Sometimes there is just so much … stuff.
Building a collection of any given interest is one of the most common hobbies there is. It’s rare that I meet someone who doesn’t collect something. Records, comics, toys, music gear, sports cards, jerseys, books — nearly everyone I know has a house or an apartment stuffed with tangible representations of whatever pointed interest they have. But isn’t it an odd pastime? To just amass … stuff?
Sometimes I look around at all the comics, figures, robots, etc. in my apartment and I ask myself what am I ever going to do with all this stuff? Because there really isn’t a “goal,” per se; the goal has always been to just get more stuff — and I’ve become very good at it over time. But is there ever a point where it becomes too much? When does the socially acceptable “collector” cross the line and become the less socially acceptable “hoarder”? Well, that depends entirely on one’s point of view. I call myself a “collector,” but there have been plenty of times when I felt like a hoarder, and once my living space became too compromised by my collection, that’s when I decided something had to be done.
The pattern was always the same: learn a new wave of a favorite line was hitting and then hunt like crazy for it, spending hours driving from store to store hoping to score. After a few days (hopefully), score some of the wave. Finding a partial wave offered absolutely zero enjoyment, though. All it did was make me agonize over what I was missing, so more and more miles would be put on the car and more time invested in trying to finish the wave. Finally finish the wave, admire it for, like, 28 seconds, and then wonder when the NEXT wave would hit. Once I had them, they didn’t matter anymore. All that mattered was what was coming next and next and then next — a vicious cycle. Getting was great; having was boring.
The pace was relentless too. First it was just Marvel Legends. Then Hellboy. Then Transformers Classics. Then DC Universe Classics. Then 3A lines. Then whatever ancillary line would keep me hunting and gathering. Eventually, a heck of a lot of stuff built up and it needed to be dealt with because it was actually affecting the quality of life I was living. What was a “hobby” had clearly become a lifestyle and I don’t even know how that happened. It became an all-consuming compulsion and it happened so gradually over time. Thanks to a moment of clarity late last year, I felt I had to make a decision — and some changes.
Here, you’ve got two options, really: storage or sell it. Storage, to me, is pointless. There’s no point in having a collection if you can’t at least look at it. So selling was my choice, and it’s a choice that was a hard one to come to terms with.
With so much focus put on new acquisitions, selling parts of the collection wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be. It’s an odd phenomenon to develop an emotional attachment to an object, but that’s what I thought I had with huge swaths of my collection. But I quickly learned that once something was sold and gone, I didn’t miss it at all and it was rare that I ever gave it another thought. That made it easier to sell more and more and slim the collection down to something manageable.
These days the collection is small and it’s getting smaller all the time — and I’m finding a lot more satisfaction with a small collection than I ever did with my gigantic collection. Sometimes I feel as though I’m done with it and I’m out, but, really, I don’t think that will ever happen, not 100 percent, anyway. I am always going to find something I’m going to want to pick up, and I will. What I need to be mindful of, however, is that it only takes one snowflake to start an avalanche.
Right now we’re living in a “golden age” with an astonishing amount of product coming at us from every direction, and it’s insane to try to keep up with it all, not to mention expensive. The trick for me now is to be able to pick and choose — thoughtfully. I never did that before. It was always new = must have. Now I can admire something for being pretty damn cool without feeling the compulsion to own it. And it took me almost a year to get to that point.
But now that I’m there, this hobby is becoming meaningful to me in a new way, and it’s fun deciding what new piece makes the cut and what doesn’t.
How about you? How do you manage your collection? Sound off below!
