I think of myself as resistant to the pull of advertising and gear acquisition, but I've developed a related problem.
When I find something that I like, I want to buy multiples of it, even if there is a very low chance that I'll wear the item out or lose it, and it may become unusable in that time. I've had many objects in my life that I thought were great, and then they become unavailable and I spend an inordinate amount of time searching for them, even though what I have still works fine. Because my brain says "What happens when it breaks?" and then I have to settle for something new and inferior.
I bought a travel backpack ten years ago. It was an unusual design, but I understood its benefits and liked it immensely. Most people did not, so after the first year it was redesigned and then discontinued. I do not know if I can get anything similar to it again, and I doubt the company will repair it. When I now see other bags that are similar but still not as good, they are significantly more expensive (because of inflation) and I regret not buying several at the time. Even though mine still works great.
Stockpiling is a valuable technique to limit/defer the risk of being deprived of (whatever you're stockpiling,) while incurring a different set of costs (the time, energy, storage space, and inevitable degradation of the good you've stockpiled.) Set limits on these costs, e.g, "I'll stockpile no more than I can fit in my spare closet" and you can rationally stockpile within those limits to your heart's content.
The problem is that it usually takes me a while to realize that something is good. Not least because I like durable things and ... well, it takes time to determine if something is durable.
I bought my favorite jacket 12 years ago in Tokyo. A very neutral/timeless thing. After 3 years the jacket still looked like new. Although I had worn it almost every day for 3 years. I searched for it online and found one for sale. On eBay. Used. And the wrong size. If I had known the jacket was that good I would have bought 2-3 more.
I still use it. It still looks almost new. Fantastic garment.
If I find that I love a product, I'll buy a spare. If it turns out that I think the successor product is better, I'll buy that and simply sell my spare to someone with the opposite opinion.
I do this too. I buy two of anything I like and save it in a “timecapsule” for the next decade when it is not available. It also lets me treat my possessions for use and not inconvenient preservation. if i really beat on it, i get a third so i have a replacement available.
Hi fellow traveller - I do that, too. Can’t say I agree that I think of it as a problem, though: it’s mostly paid off for me.
We’re surrounded by so much complexity - anything that helps to defray the cost of learning how to use a new bit of kit is appreciated. Most recently, I’ve been unable to resist the siren call of N100 mini PCs for a Proxmox cluster, but another example would be my teles: having 3 tvs all running the same OS (now long-unplugged from the internet) is just a massive timesaver. One practically needs a PhD and a lifelong Digital Foundry subscription to get the darn things set up just right - why spread that across two different brands or models.
Same philosophy with cars - although clearly that’s an area where most of us don’t own more than one. In my case, I chose the car with the best-established record of long-term reliability, and plan to never sell it. Read the docs, spelunk the forums, learn its quirks, then just live with it.
Buy one good thing - along with a few identical backups, if possible - then use it for ages. Then go outside and touch grass.
I did this with shoes. Bought 4 pairs of the shoes I liked. Right on schedule, they discontinued them, and I was so happy I'd done so!
And then when after about 5 years I said "hey, these shoes are getting pretty worn, time to move on to the next pair", I was 43 years old, and lo and behold ... my feet had widened and I couldn't even get my feet into the brand-new shoes. I had to put them in an expanding last for almost two MONTHS before they would fit.
I still regret not stockpiling a pair of shoes I got 14 years ago. My favorite pair of shoes ever. I went looking for them a year later, and of course they had been discontinued. So yeah, I've started doing this.
It's funny to see it framed in the context of music when it's a pretty universal behavior, essentially limited only by how many cool upgrades exist for a particular hobby.
It's a particularly common affliction for photographers (better cameras, better lens, studio lighting, etc), but the same happens in lo-tech fields - say, woodworking (check out my premium chisels!) or even lawn care.
In most hobbies, it's just a money sink. It is uniquely destructive in photography because if you have too much gear, you can't carry it around and you end up missing out on shots.
I've been getting into photography lately, and early on I was able to carry around my whole gear collection at once. It was an interesting new dimension when I started having to make decisions about what to take and what to leave behind.
> The last fact worth mentioning is that the phenomenon is not limited to music. GAS occurs in many areas of everyday life. In music, it can be observed in hi-fi audio culture (Schröter & Volmar 2016), record collecting (Shuker 2010), home re- cording (Strong 2012) and jingle composition (Fisher 1997). Outside music, GAS occurs amongst photographers (Arias 2013; Kim 2012; Sarinana 2013), aquarium hobbyists (Wolfenden 2016), amateur astronomists (Chen & Chen 2017), cyclists (Peters 2013) and eBayers (Zalot 2013). Despite its high prevalence in contemporary culture, the phenomenon has hardly been researched.
Yes, as someone who is into synths and photography (apparently not an uncommon intersection), it's definitely common to both, even with the same term. And I'm sure they're not the only ones. As someone who likes bikes there's also this old joke of "what is the minimum number of bikes to have", the answer being "current number of bikes + 1".
I’ve fallen victim to this, though perhaps fortunately with digital synth plugins that take up no physical space.
This is related to another problem of mine: ignoring things I’m naturally good at, and fixating on things I’m naturally bad at. In this case, I have no real musical talent, can’t play instruments in rhythm, can’t arrange a song, and I’ve nevertheless been pursuing this in my spare time for a decade with no results. Sometimes I buy new gear thinking it will help, but people with musical talent can do much more with much less.
On the other hand, I showed promise for visual arts but never pursued it. My frustration with being bad at something seems to overpower my desire to be really good at something.
I relate strongly to the comment you're replying to, and I can tell you that it's very frustrating to have a vision of something you want to create and be unable despite struggling towards that goal for a long time.
It has nothing to do with other people. My art doesn't live up to my own standards. That's frustrating as hell! It's not a simple as comparison to others -- who cares about them if I just can't seem to create the sound I want to create?
I can relate to this. I have 8TB of orchestral libraries and other virtual instruments (many, many, many thousands of dollars), but after a decade I still haven't been able to crank out 8 bars of convincing symphonic composition. On the other hand, I can crank out a convincing and interesting rock song on guitar in real time... but I don't invest in that because it's "easy."
Sounds similar to what you describe: we shun the things we're naturally good at because they feel trivial and don't provide a sense of accomplishment, meanwhile we bash our head against a wall for years because the accomplishment of breaking through would be so amazing.
> I have no real musical talent, can’t play instruments in rhythm, can’t arrange a song
Have you heard of dubstep?
Actually, acid house might be the genre for you, since "it’s true that if you gave 100 monkeys a TR-808s and a TB-303 each, you’d probably get at least 70 decent acid tracks". [1]
I get its a joke, but dubstep is actually one of the harder EDM genres to make, in my opinion. As in, how much skill/work it takes to make a "mediocre" dubstep track, especially for the more commercially well known "brostep" variety. Minimal techno, ambient, noise or lo-fi beats are perhaps electronic genres that are (again IMO) easier to make mediocre tracks for. Great tracks are hard to make in any genre, of course.
I wonder if you are getting more internal reward and stimulation from the challenge and novelty of something that is a struggle than from the steady success something you have natural talent for is offering. If so and that is troubling to you or puzzling, it may just be the way your brain is setup, but there are psychologists good at unraveling this sort of thing.
I do a similar thing. I like learning new things so much, I spend most of my time on new skills that I perform poorly, instead of using & continuing to hone my expert-level skills.
I'm skeptical of the claim for musical talent. Especially the case that you lack any 'real' one. Rhythm, interval recognition, composing are all skills that require practice and dedication. The lack of results point to a bad method, not lack of talent. Have you considered getting instruction?
It's a big problem for photographers too. Especially with the rapid progress of mirrorless cameras there is always the next camera or lens you need to get. I have bought lenses and never used them. I have also spent more time on looking for accessories for my 3D printer than actually using it.
Not sure how to combat GAS. I feel for people with a full time job it somehow compensates for the lack of time working on one's hobbies
What works decently well for me is to avoid advertising like the plague. Adblock everything: browser, DNS, anywhere I can do it. Disable targeted advertising wherever I can't outright block it, if that's an option.
Avoid visiting websites where there's a lot of advertisement disguised as news or useful content; often enthusiast websites on whatever your hobby is will have a lot of that, so find better sites.
Don't watch regular TV with commercials. Only use streaming services, and always pay for the ad-free versions. "That's so expensive," you say? Not when you consider how much crap you'll buy when you're bombarded with advertising all the time.
You can never eliminate all advertising from your life, but the less you expose yourself to, the better. Adopt a mindset that ads are a form of psychological manipulation (because they are), and make yourself hate them. That alone will make you somewhat less susceptible to it (or at least I like to think so). Be deliberate about purchases. Seek out things that you know you want because you want them; don't buy stuff because you saw it featured somewhere.
Amateur photographers often cover a lot more types of photography than pros, which makes GAS even worse.
A pro might specialize in sports photography and buy some nice long lenses with fast autofocus. Or they might specialize in portraiture and get a nice wide-open 90mm equivalent. Or architectural photography, and get a tilt-shift lens.
For some reason, a lot of amateur photographers will dabble in many different types of photography, each with their own demands on equipment.
I avoid GAS pretty easily by the application of a simple method I've developed over years as a hobbyist photographer: Be Aware of Non-Optimality. That is, in bearing in mind there is no benefit to the expenditure of resources to obtain equipment that by itself will not meaningfully improve my practice - and too, that having gear I do not use will make me regret its purchase, further diverging from an optimal state - I find myself no longer with the urge to replace a perfectly serviceable DSLR with a mirrorless that may be newer, but is not really all that much better at capturing the exposures I care to make.
I'm probably not explaining it as well as I might, but I am happy nonetheless to say I've found my GAS very reliably cured by BeAN-O.
the opposite is also true however. I've been attempting to combat GAS by avoiding a home data server. In reality, I've been needing a NAS for a number of years and have changed my photography practice due to limitations and challenges with dealing with extra data. I just solved this and it's been liberating.
In reality 99% of the time you don't need new gear. However there is also a delicate balance where a new piece of gear makes you excited to go out and do your hobby more and it's that going out more than makes you get better at it.
> I feel for people with a full time job it somehow compensates for the lack of time working on one's hobbies
I identify with this. Have full time job, some disposable income, a few hobbies but no real time for them.
This has led to a lot of gear acquisition, buying tools or equipment that are beyond my level of expertise and I don't have time to make the most of.
I guess there's worse things to burn money on but does feel like if I had more time to actually do hobbies I'd discover I can get by with far fewer gadgets.
I'm still on my A7R2, it still works great, and while I sometimes wistfully think about the ultrasonic wiggly massive resolution mode (700Mpix or something) on the A7R4, I cannot in any way justify upgrading.
OTOH, I also bemoan the loss of my 70s OM1n 20 years ago.
I haven't dabbled much in photography lately, but when I was active in it, budget was a strong constraint. These days my GAS is mostly for synths and budget is less of a constraint, thanks to the full time job you alluded to. I think this phenomenon of having money but no time leading to GAS is pretty common, from what I've seen. In my case, I often avoid it by challenging myself to use whatever I have at hand to try to recreate what I'd be getting with the new gear. Its often a fun exercise even if I don't succeed.
I feel this quite a bit. When I was young, I had a ton of time and no money to acquire the needed equipment. Now, I finally have the money to get basically whatever I need within reason, but no time to use it.
I am typically able to resist the urge to succumb to GAS, but I don't always. I still have an incomplete atreus (http://atreus.technomancy.us/) in my basement; I set it aside when I bought a house, and haven't had time to revisit it since.
My explanation is quite simple: cool toys are cool, and they give us the illusion of being better at our hobbies than we actually are. I sometimes indulge in some Gear Acquisition too -- but I try to be cognizant of the fact that if not done carefully, it only leads to a short-term happiness kick which quickly leads to another episode of GAS.
The good thing about lenses is that if you buy good lenses, they usually retain a lot of value, so you can sell them. And it isn't like you have to use them all the time. For instance, I rarely use my macro lens. And that's okay. But having it means that the 1-2 times per year I need it, I have it.
On the bright side I sometimes sell used camera gear for more than I bought it. A combo body and lens can sell more than the items separately if marketed correctly and when including sample photos.
That said, I still haven't bought a new camera body.
Yeah lmao I spent tens of thousands of dollars on my medium format Fujifilm GFX system. It just needs a couple more lenses then it will be perfected and I won't have to buy another piece of gear ever again!
This sounds like another guise of fear of missing out. You can't do X without gear Y. However, your brain doesn't realize there are other constraints on realistically doing X; free time, energy, creative spark, etc. But at least buying Y feels like a concrete step towards doing X and modern society has made it VERY easy to buy things. So, you buy Y and promise yourself you'll do X...someday.
Yeah it’s a way to feel like making progress without doing the hard work of practicing and developing your skills. Easy trap to fall into.
With most hobbies, a beginner will benefit far more from just doing projects / practicing than buying expensive high-end gear. It’s also the only way to find if you actually want to pursue the new interest. Which is very good to do before spending lots of cash.
From another angle, I think it's understandable that people like to have premium "signifiers" of their skill. A carpenter with a full set of well maintained chisels seems on first glance more likely to be a good carpenter than one who carves uses with a box cutter.
So there may be a natural drive to collect and display things that indicate skill in our chosen areas of interest.
Now, to twist this around a bit: is this "gear acquisition syndrome" a contributor to the constant churn of tools and frameworks in our field? Especially in programming, collecting and using new "gear" (libraries, frameworks, administrative tools) is essentially free - often the only cost is time.
I know a tradesman who works out of a bucket with a ripped up tool organizer inside that's held together with duct tape and zip ties. His tools are all falling apart and often doesn't have the correct tool and is one of the types you'll see using a wrench as a hammer non-recreationally.
But still he's one of the cleverest there is, has seen every issue in the field 10,000 times and knows exactly how to handle it... but the immediate lack of respect he gets when he walks into a building is stunning. It adds so much friction to encounter.
A flip side of GAS is that the market optimises for gear acquirers. A decent square taper bottom bracket is perfectly good for 99% of cyclists, and maintenance free for a decade or more. But gear acquirers are only interested in the latest and greatest ultra-stiff super-light external bearing BBs, so now square taper is dead except at the cheapest, shittiest grades. Which means that i, as someone who just wants my cranks to go round, am forced to enter their world.
I agree with you regarding press fit BBs, but aren't externally threaded BBs also better for casual cyclists and more reliable?
I don't care in the slightest about BB stiffness and weight, but I would much rather have a BSA threaded external BB. That way if something happens and I need to change my cranks (or god forbid, bearings) I don't have to worry about needing a specialized crank puller or anything like that, an Allen key is enough, and I never have to worry about stripping my cranks, and I never have to worry about my cranks falling out and marring from the bolt getting loose. Something like an ISIS spline two/three piece crank that's either self extracting or bolted like Shimano MTB cranks is perfect. Simple, cheap, no specialized tools needed, and no risk of catastrophic failure. And I'll never need to repack the bearings ever again. Plus, as someone who lives in a place where they salt the roads, I'd much rather deal with a rusty threaded external bearing BB than a square taper that might never come out of the frame.
The bearings in external bottom brackets are much less well protected, and so more vulnerable to water and dust and so on. That means they need to be regreased or replaced more often. I see people talking about doing that monthly, annually, whatever. I have been riding the same square taper bottom bracket since 2012, and it's doing fine.
The square taper per se may not be as good as a bolted spline or something. It is annoying to need a crank puller, but for me, it's been something i need once every five years or so, so not much of a problem in practice. So, compared to external bearing bottom brackets, a small disadvantage that buys you a big advantage. I have no opinion about the splined internal bottom brackets!
Me being a guitarist, I probably spent a solid 10 years buying and selling guitars. Thousands, literally. Some weeks I'd get a guitar in the mail, check it out for an hour, then list it, and sell it the same day. I have a friend that goes through the same deal with pedals.
Luckily I started experiencing some serious "burnout" - where I could no longer feel any dopamine rush from getting new gear. In the end I had two good guitars that I played on for 5 years, and nothing else - I had little desire to buy something else, but it might also have been due to me becoming more interested in other things.
Now that I'm building a small home recording studio, I'm starting to feel the burn again. And I guess I've had some small relapse with the guitars, as I currently have 20 excellent guitars in my house...I could, and should, sell everything but a few.
The worst thing is that you stop progressing as a musician, because all the buying and selling steals your time and focus.
Yeah that’s the beauty of consumerism. No matter what your hobby is, there are hundreds of different leisure products for you to acquire and stockpile on top of those of your previous hobby (whose accessories you had acquired)
Readit News
When I find something that I like, I want to buy multiples of it, even if there is a very low chance that I'll wear the item out or lose it, and it may become unusable in that time. I've had many objects in my life that I thought were great, and then they become unavailable and I spend an inordinate amount of time searching for them, even though what I have still works fine. Because my brain says "What happens when it breaks?" and then I have to settle for something new and inferior.
I bought a travel backpack ten years ago. It was an unusual design, but I understood its benefits and liked it immensely. Most people did not, so after the first year it was redesigned and then discontinued. I do not know if I can get anything similar to it again, and I doubt the company will repair it. When I now see other bags that are similar but still not as good, they are significantly more expensive (because of inflation) and I regret not buying several at the time. Even though mine still works great.
I bought my favorite jacket 12 years ago in Tokyo. A very neutral/timeless thing. After 3 years the jacket still looked like new. Although I had worn it almost every day for 3 years. I searched for it online and found one for sale. On eBay. Used. And the wrong size. If I had known the jacket was that good I would have bought 2-3 more.
I still use it. It still looks almost new. Fantastic garment.
If I find that I love a product, I'll buy a spare. If it turns out that I think the successor product is better, I'll buy that and simply sell my spare to someone with the opposite opinion.
We’re surrounded by so much complexity - anything that helps to defray the cost of learning how to use a new bit of kit is appreciated. Most recently, I’ve been unable to resist the siren call of N100 mini PCs for a Proxmox cluster, but another example would be my teles: having 3 tvs all running the same OS (now long-unplugged from the internet) is just a massive timesaver. One practically needs a PhD and a lifelong Digital Foundry subscription to get the darn things set up just right - why spread that across two different brands or models.
Same philosophy with cars - although clearly that’s an area where most of us don’t own more than one. In my case, I chose the car with the best-established record of long-term reliability, and plan to never sell it. Read the docs, spelunk the forums, learn its quirks, then just live with it.
Buy one good thing - along with a few identical backups, if possible - then use it for ages. Then go outside and touch grass.
And then when after about 5 years I said "hey, these shoes are getting pretty worn, time to move on to the next pair", I was 43 years old, and lo and behold ... my feet had widened and I couldn't even get my feet into the brand-new shoes. I had to put them in an expanding last for almost two MONTHS before they would fit.
Unfortunately, some items are inherently ephemeral.
It's a particularly common affliction for photographers (better cameras, better lens, studio lighting, etc), but the same happens in lo-tech fields - say, woodworking (check out my premium chisels!) or even lawn care.
In most hobbies, it's just a money sink. It is uniquely destructive in photography because if you have too much gear, you can't carry it around and you end up missing out on shots.
> The last fact worth mentioning is that the phenomenon is not limited to music. GAS occurs in many areas of everyday life. In music, it can be observed in hi-fi audio culture (Schröter & Volmar 2016), record collecting (Shuker 2010), home re- cording (Strong 2012) and jingle composition (Fisher 1997). Outside music, GAS occurs amongst photographers (Arias 2013; Kim 2012; Sarinana 2013), aquarium hobbyists (Wolfenden 2016), amateur astronomists (Chen & Chen 2017), cyclists (Peters 2013) and eBayers (Zalot 2013). Despite its high prevalence in contemporary culture, the phenomenon has hardly been researched.
https://www.bike-components.de/de/Shimano/Dura-Ace-Di2-R9250...
This is related to another problem of mine: ignoring things I’m naturally good at, and fixating on things I’m naturally bad at. In this case, I have no real musical talent, can’t play instruments in rhythm, can’t arrange a song, and I’ve nevertheless been pursuing this in my spare time for a decade with no results. Sometimes I buy new gear thinking it will help, but people with musical talent can do much more with much less.
On the other hand, I showed promise for visual arts but never pursued it. My frustration with being bad at something seems to overpower my desire to be really good at something.
If you enjoy it, it doesn't matter if you're good or bad at it, if joy itself is the aim.
If your aim isn't joy, but success, then of course you'll lack joy.
It is very liberating to do something, knowing you're "bad" at it, but doing it only for enjoyment.
It has nothing to do with other people. My art doesn't live up to my own standards. That's frustrating as hell! It's not a simple as comparison to others -- who cares about them if I just can't seem to create the sound I want to create?
Sounds similar to what you describe: we shun the things we're naturally good at because they feel trivial and don't provide a sense of accomplishment, meanwhile we bash our head against a wall for years because the accomplishment of breaking through would be so amazing.
Have you heard of dubstep?
Actually, acid house might be the genre for you, since "it’s true that if you gave 100 monkeys a TR-808s and a TB-303 each, you’d probably get at least 70 decent acid tracks". [1]
[1] https://www.factmag.com/2014/01/22/20-best-acid-house/
Deleted Comment
Not sure how to combat GAS. I feel for people with a full time job it somehow compensates for the lack of time working on one's hobbies
What works decently well for me is to avoid advertising like the plague. Adblock everything: browser, DNS, anywhere I can do it. Disable targeted advertising wherever I can't outright block it, if that's an option.
Avoid visiting websites where there's a lot of advertisement disguised as news or useful content; often enthusiast websites on whatever your hobby is will have a lot of that, so find better sites.
Don't watch regular TV with commercials. Only use streaming services, and always pay for the ad-free versions. "That's so expensive," you say? Not when you consider how much crap you'll buy when you're bombarded with advertising all the time.
You can never eliminate all advertising from your life, but the less you expose yourself to, the better. Adopt a mindset that ads are a form of psychological manipulation (because they are), and make yourself hate them. That alone will make you somewhat less susceptible to it (or at least I like to think so). Be deliberate about purchases. Seek out things that you know you want because you want them; don't buy stuff because you saw it featured somewhere.
A pro might specialize in sports photography and buy some nice long lenses with fast autofocus. Or they might specialize in portraiture and get a nice wide-open 90mm equivalent. Or architectural photography, and get a tilt-shift lens.
For some reason, a lot of amateur photographers will dabble in many different types of photography, each with their own demands on equipment.
I'm probably not explaining it as well as I might, but I am happy nonetheless to say I've found my GAS very reliably cured by BeAN-O.
In reality 99% of the time you don't need new gear. However there is also a delicate balance where a new piece of gear makes you excited to go out and do your hobby more and it's that going out more than makes you get better at it.
I identify with this. Have full time job, some disposable income, a few hobbies but no real time for them.
This has led to a lot of gear acquisition, buying tools or equipment that are beyond my level of expertise and I don't have time to make the most of.
I guess there's worse things to burn money on but does feel like if I had more time to actually do hobbies I'd discover I can get by with far fewer gadgets.
OTOH, I also bemoan the loss of my 70s OM1n 20 years ago.
I am typically able to resist the urge to succumb to GAS, but I don't always. I still have an incomplete atreus (http://atreus.technomancy.us/) in my basement; I set it aside when I bought a house, and haven't had time to revisit it since.
That said, I still haven't bought a new camera body.
With most hobbies, a beginner will benefit far more from just doing projects / practicing than buying expensive high-end gear. It’s also the only way to find if you actually want to pursue the new interest. Which is very good to do before spending lots of cash.
So there may be a natural drive to collect and display things that indicate skill in our chosen areas of interest.
Now, to twist this around a bit: is this "gear acquisition syndrome" a contributor to the constant churn of tools and frameworks in our field? Especially in programming, collecting and using new "gear" (libraries, frameworks, administrative tools) is essentially free - often the only cost is time.
But still he's one of the cleverest there is, has seen every issue in the field 10,000 times and knows exactly how to handle it... but the immediate lack of respect he gets when he walks into a building is stunning. It adds so much friction to encounter.
I don't care in the slightest about BB stiffness and weight, but I would much rather have a BSA threaded external BB. That way if something happens and I need to change my cranks (or god forbid, bearings) I don't have to worry about needing a specialized crank puller or anything like that, an Allen key is enough, and I never have to worry about stripping my cranks, and I never have to worry about my cranks falling out and marring from the bolt getting loose. Something like an ISIS spline two/three piece crank that's either self extracting or bolted like Shimano MTB cranks is perfect. Simple, cheap, no specialized tools needed, and no risk of catastrophic failure. And I'll never need to repack the bearings ever again. Plus, as someone who lives in a place where they salt the roads, I'd much rather deal with a rusty threaded external bearing BB than a square taper that might never come out of the frame.
The square taper per se may not be as good as a bolted spline or something. It is annoying to need a crank puller, but for me, it's been something i need once every five years or so, so not much of a problem in practice. So, compared to external bearing bottom brackets, a small disadvantage that buys you a big advantage. I have no opinion about the splined internal bottom brackets!
Luckily I started experiencing some serious "burnout" - where I could no longer feel any dopamine rush from getting new gear. In the end I had two good guitars that I played on for 5 years, and nothing else - I had little desire to buy something else, but it might also have been due to me becoming more interested in other things.
Now that I'm building a small home recording studio, I'm starting to feel the burn again. And I guess I've had some small relapse with the guitars, as I currently have 20 excellent guitars in my house...I could, and should, sell everything but a few.
The worst thing is that you stop progressing as a musician, because all the buying and selling steals your time and focus.