I set a budget in October and told myself I was going to be disciplined about it, pick the parts, stop reading, pull the trigger. I read for four months. Every time I got close to finalizing something a new benchmark would drop or someone in a thread would say the thing I'd picked was a bad value right now and I'd start the GPU conversation over again from scratch. I have a spreadsheet with six different versions of this build dating back to November and if you put them side by side the differences are genuinely minor but each one felt like a meaningful correction at the time.

I finally posted my parts list two weeks ago and felt this specific relief that lasted about forty minutes before the comments started coming in. Half of them were helpful and encouraging, one person told me I'd overpaid for my case which I had already made peace with, and then someone said the GPU I'd chosen was fine but that if I could stretch another eighty dollars I'd get meaningfully better performance and I have some money saved up so the eighty dollars wasn't really the issue, the issue was that I'd finally closed the door on that decision and someone had just opened it again with a reasonable argument I couldn't dismiss. I sat with it for three days before I just kept the original choice purely out of self preservation.
The build is sitting in boxes in my living room right now and I haven't started putting it together yet because some part of me is still not totally sure I'm done second guessing it, which I understand is insane for what is ultimately a hobby purchase that will make me happy regardless of whether I left eighty dollars of performance on the table. I think I've spent more time researching this PC than I spent on any decision I've made in the last two years including actual important ones, and I don't know if that says something about how I approach decisions generally or just about what happens when you give an overthinker an internet connection and a parts picker. Probably both.