines of nested composed recursion - it all starts to flow, and boom, you have a new way of approaching every problem.

And even if you don't live in the lispy functional realm after that you'll always be better off for having crossed that threshold.