So, I still love music. I listen to music (guitar and other) a lot. I also have licks and passages I like to play. I’m trying to spend more time playing over loops or jam tracks. I’ve been trying to do sort of a “back to basics” rebuild of vocabulary for improv purposes, looking at Clapton on the Beano album as a starting point to model from. I also started digging into Joseph Alexander’s books on theory/improv.
Yet probably 9 times out of 10, when I grab a guitar at home, I spend my time dicking around with right-hand variations on “Yngwie sixes” type picking. I’m basically doing the exact opposite of what every interviewee (and Troy) suggests for making usable musical progress. I’m not particularly compulsive in other aspects of life, but I’ve worked my way into treating picking-hand technique like an optimization problem that I fixate on for it’s own sake. It’s intrinsically rewarding in its own way, very much in line with the metaphor that has come up before of “learning a skateboard trick”, but on an intellectual level, I’m coming to recognize that I spend time on it at the expense of more musical practice because it’s less mentally demanding, or in the most charitable terms, it’s demanding in a way that’s very familiar and comfortable. Kind of like playing a video game you’ve previously mastered, and inventing new mini-goals for yourself within the gameplay.
Even as I’m writing this out almost as a kind of therapy to try and motivate myself to change my approach, there’s a part of me that wants to nerd out about why I’m starting to love pronated DSX with a three-finger grip so much. 
Philosophically, I’ve turned into the opposite of Albert Lee.
I guess what I’m trying to say is: going too far down the rabbit-hole of dicking around with technique at the expense of making music is absolutely a real phenomenon, and I really encourage other people to be wary of how the reward processes in your brain are working. Back to the videogame thing, at the risk of alienating videogame lovers, I feel like spending too much time fiddling with mechanical things becomes, again, like playing an already familiar videogame instead of reading a challenging book (or, hey, playing a new and differently challenging videogame).
Anyway, TL;DR: I crossed a threshold of alternate picking competence long ago that I should spend more time using to make music instead of getting sucked into ever more diminishing returns continuing to experiment with variations on picking technique. Be mindful of whether the same is happening to you, and whether you would consider that a good thing for you, or a bad thing.
And in the spirit of semi-unhinged, self indulgent rants, here’s a recent John Oliver video about the movie “Air Bud”.
