imi wrote on 2020-07-06, 13:49:
that sounds very familiar 😉
"the fear of missing out"... and it gets worse with time too
There can definitely be something addictive going on with any kind of collecting habit!
For me, after I think 5(?) years it started to decline and I even remember the moment this happened:
I was in my attic and as some of the oldtimers here may remember, I had my attic set up with shelves and stacks of kiwi boxes and organised a bit as if it was a shop, everything neatly sorted and with a workbench in the same room (basically a door laying on 2 half-height shelves as using an old door was wayyyy cheaper than paying for a piece of wood to make the top of a table with) and I had just gone into my attic and I looked at the hundreds of parts I had stored. And then I realized that I had basically everything I had really wanted up to that point. I had wayyy more then I had ever dreamed of back when I was just a kid who didn't even have his own PC. I had to go to friends and basically use their PC (of course they always got first dibs since it was of course their stuff 🤣) and PCs had something magical to me. And fast forward, here I was, in my self-made attic having basically done most of the collecting before I even knew there were other collectors to find like here on Vogons!
I was satisfied. I had basically proven to myself that I could do it. That I could do amazing stuff that before that I held for just a kid's dream, having basically my own shop and it was all mine! 😁
Sure, I didn't have all the stuff I would like to have, but I had had the chance to build basically whatever I wanted at that point (provided it wasn't the really new stuff as that was too expensive for me).
No collection will ever be perfect unless that collection has basically all the collective elements with literally no part not part of that collection and this is impossible. At least this is how I kinda see it.
My collection was so awesome that even people who were totally not computer savvy and who I let into the attic to lay an eye on my collection, every single individual was just in awe. And that's pretty much amazing in my book 😜
I was collecting a lot (and I still do even though it's mostly just sporadic stuff these days) but at some point I became satisfied.