“Is that new?” “Don’t you normally ride a red bike?” “Is that another new bike?” “What are you buying now?!”

I get this sort of comment a lot, from friends, acquaintances and bike shop employees. Bikers tend to notice what you’re riding, after all – I’m more likely to recognize someone from their bike than their face or name. So, there’s no hiding it, and it’s beginning to get embarrassing.

Right now, I own about a dozen bikes, from the 2011 Genesis Croix de Fer I bought to keep fit at university to the Santa Cruz 5010 and Nomad I picked up on sale last year as the industry blew up like a beached whale. I’m not a pro rider, or an influencer, or a millionaire. I have a regular job and typically do a sub-10 mile ride once or twice a week. So why the hell do I have so many bikes?

I have ADHD. You’ve probably seen memes about it, and maybe rolled your eyes at how everyone seems to have some special diagnosis nowadays. As with a lot of mental disorders, many people will recognize some of the symptoms and so wonder what all the fuss is about, but the threshold for diagnosis is when you have several of them and they have a significant impact on your life. This is why you can be sad but not have depression, stressed but not have an anxiety disorder, and so on. One of the ways ADHD impacts me is being absolutely terrible with money.

ADHD comes in the “inattentive” type, the “hyperactive-impulsive” type, and the “combined” type. When it comes to money management, “impulsive” is the key factor. ADHDers are thought to have lower levels of the reward chemical dopamine in the brain, and a common way to get it is by buying things: impulse purchases. We also seek novelty – owning a new, different bike – and avoid tasks that require effort without an immediate reward – building the new bike, cleaning and maintenance, working on skills, even getting out of the house for a ride. We have a very short “time horizon”, which makes us struggle to act in ways that benefit our future selves: think eating junk food instead of preparing a healthy meal. I know, in theory, that future me will have to deal with the potentially significant impact of having spent that money, but that knowledge does absolutely nothing to motivate me against spending it. This is sometimes called future myopia (short-sightedness) and it is terrible for both my credit score and sanity. I also have a hard time with FOMO: I feel an enormous compulsion to buy things that are on sale or in limited supply. And finally, another ADHD quirk: hyperfixation. I can happily while away hours window shopping for bikes and parts, reading reviews, and filling up online baskets and custom build forms, and I often do. When a particular bike catches my eye, I can become obsessed with it against all reason, until the next one comes along.

So, we have:

• Reward seeking
• Novelty craving
• Future myopia
• FOMO
• Hyperfixation

Hopefully you can see how all that might encourage someone to buy new bikes and gear rather more frequently than is prudent. I do sell them from time to time, but preparing a bike for sale, creating an ad and so on is quite a lot of work with no immediate reward, which makes it a big ask for the ADHD brain. Similarly, I often fail to return purchases such as clothing that doesn’t fit, which is transparently a waste of money and contributes to something colloquially known as “the ADHD tax”.

I’ve experienced this phenomenon in other hobbies too. I used to play guitar, and I’d frequently buy new guitars and effects pedals. As well as the dopamine hit from making a purchase, new gear gave me motivation to play and made playing the same old songs interesting again, avoiding the hard work of learning something new. I might have been playing the same sloppy covers I’d played for a decade, but my tone was impeccable.

This behaviour is normalized in online communities and it’s not hard to find someone with a worse habit than you. In the music world it’s known as Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS). In the cycling world, we say the correct number of bikes is N+1, where N is the number you currently own. But cute acronyms aside, most people are far less profligate, as you can see from this poll by Instagram influencer mud_and_no_makeup:

So, if you’ve seen me with yet another a new bike and wondered what’s wrong with me, now you know.