The novelty trap and me, OR I need to not get distracted by anything that is even remotely cool

I don't want to pretend that I have ADHD, because I haven't been diagnosed with it and am not interested in going that direction either. It just happens that I need to be overstimulated to get going with any activity, and if something does stimulate me, it takes up a lot of my time. Which is to say, I get over-invested, even distracted by a new activity or a knowledge, to the detriment of everything else.

Let's call this the novelty trap. When I find something new, I need to learn about it, everything there is to know. How it works, how I can bend it according to my requirements, how I can use it, what the future possibilities are, what the downsides are, and how it might cause me problems. And I spent dozens and dozens of hours, sometimes hundreds even.

Case in point: I've been using ai to generate image for my website far beyond the needs of it. I don't have to be spending tens of hours generating ai images for it, but here we are, because it's an activity that's decently enjoyable, I'm alright at it, and since it's new and novel that everybody else is figuring out too, I'm so deep into it.

The other day, I spent four hours trying to find cheap cruise tours. Found a few that go from Seattle to Singapore. Almost bought the tickets too. I know. But what can you do. It's so freaking exciting, nobody else has done it before, I thought.

That's a trap. That's how they get you. Some people's minds are wired to over-value novelty. Which is great to explore a new environment, but not so much when there's schools of marketing-philosophy targeted at people like you, to sell you crap you'll never need, to amuse you for hours and hours and years, just because they understand that you overvalue novelty, and there is unlimited novelty in the world.

Novel does not mean good. New does not mean interesting. Even if it's good an interesting, it doesn't mean useful. Even if it's useful, it doesn't mean right for me. And even if something is right for me, it doesn't mean the time is right for me to explore or understand it in great depth. I need to be internalizing that to deal with this whole situation better.