Repeat after me, "Hi my name is ... and I'm a knife-a-holic."
Hi CZ. Sit down, coffee's over there.
Let me tell you how this goes, or at least, how it went for me.
You will get a knife. That's how it starts. My beginnings were humble, I had a schrade that I subsequently lost and missed enough to save my allowance to buy another. I think I lost that one, too. I believe I'm on my third so far. Anyway.
Maybe somebody gave you one, maybe you spammed Non-Firearm Weapons for three weeks begging people to tell you what the best knife is for camping, household chores, seatbelt cutting, sentry elimination, ninja combat, destroying zombie brainstems, etc. The point is, you've got a knife, and you're happy with it - but maybe, you think, you could find one that's a little better.
I went from that schrade slipjoint to a backlock by whatever company that was that schrade owned that later folded. The backlock beat the slipjoint, hands down. Then on to a linerlock, this one with a thumb stud. Soon I found myself with two different assisted-opening knives, more backlocks than I could count, a knife for formal occasions, one for scuba diving (I don't know how to scuba dive) and one I won't wear unless I've got a flannel shirt on. I'm drooling over a Kershaw ET now, if only because it functions in a way that I haven't gotten to play with yet.
At some point, you will discover blade steels, and when you realize that's happened you may as well eat your wallet -- it's no use keeping it around to hold money..
Sick of the technology? Go primitive. My most recent buy was an Opinel. Not that i needed another knife. Not that, in principle, I ever needed more than one or, in practice, more than a couple.
And your friends will go "You're into knives, right? I want a knife for my birthday, will you get me a cool one?" And you buy them something you've never tried but strikes you as a neat idea -- and you have to give it to them with the package opened because you had to verify that it worked and was exactly as cool as you thought.. and you would've given them a new one and kept that one had the store been open after work.
But at the core of your obsession remains the pleasurable experience of working with your hands, of crafting something tangible with a tool.
And then you're going to get into multitools, khukris, axes, machetes..
