While I enjoy (and crave) the waves (of time) that make my brain obsess over things which bring me immense joy to the point I neglect essentials (food and water), what follows is a hard learned crash where I have no energy (or dopamine) left to give to anything!

Similar for my approach (although I haven't been diagnosed with ADHD). This is how I learned electronics enough to manage becoming a certified electrical engineer without ever officially studying anything even remotely like it. I was in the exam with people who did this professionally for half of their lives. This is also how I learned anything I ever did as a freelancer, including sound mixing for movies, VFX work, color grading, programming: I was curious about it, I was young, had time and just followed my interest. It is still how I learn new things, only now all the knowledge from other domains helps me doing it even faster.

The trick is to play judo instead of karate with your own drive. Instead of trying to stop your urge and force yourself to do the boring stuff, it can work to take your energy and just slightly redirect it to where you want to go and where it makes sense for you to go. Maybe you have the urge to play a video game and can redirect it to reading a book like homo ludens instead, or maybe you redirect it towards making a game? Even if you never finished it you learned something.

Strange question: Could you obsess mainly over time management / optimisation and fix all of this?

HAH! I have been happily using your grinder for a decade (When I clicked on your link, Amazon tells me I bought it on July 30, 2015). Last week, I realized it is just way too worn down to be useful. I see no reason why I wont buy the same one again.

Pro tip: stick your drill/electric screwdriver to it and now you have a $200 motorized grinder. Been doing that for a decade. I use the same drill to roast my own beans in a homemade "wobble disk" roaster (look it up on youtube, if you care). I also use the drill with a whisk, and many other things.

I am a calm coffee (espresso) snob.

I love the basic, and I love the fine.

Believe it or not, expensive grinders (~$500 range) create an unbelievable difference.

But they’re a luxury :)

Lance Hedrick (popular coffee YouTuber) demonstrates time and time again that cheap machines and setups can rival even the most expensive end-game setups.

I used that Hario grinder for years but eventually the clear base part broke. I continued using it by grinding directly into the AeroPress but it was pretty annoying. I finally upgraded to a KINGrinder K6 and it’s amazing how much better it is. It grinds way, way faster.

Coffee is an example, but there are plenty of others:

There's a pretty basic problem that a coffee grinder is a motor, the actual grinding surfaces, and the tubes that connect where the beans come from and grounds go to. Maybe add a scale and a little bit of electronics, but still, what does a $1000 grinder have that a $200 doesn't?

Indeed you have to get a lot of things precisely right to get a desired grind particle size distribution and that takes science and study and precision but the end product is still only a few simple parts that meet a specification. The problem is volume and just charging large amounts of money because that's how you attract customers in the "quality" space where having very good taste for quality is itself quite hard.

Coffee grinders are ripe for disruption with a low cost high quality product, but in order to pay for the engineering time to make one you have to have confidence in pretty high volume so picking a price point is hard.

[dead]

Everything is a distraction from a distraction from a distraction. -Kierkegaard

> I wish I could will myself into one obsession or another.

I understand. Not sure if you’re in the same boat, but for me, it’s a combination of age, energy, time, and becoming jaded. I used to spend late night hours poking at new things to learn about new hobbies and the like. The older I get, the less time and energy I’m willing to excerpt. This has been great for my getting back to reading books, but it’s been a sinkhole for self-learning and new skill development. The dopamine is lacking.

While I'm savvy enough to keep my madness to myself (most of the time), that's pretty much what's happening in my brain!

Not OP, but I was also replying and had thoughts along a similar vein.

I'm 44 and have had countless hobbies over my adolescent and adult lives. Some I've taken up multiple times, some I've visited multiple variations on a core idea (e.g. aquariums/planted tanks/dwarf shrimp tanks). I've learned (and subseqeuntly forgotten) a tremendous amount, and spent an unholy amount of money. Most things have not stayed with me.

Miniature painting is one thing that I think might last me the rest of my life.

I think it boils down to a few factors:

- miniatures aren't alive; I don't need to care for them, so the worst that can happen is I break or scratch something. This keeps my anxiety/concern/guilt largely out of the equation.

- the feedback cycles are fairly short; I know almost immediately if a paint stroke was good or bad, if my brush is too wet or too dry, etc. A single project is normally just a couple of hours, and then it's done and I can view it as a completed whole.

- the product occupies little space and it's trivial to keep around and compare to work done before and after and see progression and evolution over time. Also, if you're prone to collecting things, just keeping the product on the shelf next to other things becomes an ongoing source of reward.

- if I absolutely fubar something, I can buy or print a new mini for a couple bucks or throw it in some Simple Green overnight and brush the old paint off. Most of the time I can just paint over the issue.

- paint, brushes, a wet palette, minis, airbrush, etc all add up, but you can have an amazing setup for under a thousand bucks, and you can transcend the realm of mortals for $2K. The ongoing costs after that are manageable unless you're into Warhammer. You can get started and do some really fun and cool things with a $50 starter kit.

So there's some higher-dimension graph with effort, frustration, reward, feedback latency, etc, and for me at least painting miniatures tends to sit in a happy area.