What happens when you do something new that you like?
You start doing it very often, you start mastering the skills, maybe you even find a community of enthusiasts to connect to.

Your mastery goes on and on, you’re better at the craft, you start buying things at medium-pro level.

Time passes, the passion won’t fade, you interact with the community, you show off your toolkit, people reply, you feel like you’re on the edge.

Then you see the shiny new tool, the new product, whatever. It feels like magic, you need to buy it.
From newbie, you’re soon into the pro level field, you’re buying almost high-level stuff. What 3 years ago felt like wasting money on an utility now it’s something you crave, you desire, you want.

People have more than you and you feel you’re missing all the nice things, your master _feels_ like it depends on those tools. Those tools will help you move even further into the craft, you end up buying them.

Then another new tool come along…

This is addiction. We may laugh at that, but it’s part of our human brain. It’s not nicotine based, it’s not drug related. It’s something our mind crave from time to time and we indulge into it.

If you look at this and think “Oh this doesn’t happen to me” then think twice. Think when you were a kid and the other kids had something you wanted. Think about giving up alcohol, coffe, sugar, sex, tv, facebook, netflix, amazo or smartphones for an entire year. Does at least one of them feel like asking too much?

Addiction is in our brain and we think it’s all about substances that create it, but no: addiction is everywhere.
It’s a social addiction, like the FOMO, fear of missing out, addiction is measuring who we are and what we need, with some kind of expectation we built up by comparison, a bad comparison.

That comparison is always uneven, because we will always find something new, something better, something else to crave. A new gin, a new razor, a new hookah, a new shoe, a new show.

How to stop then, how to step back?
Purposely do less, lower down yourself by one scale. If you’re addicted to amazon, allow only 1 or 2 items to be shipped next day, choose the slower shipping for the others.
If it’s buying new things, sell the old ones and keep only the latest. If it’s work, get out at 5pm each day.

We live in a world of abundance and from time to time we tend to forget that being modest is not a bad thing.