Re:Hoarding
by drewcoo on Sunday May 21, 2023 @11:58PM
(#36027295)
tl;dr I agree with you and think the author mis-assesses the psychology of collecting, too.
I grew up in a family of collectors. By the age of 10 I'd spent countless hours scouring antique shops and shows and flea markets for my items of hyper-focus: metal litho advertising, mostly particularly tobacco cans, because I was working with an allowance and the age of tobacco tins was not long in our past then. I was really introverted, but learned to haggle, to "dicker," before I learned to swim. I spent even more hours in my public library, looking up whatever information I could find about my collection and similar pieces and why some were valuable and others not.
Yes, I kept everything up well. But . . . I only kept collecting. It was almost some kind of mania. Even when I branched into antique yo-yo collecting, it wasn't doing anything for my ability to socialize as a teenager. Collect, collect, collect!
Until my parents got divorced and sold their collections. My brother and I opted to also sell our collections. No coercion - it was a choice: I was an adult by then and my brother was 18 but still finishing high school.
And soon after that, I wasn't looking at everything as a collector anymore, I wasn't trying to put a value on things. I also didn't have a lot of stuff that just took up space. Eureka! I'd discovered some new state of being: collection-free.
I think collecting can be a problem. I think the author misses that in the analysis, too.
I grew up in a family of collectors. By the age of 10 I'd spent countless hours scouring antique shops and shows and flea markets for my items of hyper-focus: metal litho advertising, mostly particularly tobacco cans, because I was working with an allowance and the age of tobacco tins was not long in our past then. I was really introverted, but learned to haggle, to "dicker," before I learned to swim. I spent even more hours in my public library, looking up whatever information I could find about my collection and similar pieces and why some were valuable and others not.
Yes, I kept everything up well. But . . . I only kept collecting. It was almost some kind of mania. Even when I branched into antique yo-yo collecting, it wasn't doing anything for my ability to socialize as a teenager. Collect, collect, collect!
Until my parents got divorced and sold their collections. My brother and I opted to also sell our collections. No coercion - it was a choice: I was an adult by then and my brother was 18 but still finishing high school.
And soon after that, I wasn't looking at everything as a collector anymore, I wasn't trying to put a value on things. I also didn't have a lot of stuff that just took up space. Eureka! I'd discovered some new state of being: collection-free.
I think collecting can be a problem. I think the author misses that in the analysis, too.