You looked up one thing. Ideal ruck weight for your height. For a training plan you're already complicating.

Now it's 2 AM and you're reading about the physics of medieval lances, having passed through ruck weight standards → military forced march protocols → Roman legion packing lists → Roman road engineering → why Britain drives on the left → medieval jousting rules → the physics of lances.

Each link was irresistible because each new topic triggered your novelty-reward system while your working memory fragility meant you couldn't hold the original context ("why did I open ChatGPT?").

The original question left active memory within two clicks. But each new topic was fascinating. Your high-fidelity encoding system was capturing every connection, every implication, every "oh wait, this relates to..."

You weren't wasting time. You were doing what your brain does best: constellation thinking. Connecting distant domains. Finding patterns across unrelated fields.

The problem isn't the spiral. It's that the spiral has no off-ramp because the original context (why you started) has been overwritten and there's no external anchor pulling you back.

Set a timer before you click. Give future-you an exit ramp. Then go to sleep