"Freud suggested collecting stems from toilet training."
During covid or any storm/hurricane the first thing that was cleared off the shelves was toilet paper. People collected/hoarded far more than they needed and creating unnecessary scarcity.
Reminds me of the song...'Never enough' from the Greatest Showman. A good lyric commercial remake for Charmin... 'Never enough to wipe me, wipe me, WIPE MEEEE!"
"Thus, it may be that compulsive hoarding and compulsive gambling can be at least partially explained by evolutionary bet hedging. In its strictest form, if diverse gambling and hoarding behaviors were the result of randomized phenotypic realizations of a single genotype, we would not expect to see any influence of heredity in these behaviors. In fact, available evidence suggests that the appearance of these disorders is at least partially sustained by genetic diversity rather than by random phenotypic realizations."
Interesting thoughts, but how much is enough in a catastrophe. By its nature that is unknowable. On the other hand, I collect cds and have the perfect amount of them. Until tomorrow.
If your heirs don't share your passion, and they seldom do, your collected treasures eventually end up being somebody else's junk when you pass. Unfortunately, the frivolity of collecting doesn't become apparent until our senior years when mortality becomes more of an issue. On the flip side, most collections are a healthy obsession, and the collectors derive a great deal of pleasure from them while they are alive.
Great thoughts.... but more specifically, I focus on collecting the "greatest hits" of an artist/group and their top albums/songs..... usually in SACD format.
I have a part-time job for the summer helping to clear out and sell old farts - like me - stuff. That stuff is hummels - I had NO idea what they were in June lol - old soda dispensers from the 1950s that weight hundreds of pounds, Pez candy dispensers - several hundred of these at one house - , old soda bottles, records - mostly in bad shape - and lots of other stuff. As the saying goes "one man's garbage is another man's gold" - and vice versa.
Until recently, with the arrival of streaming, collecting and listening to your personal choices in music was really only possible through physical media. Hence, we ended up with physical music collections, Frankly, I don’t see this behavior as being in anyway strange, but simply an expression of an interest in music. Like jmalen123 I have the perfect amount of CDs until tomorrow - as my wishlists on Amazon, eBay and Discogs attest to. I stream mainly to affirm the purchase, or not, of physical media, as I know at 72 I will die before being able to listen to my entire collection end to end. CD collecting simply reflects my choices emotionally and financially and the value of that music to me and very much one man’s gold is another’s trash - but I didn’t collect it for another man, but me. Am I obsessive, maybe, but frankly I’m also too old to care as it provides immense satisfaction and value to me as it was intended to. Collecting reflects what you love.
That behavior is absolutely baffling to me. If you run out of tp, there are several ways to clean yourself including stepping into the shower. People are getting less commonsensical by the year.
One of my favorite Youtube characters doing the rounds.
Of course, most "collections" now reside on servers, pc hard drives, etc., so our heirs can, if they wish, grab our music collections off the servers if memberships are transferable or they have access to our home residence servers.
I have about 200 LP's from the 30's to the present that my daughter, who is a musician on the side, has called dibs on.
Both my parents were art dealers and collectors of many forms of art. When they both passed on within 2 years of each other myself and my siblings had a heck of a time parsing it all out.
My wife recently lectured me about the necessity of assigning monetary values to all the stuff I have amassed, so that my heirs can at least know how to value things they might want to garage sale.
Like most of us here probably there is a faint background anxiety concerning the disposition of our collections. It is somewhat comforting to know that many people are captive to the same "Squirrel's Dilemma."
Back in the day, before we had a surfeit of bright and shiny to hoard, people who collected were known as pack rats. My mom called my dad that. He didn't need anything (and was fond of saying everything we have, we own) but saw intrinsic value and needs in worthless things.
My sister was another story, being a classic hoarder, who could bury a room, making it unrecognizable as a human habitat. For some reason, I and my two other sisters went in a saner direction. Some families have more than one black sheep.
My mother in law died recently and we have been cleaning the home out to get it on the market. She wasn’t a hoarder, thankfully, but we have interviewed different Estate Sales vendors and some of the stories they tell about homes that they have been in are fascinating.
It is known, even though not entirely accurate as a historical fact, that when Thomas Crapper invented the Flush Toilet (incorrect) created a mass produced product to be used as a Flush Toilet (correct). Individuals were now more regularly passing motions in their unnatural posture.
The unnatural posture results in a partial excrement, leaving waste within the Bowel and hence increased needs to clean the Bowel with a wipe.
Wipes in the excess used today are pretty much a growing market for approx' 150 years in the western world. People in general are very concerned about the cleanliness of such a area on the body, it is not uncommon to domestic use packages of Wipes being sold as 36 x Rolls, not running out is a dominating factor in the minds of the average individual. Suggest Supplies of Wipes are to be threatened and that is an equivalent to a unavoidable Armageddon.
The difference between a Typical Hoarder and a Hoarder of Wipes used as a cleaning aid following a use of a Toilet. Is that the Typical Hoarder can't bear the thought of parting with their hoarded goods. Where as the Wipe Hoarder can't wait to diminish their Hoard and get out and replenish it to the quantities funds will allow for.
Apparently COSCO have substantial sized Packages of Wipes immediately ready to be added to the trolley, as this settles the shopper, and makes them more at ease with the purse strings being opened as they are routed through the Store.
Are collecting and hoarding the same thing? There are some members here that have every single reissue of a favorite record album. That’s collecting. Hoarding would be having a home filled with cases of T.P., or so filled with random junk that one can’t move about
If an individual is fortunate enough to collect / hoard items that are appreciating in value, heirs of such collections will say:
"Even though he was an eccentric hoarder, he was also a Wise Investor. Aren't I lucky the Wealth was not left to the local Cat Rescue Charity. God Bless for putting me in the Will, they won't be needing any of it anymore. Shame I have a expensive Item to find a buyer for, Cash would have been better".
Anyone found a good source for high quality scans of LP or CD liner notes? I miss being able to read through them while listening to a stream. I enjoy the “everything is in my library” effect of streaming, but many of the liner notes and CD booklets were works of art in themselves. They were sometimes in the artist’s handwriting, gave artist dedications, random thoughts, and other quirky info that was fun. All I can find now is good cover art, lyrics, and song credits. I’d love access to a “digital collection” of my classic rock favorites!
I accumulated a lot of LPs from the early ’70s through the aughts-- buying heavily when records were devalued (except for audiophile stuff like the HP List, which I never bought into in a complete way b/c the sonics were his thing and much of the music was less appealing to me). I only started "curating" what I had in about 2006 or so, when I finally had some time to sort through what I had. At that point, I had accumulated a fair number of Island pink labels, because Chris Blackwell’s choices in who to sign and how to produce a record appealed to me. I also started acquiring Vertigo Swirls, Strata-East, Nimbus West and other records initially based on recommendations from other collectors. But I was never a completist.
When I relocated from NY to Texas at the very beginning of 2017, I had gotten rid of about 12,000 LPs- mostly "seconds" (I had a fair amount of duplicates), budget line copies of things I had replaced with better copies and material I just had no interest in. Most of this stuff was not of great value. I did sell a few high value records and used the money to fund other record purchases. I’d guesstimate there are around 6,000 LPs here, but they reflect less of a "collector’s" mentality and more about my particular tastes in music, which range from early very heavy rock (precursor stuff to what is now labelled heavy metal) to a considerable amount of post-bop jazz.
Given the astronomic rise in the prices of a lot of this stuff (along with a corresponding decline in standards for grading used records), I’ve slowed down considerably on the acquisition side. I will still buy the occasional Tone Poet or even a digitally sourced reissue of an old analog record. Look at the prices the self-titled Pharaoh (Sanders) now fetches-- it was not a big seller at the time and my suspicion is that only a limited number were pressed; the reissue is apparently cobbled together from needle drops and restored with digital processing.
My main objective in what has been a more than 50 year pursuit is buying and playing recordings of music that I enjoy. My tastes have evolved over the decades and I find myself going back to what I relegated to the "second" room--the stuff that was not in my listening room--to rediscover records I had neglected or did not fully appreciate at the time I reorganized things in 2017. For me, it is a continued process of discovery and though I know that some of these records are "high value" today-- at least based on retail pricing, that is far less important to me than having the time to enjoy them while I’m still able to do so. And that, along with the research, the history and the various overlaps among the personnel, makes this a sort of "living" pursuit rather than just an accumulation of artifacts.
If one has ever gotten a whiff of a real bear, using a cartoon 'family' (in reality, 'dad' bear is long gone...) to hype tp is subject to wise-ass 'round here.
We buy a case of 48, being a commercial entity IRL; not hoarding, just keeping from being 'behind'....
'Wipes' anything are for screens and eyeglasses.
We installed a toilet-top bidet.
TP use dropped 70~80%....."A single swipe will do ya'.... ;)...." *snicker*
If I hoard anything, it's involved with wood and odd materials....and audio this 'n that.
Not much into new LP or CD purchases, since likely anything I'd care to listen to is online Somewhere....and the hunt is half the challenge.
Funny- reposting a comment I just made a few minutes ago....
I despise collectors - they purposely drive prices up. When the record manufacturers like Acoustic Sounds, Music Direct, Blue Note, Speakers Corner, etc. come out with reissues I am happy, When they overproduce them and I can get an overstock or great price especially from a speculator who never opened it hoping for big investment gain, I am really happy (brand new Kind of Blue UHQR 45 for $120 for example a while back on eBay).
Collectors should stick to stamps, coins, art, and beanie babies. Car collectors are OK if they drive them at least a thousand or two miles per year or they are truly art (the multimillion dollar ones that belong in a museum) investments. Cars are meant to be driven and enjoyed.
I really miss reading and looking at liner notes and album art. I wish streaming services had that on all their titles.
To the subject at hand: I think nice collections can easily turn into hoarding when the amount of the collected item impedes our living space. If you have vinyl records taking up every inch of wall space in every room of your house, I think that would be hoarding behavior even if the records were all collectible releases.
A guy I heard talking once told the assembled that when his mother died and the kids were cleaning out her possessions they found a large box full of nothing but broken sewing machine needles. She had been through the Great Depression in a very, very taxing situation and had developed appropriate survival strategies that sometimes encompassed folly. No one begrudged her this.
I mentioned up thread that we are cleaning the home of a recently passed relative. We’ve dealt with a couple of Estate Sales people who say that stamp collecting has completely tanked as a hobby.
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