That's something I noticed with a lot of people in my circle and 3d printers. They don't 3d print for their hobby. Most of them have 3d printing or even 3d printers as their hobby.
Personally I like to use my printer to enable my other hobbies, but along the way I've picked up 3d design and printing as secondary hobbies.
But it's only worth it if you have a reasonable number of those parts, or if lead-time is important. For most people designing stuff, led-time is essential, but not everybody that want some specific part designs it.
I decided to install arch once. Didn't have any issues per se, but spent far too much time going through all the window manager options, file browser options etc etc etc.
I eventually decided that I needed an os to do stuff, not be the stuff to do.
I just recently started to customise my Powershell profile. Let's see where this leads...
I just use a premade Debian rather that selecting every single tiny piece.
If I need to change things I can, I just don't feel I have to change everything.
Nowadays I'm using Code with the Vim plugin and I haven't tinkered with my config for quite some time.
Emacs is infinitely more powerful - but with Code I was able to set it up once and be done, and there's value in that too.
Having a 3d printer now, I can get a half dozen iterations on something done in a day and compared to a single iteration per day from the library. So if you're designing your own parts and can't draw them perfectly first go, having the printer is huge.
Replacement battery covers for remote controls. If I value those at $200 each, I've broken even.
If you are lucky enough to have a neighbour to do the commissioning, maybe, but otherwise shipping has gotten so expensive (at least in these parts), and 3D printers so cheap, that a getting few design iterations in your hands will practically buy you the printer.
My woodworking setup for my garage, however. Someday it will see use other than for organizing my woodworking setup in my garage. I just need that one more tool. And to build a place to put it.
Though I do think there can be another aspect at play; I often find myself collecting things that I think "might be useful". Eg: I have a ton of empty yogurt containers, for use in hypothetical future art projects. I do use them sometimes, but at this point I have plenty. I still feel the urge to keep saving them, though — for some imagined future. I wouldn't say "I enjoy collecting yogurt containers," though.
I'm no hoarder, but I do feel a certain pull/compulsion in that direction from time to time, and I could see the same being true elsewhere. It's not always easy to know whether I'm scratching an itch or worrying at it.
It's purely acquisitive and about the buying and getting and just seems quite sad and empty. Those afflicted become slaves to the companies pumping out items purely for this class of consumer. For example, "limited editions" and such are not rare because the product warrants it, it's just designed scarcity to press the buttons of the collectors and extract the most money from them. Or it's bidding wars on vintage items like wine where huge price inflation happens just for the collection kudos not the virtues of the item itself.
For example, I like fountain pens, but I can't really read r/fountainpens because it's mostly people building huge collections of pens and getting excited about buying a new pattern or colour of pen they already own. Nothing makes me sadder than seeing their full collections of 100s of fantastic tools that will sit idle for the vast majority of their life until the owner passes and a relative has to liquidate things they don't understand.
It looks like a dysfunction to me - a stimulation seeking addiction which is not satisfied by the next acquisition and will never fill the emptiness, the need, the dream, of the collector. I know people will be super defensive about their collecting but I would love for that money and energy to be redirected towards higher degrees of self-actualisation. It feels like a failure scale the Maslow's hierarchy of needs and get stuck in a loop down the bottom. Instead of creating novelty or growing, there is something safe, comfortable and unchallenging to just acquire.
now that my rant is over would you like to see my extensive collection of Star Trek memorabilia plates? The paint is toxic so we cannot eat from them so i just leave them in this box and bring it out when guests come over.
It's hard to choose the line between "don't yuck someone else's yum" and not wanting to endorse others' self-destructive tendencies.
Part of me wants to chastise you for gatekeeping other people's enjoyment[1], but I do agree that it can slip into dysfunction, and also agree that some companies downright push people in that direction (looking at you, microtransactions).
The Lego I would put in its own category because it was endlessly fascinating and rebuild-able. I used it all the time. The dinosaurs were at least educational.
But the keyrings were just hoarded and gathered dust. I'm trying to decide now if this was unhealthy and trained me to covet stuff, or if it was a good inoculation against the behaviour later in life. I now have zero interest in collecting anything just for the sake of collecting it. I'd rather be minimal where possible, and after accumulating a lot of crap in my early 20s (when owning stuff was a novelty) I now also try to avoid the "I might use that someday" trap.
I too like fountain pens and have about six, moderately priced, all made by 'Cross'. I put various coloured inks in them (I usually have about 3 good to go at any one moment) and ... I virtually never hand write anything.
The thing I have most of is certainly cables and tech widgets of various descriptions, but I don't try to collect them, somehow they just sort-of happen.
Make of that all what you will.
Mmm. That does remind of the quite nice social interaction some types of collecting gives. For example, a neighbour was a thimble collector so whenever visiting somewhere, we would look for a thimble. It gave us some entertainment as a tourist, like a treasure hunt, and then the nice moment to give it to the neighbour and show we were thinking of them while away.
It can go wrong though. I've known a few friends who have become associated with "a thing" because their family saw they owned one of "the thing" and now it's the exclusive theme of all presents but they don't have the heart to correct them and reveal all their presents were unwanted!
On the “associated” thing - not so much about collections but there was an interesting article on the guardian website a few months ago, about a woman who came to realise that ‘I like Prosecco’ was not a substitute for a personality, but she had run with it for so long that that was all she ever got as a gift, and she discovered her friends knew very little else about her. A one-dimensional character trap.
As an adult, I go by the motto of “Don’t save the candles”, which is to actually use the things you buy, even the expensive cutlery and the scented candles.
That makes me think that someone who is a hobby cable collector must have the easiest time of it!
People do collect all sort of non-expensive things (pebbles, seashells, ...) so it feels like just a coincidence that collecting pens means also collecting a lot of tools that will never be used.
So, yeah, I truly do not understand collecting Beanie Babies, Funko Pops, or fountain pens. But, I do collect coins. I find them interesting on multiple levels. I can't think of too many other hobbies that give one a good excuse to study history, economics, art, metallurgy, and more. So many things that happen involving humans and human societies also involve money and commerce. Going back to the rarity aspect, I own quite a few coins that are anywhere from quite scarce to truly rare. It also really helps that they don't take up a ton of space, either.
I don't see anything particularly maladaptive about it, except that it's a hobby that can take up arbitrarily much time and money. But, that's actually one thing I like about it: I could definitely have fun collecting coins on less than a $100/month budget, even though I actually spend quite a bit more than that on it. The acquisition process is fun as well. I like going to coin shops and coin shows. Buying online or at auction is slightly less fun, but it gives me a greater opportunity to find what I'm really looking for. When dealing with things that are, as I said, fairly scarce, the hunt itself becomes part of the enjoyment.
Not sharing this as a serious alternative, just sharing this as something nerdy and cool. It's a little more involved than coin collecting lol... but this guy making his own Carnyx (Celtic war horn) ticks many of those boxes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWTFIDAbDtY
A Carnyx being played:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRIQp4qZrrE
Engaging with history in very practical ways like this is very cool. I'd love to make my own Round House one day.
More of a business than a hobby, but still.
Like you, this isn't the mass market consumerism type of collecting, but is maybe a bit closer to it than your idea of somehow getting a working PDP-11.
Me too. Thankfully, buying old PDP-11 manuals on eBay and assembling a PiDP-11 satisfied that urge. I also live close to two good computer museums that have plenty of PDPs to poke around on, when they're working. Watching the graybeards diagnose and fix things on these 50+ year old machines reminds me why I don't want to do that at home.
In all likelihood, you and I find collecting sad and empty because we’re not collectors. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. For all we know, collectors have found more fulfillment than we will ever know.
Undoubtedly for some it is a dysfunction; but for most, I suspect it taps into something common to most of us and is encoded by our evolutionary past given that for most of human prehistory we were equipped to deal with scarcity. For many with collecting hobbies, the target items are very specific and their practices don’t preclude moving effectively through life.
There are differences as well. Magnitude is the obvious one, unless you actually filled your entire kitchen with yogurt containers or something lol. :) The other big one I can think of is that an actual hoarder will have genuine, severe anxiety at the mere thought of getting rid of anything from their hoard. This is another assumption, of course, but my guess is that if you had to get rid of some, or maybe even most of your accumulation of yogurt containers for some reason, you'd be able to do that, and the thought wouldn't fill you with dread or anything.
Every once and a while I'll try to curate my parts bin, tossing bulky or unused items that I haven't needed.
Every time I find myself needing some seemingly dumb part from what I got rid of a month or two later.
I still try to clean up, fully knowing I'll need that thing later. Its rough.
Still can be annoying, though.
I do. About any collecting hobby. I view that more as an addiction than a hobby tbh.
A person with GAS does not enjoy collecting; they do end up collecting, but it's a side effect.
Buying artificially scarce dead trees isn't really the same.
1) "Save _all_ the things!" Yeah, save them, use them, etc.
2) Use it or lose it: I have a space under the sink for washed/clean plastic containers. If that gets too junky, it's time to throw them out in the trash, offer them "free" on craigslist/facebook marketplace, your neighborhood group, whatever.
3) Regularize: we've ended up with strict "use cases" after saving "_all_ the things!". Sour cream containers become waste-grease-buckets for the freezer. Glass spaghetti jars become candy/cookie containers. Peanut-butter-jars become nail/screw holders in the garage.
4) Limit the flow: Once you "run out of space", keep only one or two "on hand" if it's a particular type of jar that you know you will "flow through". Basically you should reach a steady-state of using the stuff you're saving rather than growing your "cache" unbounded. Unless it's a really useful/valuable/unique type of box/jar/product, get rid of it! Even if it's awesome (but unique), probably get rid of it, b/c it'll end up being "the odd one out" unless you have a really specific need for it.
5) re-Regularize: is there a certain type/brand of spaghetti-jars that are soooo awesome, because they fit on a shelf, have the right size opening, etc. etc.? Start consolidating around one particular type (as you "flow through" them) and getting rid of the oddball ones.
6) Front-door, back-door: Put things by the front door if they're going to be given away, sold, donated, etc. Put things by the back door if they're destined for the trash. Make those decisions and then take action on them as you can.
There's a lot of value in saving some of this "stuff" from the waste-stream, and lots of pleasure to have all your other "stuff" organized in solid plastic containers (that you ended up kindof paying "nothing" for)... just don't fall victim to the "save everything", instead know that you can just "stretch out your hand" and grab the things you need _when_ you need them, not _if_ you need them. :-)
Source: I wanted a set of the Volca electronic instruments, but the secondhand market was not significantly cheaper than new.
GAS is a form of delusion. You are asking people to “just” self-recognize and somehow self-fix their deeply rooted psychological problems.
To re-imagine the situation, they would have to give up the original goal of the hobby.
Both of those companies have this concept that's called a "registry set," which is where you can go on their websites and enter the serial numbers of coins you own, then create virtual sets out of those coins. You can create your own set lists, which I have no problem with, but there are also pre-made set lists the company created, which are scored according to a rarity-weighted average of the numerical grades of your coins, with a score of 0 for any missing coins. For instance, there's a Buffalo nickel registry and a wheat penny registry, and so on.
I think you can probably see where I'm going with this now. Before these companies came into existence and started publishing rankings of these sets, you couldn't really do something like say "@gilleain has the #1 ranked Buffalo Nickel set in the world," and such. Now you can, and it really annoys the piss out of me. It's not because my collection doesn't rate very highly (it doesn't, FYI), but because I think "competitive coin collecting" is bad for the hobby and only serves to make those 2 companies money.
If you want to reach the level of @gilleain you have to obtain the coins he has. Coin collecting is based entirely upon owning resources.
On the other hand let’s say that a guy collecting coins has built a very popular YouTube channel about numismatics. He has his own collection and talks about it. You are envious of his success and you want to become just as popular as him.
A person without GAS would think that in order to achieve this he would have to learn a lot about numismatics and then improve in his ability to speak and entertain.
Someone suffering from GAS would think that acquiring the guy’s collection is the solution and would blame his lack of popularity not on his skills but on his resources
Totally agree that this 'gamification' of collecting is an unpleasant way to monetise something that is otherwise quite a chill pursuit.
From the companies point of view, of course, it means collectors are more likely to try and 'finish' collections. Like how some card collections (I think?) would have books that you would put your cards in, which gives an endpoint to achieve.
edit: I lie, I do technically have a single coin I suppose. A 1918 silver 'threepenny bit' (3p coin) from a Christmas Pudding. King George V's head on it. Forgot it was in my wallet.
It started as a deeply rooted necessity. If you want to get through a winter that you don’t know the severity of, you better have above-average stocks of food and wood, plus stuff to repair your home if a severe storm strikes, plus extra winter clothing in case the winter is truly severe or your house burns down, and you’ve got to flee to your family, a few days walking away.
I used to do a lot of DIY software when I first got started, that I now deeply question the value of. I think without the imaginary payoffs, I would have only done about a quarter of it for fun. I don't use any of that code now, nor do I write anything similar on a regular basis, and my entire approach to coding is completely different, so it kind of feels like I was throwing time and money away.
I have a similar litmus test: assuming you’re going to fail, how do you want to spend your time?
But when you design a project I a way that's not appropriate for your resources, and it becomes an overwhelming pile of bugs, because you tried to do something really complex and reinvent 20 different wheels, it's less fun, unless you can polish it up to be like what you imagined, but that could take years depending on how crazy your idea was.
My point is: you didn't do anything wrong. The mere fact you're thinking about it reveals you've grown wiser for the experience. Kudos, friend. Thanks for sharing.
All of the above is fine, learning the history of and techniques in restoring things is cool.
You can work on a project, or you can work on a tool to make that project easier. A work-station, a jig, a library, a pod orchestration framework. Sometimes the new thing you've made will make the target project easier; sometimes you go down a rabbit hole and forget the project you were supposed to be working on as you start designing a new language to write a library in to write a database with that would suit your new project a lot better than SQLite.
Open any wood-working magazine, and half the projects are workbenches and shop organization.
I always thought old hand tools were kind of crap to use though until I cleaned up an old block plane and sharpened the blade. With a sharpened blade it made incredibly satisfying curls of wood on my next woodworking project, where I would have normally used my loud and unpleasant belt sander. I think I get it now why some people really love collecting old tools.
I feel like myself and my friends are aware of this.
GAS is the syndrome, and we talk about it to help keep ourselves in check and not lose sight of what we’re actually doing.
1. Doing the thing
2. Talking about doing the thing
3. Getting into the gear for doing the thing (collecting, building, customizing)
4. Talking about the gear for doing the thing
Very often, the first group is the smallest!
So what they do is the other 3, and wait for a random bolt of lightning, or a favorable judgment from the inscrutable supreme authority, or even declare that the "doing" is in fact the "talking etc".
It's an interesting bit of psychology for sure.
> It’s driven in part by the belief that new gear will improve one’s art or performance, e.g. I don’t sound like Jimi Hendrix because I don’t have the same effects pedal he used.
Bit tangent, but I think one should just embrace it and say “my hobby is collecting guitar gear, and my niche is things that Jimi Hendrix used or things that make sounds like he did”
There’s no shame in a hobby collecting and being honest with yourself might bring some clarity to your life.