The Psychology Of Collecting

The Squirrel's Dilemma

"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."

"I Buy Old Records"

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."

Mr. Whipple

A Freudian Dump

I realize this may all seem "sketchy," but we are heading to a rousing conclusion about music pretty soon I am sure.

Except that such a wall of LP's can have room acoustic advantages.

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.