I'd like to point out there's a time management / estimating angle to this as well. Being excessively optimistic about how useful things will be, and how quick

I'd like to point out there's a time management / estimating angle to this as well. Being excessively optimistic about how useful things will be, and how quickly they can be put to use, lead me to buy a lot of components at Radio Shack when I was a kid, for projects I never finished. I threw a lot of them away recently, along with many other purchases of stuff I never got around to. This scales to full on life disasters, or down to the boxes of parts.