Part 3/3
Your personal journey:
There are hundreds of spices to try out. You can then mix them into custom blends, like taco seasoning or Chinese five-spice powder, and eventually get really creative with more complex stuff like XO sauce. You can learn how they affect & influence different dishes, such as why we use bay leaves (read up here, here, here, and here to begin with!), or how boring pumpkin is until you add stuff like nutmeg, allspice, cloves, ginger, cinnamon, and molasses (and then get creative with things like pumpkin pie, sous-vide Pumpkin Pot de Crème, mini-loaf chocolate-chip pumpkin bread, etc.).
Part of the journey is getting exposure to what's out there, in what combinations, and in what dishes. Another part of the journey is learning about your personal preferences - what you like, what's okay to buy pre-made, and what you prefer to make yourself. For example, I've tried gourmet ketchups & also went through a homemade ketchup recipe phase, and it turns out you just can't beat Heinz. I still buy Hellman's mayo (even though I make my own -very easily & quickly - using an immersion blender, but this is a bit more aioli-style & I make it more for flavored mayos & stuff like my Burger Sauce), and have my personal favorite items like Red Boat fish sauce & Sriracha.
You'll also learn a lot of interesting things along the way, like what cinnamon really is (here & here), how artificial vanilla extract is just fine (especially due to the recent price increase on the real stuff, due to the monsoon issue in Madagascar), and what actually works when doing marinades. As well as slightly more scary stuff like learning about Parmesan cheese (yikes), olive oil, the crab in your sushi roll (not necessarily a bad thing), and orange juice and how spices & sauces are cut into different products in different ways, sometimes for reasonable purposes & sometimes for ridiculous purposes. There are also modern takes on historical things to learn about; for example, I recently got into gel-based food colorings & they are super awesome compared to the regular liquid kind you buy at the supermarket!
There are lots of websites that covers spices & there are new spice trends all the time. Personally, I like to lag behind a little bit in order to wait for the market to get saturated & then for prices to fall & lots of proven recipes to get published. My latest trendy spice is fennel pollen, which is a bit hard to explain, but imagine black licorice on a sunny day. I'm not a black licorice fan at all, but it adds a really interesting element to dishes!
There are lots of other fun things to try out as well, from things like Miracle Berries (flavor-tripping parties are fun!) to learning about how we handle taste. Originally, it was just four basics tastes: sweet, bitter, sour, and salty. Then we discovered umami or the "yummy" taste (Doritos, whoohoo!) and the latest one is starch. Also in the running are calcium, kokumi, piquance, coolness, metallicity, fat, and carbon dioxide.
So combining education with experimentation is really the best way to get into spices & grow your knowledge & skills over time. Again, buying one new spice a week & working with it in a few different dishes that week means that in a year, you'll have tried over 50 spices, and if you use it in just 3 meals (out of your 21 meals for the week - breakfast/lunch/dinner times 7 days in a week), then you'll have tested those spices in over 150 recipes! And of course, you can also start by creating your own multi-purpose seasoning blend. The Spend with Pennies website has a lot of create seasoning blends you can DIY:
So in general you have spices, spice blends, and from there can go into sauces, fermentation, infusions for oil & vinegars, dips, dry-rubs, etc. Most people just kind of dabble; if you're really interested in learning spices, I'd recommend throwing together an easy plan for growth over time, because you'll be amazed at how far you'll be a year from now if you do! Even just one new spice a week, applied to a few dishes that week, will multiply over time & give you a treasure trove of recipes for your personal collection!