There are three area a collector can find themselves in: 1. The Joy of Collecting, 2. The Obsessive, and 3. The Investor. As a collector you always want to be in #1 but sometimes you catch yourself drifting into the other areas and soon the hobby turns into a chore and it's all down hill from there.
I moved from collecting U.S. Coins exclusively to collecting World Coins to keep me in that perfect state of mind but sometimes things change. Over the last 4 months I have been attending a lot of coin shows and there has been less and less foreign coins so my attention turned back to U.S. Coins. Soon I was searching for die varities & errors and chatting up a storm here and there about my purchased victories but I wasn't having Fun! If anything, I was constantly researching and hunting for that next under-valued coin to the point that it was interfering with life.
I found myself becoming obsessive and to some extent an investor and for me it just wasn't that joy that turned me on to the hobby. Varieties and errors were never the reason why I started collecting. It was all about history and how I connected to it through coins. Once I realized what was happening, the brakes were applied and my bliss returned once more. In other words, I wasn't being true to the real reason why I love coin collecting.
The more you learn about a hobby the greater the possibility is of forgetting what is was that attracted you in the first place. My advice to readers is never forget why! Write it down if you must, cause if you don't then it's a quick road from fun hobby to laborious chore or rut.