The mentality of the gambler. There's a lot of people out there who have this addiction and just aren't fortunate enough to have lucked into becoming a CEO. That's how you know it's a lottery, and being born into riches is a shortcut.

Not just sunk cost, they see all this apparent press, writers, business leaders saying they have fantastic results, so obviously they most be doing something wrong.

I have seen it over and over again in tech. People are told that everyone else in the world is doing great with some tech and everyone is so afraid they are "not getting" something they won't say anything or else they will pretend they also "get it" and it is awesome.

Not even things that have marketing spend behind it, some programming paradigm or whatever. Marketing spend makes it worse, but all by ourselves everyone seems to be afraid to somehow be seen as a clueless Luddite at any second.

It's really weird when you attend some talk where the guy talks up sonething or another and then in more casual private conversation basically admits straight up that he actually doesn't see the benefit, but feels like he has to dance the dance.