If your project needs one more piece of gear to be good, it probably needs one more idea instead.

Shopping feels like progress because it is specific, researchable and ends in an arrival. Thinking feels like nothing, which is how a vague dissatisfaction converts itself into a purchase. If the work is not holding together, the missing piece is usually structural: a clearer point, a better opening, one less element. Equipment solves problems you can name precisely, and that is rarely what is wrong.

Before you buy anything, write one sentence naming what the purchase will fix. If you cannot, spend that hour on the idea instead. Try making the next version with less rather than more and see what it loses.