As someone who has been fascinated by the universe and galaxies from a young age, I too thought interstellar was the way to go. Nowadays, however, I've started to feel that we've been wrongly conditioned by science fiction to see interstellar exploration as the next logical step for humanity.

Our species is still very immature ethically, socially, and politically. We haven't even learned to accept each other and co-exist happily on Earth. Our distant hominin ancestors crossed entire continents but today we set up physical borders and cultural barriers to prevent even neighborly visits. We certainly won't become the broad-minded united ethical species that Star Trek TOS/TNG portrayed within the next 2-3 centuries.

Gradual spatial expansion, and through that, gradual cognitive and worldview expansion, has been our track record. Whenever things got hairy for someone in our hominin tree at any time, they moved just a little bit more to survive.

So, I feel exploring and settling other solar system bodies should be our next logical step. There are 4 solid planets, 5 dwarf planets, and as per Gemini, ~40 moons, ~3000 asteroid belt objects, and 200000+ Kuiper belt objects, all above 10 km radius. That's a lot of nearby space to explore and more practical than interstellar. Some of them will become the solutions or refuges from our current social and political problems on Earth.

It'll take us 1000s of years more, maybe even 100s of 1000s, to do all this. Including a lot of violence, conflicts and injustice. But eventually, we will learn to develop the cooperative institutions and cognitive/ethical frameworks we currently lack to become a multi-planet species. Interplanetary cooperative institutions and technologies will emerge eventually, just like today we have airplanes, the Internet, UN, WHO, EU - institutions and technologies that, while far from perfect, seemed downright unlikely for 100s of 1000s of years of our hominin history.