A related thing to this thread that I've been thinking about for myself--not pointing fingers at anybody else: the distinction between being a knife user, and a knife collector. Obviously many of us do both. But I often find myself spending more time focusing on the 'acquisition' stage of knives--what steel do I want, what folding brand or mechanism, what sheath/regrind/handle customizations, etc.--rather than focusing on how to USE the knives with skill.
This really struck me recently when I was reading a book about kitchen knives, where the author was discussing different types of cuts and developing your food prep knife skills. Similarly with outdoor tasks: there are 'skills' to using a blade for camping, hiking, and backpacking, fire prep obviously being a great example. Many of these skills have been lost in modern urban-dominated life, where we tend to pay people to do everything for us, or buy another specialized tool. A great example of knife skills, I've seen video of folks in Central America doing pretty amazing 'small knife' type tasks with a machete, and my daughter who was there on a mercy/ministry trip in Nicaragua, said the machete is just ubiquitous and a lot of people do everything with it, even fine filleting and slicing tasks that would kinda' blow our mind here, we'd always be reaching for another specialty knife.
So the resolution: learn to be a better knife USER. Learn some new skills in a new area (kitchen skills, field use skills, multi-purpose use of a larger blade skills, or even take a class on how to use a blade for last-ditch self defense, whatever).
