The Psychology Of Collecting

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.

+1 rcm

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.

@gdaddy1 

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.

"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."