Our obsession with tools is universal. Music producers and audiophiles obsess over the brand or type of amplifiers, speakers, and even whether to use copper or silver cables. Photographers obsess over their cameras, lenses, and sensor types. Chefs obsess over their cooking utensils. And of course, programmers constantly obsess over code editors, programming languages, and whether to use Kubernetes or Docker.

Some level of tool obsession is good, necessary even. After all, our ability to make increasingly advanced and powerful tools is one of the key unique attributes that put us on top of the food chain. But I think there are a number of forces that push us to overly obsess about tools, to the point of being counterproductive.

We are already naturally predisposed to pay extra attention to tools. Imitation is how we learn, and the easiest things to imitate are the surface properties we can observe, such as tool use. So when we want to improve ourselves, we look to the people we aspire, who are doing better than us, and scrutinize what tools they use. This worked well for us historically, because when most of our work was physical, the reason that someone is doing better than you is highly visible. If you notice your neighbors finishing all their farm work early, you can start to pay attention to how they are using the plow or scythe, whether they’ve made any modifications to them or are using them differently. But for knowledge work, this isn’t very effective. Using the same word processor as a successful author is not going to suddenly make you type out best-selling books. Yet our desire to imitate tool use lingers.

This instinctive tendency gets further amplified by market dynamics. The economy is in large part made up of people trying to sell tools. All around us are narratives about why we need a particular tool, and how we will become closer to those we admire should we adopt it. This is always done without mentioning any downsides of course, making everything seem like a flawless magical elixir. Even those who are more impervious to such blatant marketing tactics are not immune, since mere increased exposure to these messages will subconsciously alter our perception about the tool.

The result is that we typically pay a much higher than optimal amount of attention to tools, and perceive them to be more revolutionary than they actually are. At the end of the day, tools are just a means to an end. Given all the biases in our perception of tools, we should watch for and moderate our obsession with them accordingly. Even tool makers should try to focus just on the tool they create, and dial back the fixation on the other tools they use to do their work. For the necessary and inevitable obsession that we should have for tools, it’s better to direct it at paradigms and philosophies over the individual tools. Understanding the core ideas behind infrastructure as code, for example, is much more timeless, useful, and important than knowing specific flavors of tools that implement them.

Even with this realization, it’s still very easy to lose ourselves and become overly obsessed with tools. Having it happen from time to time can be productive and healthy. As is being reminded that for most of us, we want to enjoy music more than to debate about speaker technology; we want to create art more than to pursue the highest pixel count; we want to cook delicious dishes more than to have the prettiest knife; we want to make useful programs more than to have the most efficient keyboard layout.