It’s not hard to imagine rummaging through the back of the closet for the one thing you swear you saw last week, only to be distracted by a landslide of memorabilia and nostalgia—the old cookie tin that still smells like butter and sugar when you crack open the lid, that rattles with odd marbles, colorful rocks and exclusive lego characters. Or maybe you have a binder of pristine, laminated cards, or a shoebox full of rubber ducks tucked under your bed. The point is, collecting is familiar to everyone. Even for those who don’t remember a childhood treasure box, it’s likely that they collect more practical items, like books, coupons, contact information, or even money. The oftentime subconscious urge to collect things is possibly linked to a primal survival instinct and natural selection, a cause for the shift from nomadic lifestyles to a settled one. Historically, people that collected things might have found emergency use of all the stuff and lived long enough to reproduce. Perhaps we are all just desperate magpies, seeking to bedazzle our nests and attract a mate. Then again, it may be rooted more emotionally, and collecting satisfies whatever longing for stability and freedom, for a bit of the world to (anthropocentrically) own, or for the knowledge and learning. It can be a way to ground a floating sense of self in this great big world, or to fill a less concrete, psychological gap. As Mark B. McKinley says, “one does not eat just because of hunger.” And there’s the idea that collecting is fundamentally a nostalgic hobby, that traces back to childhood interests and games. There’s also a social aspect to collecting. It’s common practice to go to swap meets and interact with like-minded souls, simultaneously gathering friends and contacts. Some people love collecting things because the thrill of chasing down obscure items is addicting, only it’s time and effort that’s gambled. From an existentially anxious perspective, when a collector passes on, they can donate their collections to a museum to enhance public learning, extending the impact of the deceased collector. As the world has increasingly become oversaturated with consumer goods, the scope of what can be collected has expanded exponentially as well. Two extremes of a reaction: hoarding and minimalism. Hoarding abnormalities can be diagnosed as a deviation of behavior that interferes with daily life, often involving, “gross interference with the lives of others, even leading to enforcement issues” (McKinley). Whereas a collector will have something like reverence to all the things they accumulate, a hoarder will more likely pile stacks of broken or meaningless things onto each other and become defensive or aggressive when threatened with the thought of getting rid of any. Cases of compulsive hoarding are closely associated with compulsive buying and major depression, which could give some insight to the motivating factors behind such extreme collecting. Unfortunately, hoarding can also dip into pathology and the macabre connections between collecting objects to collecting animals or human lives. On the flip side, the ideals behind minimalism press for reducing material possessions to the bare necessities and a few intensely treasured objects. It offers respite from the extreme worth we associate to too many things and to accumulating too many things, a way to seek satisfaction by being more mindful of meaningless desire. But take this to the extreme and problems like obsessive behavior emerge or the fixation on removing clutter makes the fixation on material objects neurotic. We collect to survive, to learn, to connect. And we collect to remember surviving, learning, and connecting. Citations“Why Do We Collect Things - The Intelligent Collector.” Heritage Auctions, www.ha.com/intelligent-collector/why-do-we-collect-things.s?article=collect. Jarrett, Christian. “Why Do We Collect Things? Love, Anxiety or Desire.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 9 Nov. 2014, www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/nov/09/why-do-we-collect-things-love-anxiety-or-desire. “Collections Are Objects of Desire.” The New York Times, The New York Times, www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/12/29/why-we-collect-stuff/collections-are-objects-of-desire. “The Problem with Using Psychology to Explain Collecting.” ZME Science, 5 Sept. 2017, www.zmescience.com/other/feature-post/problem-using-psychology-explain-collecting/. “What Is Minimalism?” The Minimalists, www.theminimalists.com/minimalism/. “Mnmlist: Minimalist FAQs.” Mnmlist RSS, mnmlist.com/minimalist-faqs/. Suggested ReadingsHill, Graham. “Living With Less. A Lot Less.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 9 Mar. 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/opinion/sunday/living-with-less-a-lot-less.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
McKinley, Mark B. “The Psychology of Collecting.” The National Psychologist, 1 Jan. 2007, nationalpsychologist.com/2007/01/the-psychology-of-collecting/10904.htm.
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