You're absolutely right; I've gone through this stage as well. Hesitating when it comes to payment, feeling anxious when using it, producing a bunch of half-finished products while comforting myself with "at least I'm keeping up with the times." Later, I slowly realized that if the direction you're working on has a compounding effect, these initial "wastes" are actually accumulating quietly. For example, when I was working on prediction market strategies, the first two months were indeed just burning money, but the data, the lessons learned, and the system rules were all stacking up. In the later stages, the same investment yielded completely different results. The hard part is that in the early stages, you can't tell if you're "accumulating" or just "playing around." You only realize it when you look back.