When Does Collecting Become Overconsumption?
Collecting and consumerism is a fine line that people can't seem to tell when they've crossed it until they've already overshot it. People have been collecting trinkets and memorabilia since we invented fire. However, in the era of late-stage capitalism, we've kinda hit a point of absurd excess.
You've seen the trends online. If you haven't, I gotta ask you, how was your trip living with the Amish for the last 4+ years? Labubus are today what Beanie Babies were in the 90s. However the difference now is we have injected gambling culture into the mix with the upswing in mystery box toys like the aforementioned Labubus.
You'll have people going fucking ape shit over these $5 squishy bun surprise box things. Kids I can understand, but you've got adults doing this shit and often stepping over children to get their grubby mitts on whatever the latest tiktok trend is. Usually it's middle-aged, petite-bourgeois white women doing this kinda shit. Men got their own demons with Pokémon cards.
Some people collect these things just for the sake of collecting them and then throw them in a landfill/inundate a thrift store when the trend inevitably nosedives into a field, it's consumerism at it's highest.
I started to ask myself though, at what point does a collection go from a valid hobby to just becoming overconsumption? Or is collecting a valid hobby to begin with?
On reddit, where nuance goes to kill itself, you'll get a mix of responses that tend to either be incomplete, lacking any nuance, sexist, or classist. Why is a collection of Stanley cups aesthetic, but a collection of monster cans "trashy"? Why is a collection of Stanley cups consumerism, but not a collection of action figures? I thought I'd try and answer this myself.
I'm definitely biased here, I've been a collector for my entire life. I used to collect rocks when I was a kid, but now I have a pretty big collection of physical media and electronics. PCs, consoles, DVDs, games, books, vinyl records, etc. all make up this collection. Despite this, I will do my best to try and figure out where this line is.
So, is collecting a hobby? A hobby can be defined as something someone enjoys doing in their leisure time. So, by definition, if someone enjoys spending their leisure time curating items and managing/organizing/engaging with said items, collecting is a hobby.
So when does collecting just become consumerism/overconsumption? I think one of the biggest indicators is in why you're collecting. Are you collecting for the sake of showcasing this online? Or are you doing it for your own self-gratification. Are you doing it because it's a new trend? Or are you doing it because you genuinely love it?
Collections also come with sentimental/historical value. Something like coins or war memorabilia are a way of preserving history. Games also fit this mark as well as you're preserving gaming history and often times functionality as many games can only be played on certain hardware, or are particularly rare. People often will buy CRT TVs for their older games because if you use an LCD screen, pixel art gets screwed up. So there's that as well.
Another line you could draw would be in the "why" of each addition of your collection. Are you actually adding items to the collection that you actually care about? I think of people who collecting GameCube games for nothing more than just because they're the most expensive. They have zero personal nostalgia for it, and they barely play it. This would be considered consumerism to me. Alternatively, lets say you grew up playing games your whole life, and so you try and collect every game you had growing up? Or lets say you're collecting for a console that is your favorite, you're getting the classics that you loved and trying to find some harder to find gems.
I guess that brings out another indication, collections aren't just about buying things, it's about curation. You set standards for what you're willing to collect versus what you wont. You avoid duplicates, you ensure copies are in a certain condition. For much of my disk-based games, I ensure the game/case is in good shape, and it comes with a manual. I also only collect games that I love, or that are part of series that I love. I'm not gonna buy every 360 game, because there's a lot of low-effort sports games or Kinect games that I couldn't care less about. With music, I listen to the album for free online, if I like it I'll consider buying it on CD, if I LOVED it I'll buy it on Vinyl, if it's an all-time favorite I buy it on both CD and Vinyl.
Collections tend to say something about the curator, what does a collection of Stanley cups say about the person who collected them? They like cups or they hopped on a trend. With music, games, art, memorabilia you get a sense of that persons personality and interests (more than just I think this cup looks cool).
I grew up knowing people who collected Monster cans. What separates this from just collecting junk is usually how they collected it. Many only collected 1 of each can. Some people drank the contents of the can first, other people they didn't and would buy 1 to drink and 1 to collect (if it was a can design not in their collection). It starts to go into "junk" territory where you just have empty cans and don't actually care about the condition of them. The reason I consider this a valid collection is because often times people want to collect, but are dirt-fucking poor. So they collect something they can feasibly curate something they actually enjoy.
Collections also have a stopping point. At a certain point your collection is complete or at the very least you slow down your collecting. In the case of games, once you've collected every game you've played and loved as a kid, that's it the collection is done. Or often you just find yourself with no more space to dedicate, so you put a halt on your collecting. It goes into consumerism/hoarding territory when you keep going endlessly, space be damned. You see these people who have a massive "collection" of disposable products (like skin care or makeup) that they never use and then it expires and they just throw it all away for a tik tok.
Some people online drew a false equivalency between people who collected action figures and people who collect mystery box toys. Basically saying they're one in the same. I think this generally comes from a lack of knowledge of figurine collections. I'm not talking about Funko Pops, those are beanie babies for nerdy millennials. I'm talking things like Gundams and articulated figurines. What separates these figurines from something like Funko Pops is that with Funkos they basically follow this exact same mold, same cheap plastic style for the sake of mass production (same as the mystery box toys). The figurines people collect, in my eyes, are basically like art. They use a higher quality plastic, there's higher levels of detail to each figurines, there's often impressive levels of articulation in the joints. In the case of Gundams and Legos, you have to build these things yourself. There's also the types of people who collect figurines that have been discontinued. I think of the star wars toys from like the 80s, this can pull on both historic preservation/sentimental value if that person grew up with those toys. These toys have often long-since been discontinued so now there's an actual rarity rather than some artificial rarity. This might be another point of my bias, because I've wanted to collect those Halo McFarlane toys that were released for Halo 2/3/Reach. Yeah they were $10 each on launch, but they don't make them anymore and they're getting increasingly expensive and rarer to find.
I think the male equivalent to the mystery box trend (which is often centered around women and girls) is 3D printing. Basically spending hundreds of dollars for cheap plastic knick-knacks that are basically meant to be enjoyed as a novelty and then thrown away.
I try to avoid making this a battle of the sexes type thing, because both are bad in different ways when it comes to consumerism, but one gets far more heat than the other. You'll have women with an immense shoe collection and scoff, for obvious reasons. But when the shoe is on the other foot bad dum tss, you get the sneaker head who gets 0 flack for it, and often gets praised. And I think that's bullshit.
Anyway, the long short of it, there isn't really any one solid thing that makes a collection a hobby vs. consumerism. It kinda comes down to the individual's reasoning behind it and how they maintain the hobby. Ask yourself, am I collecting this because I'm passionate about it? Or am i just collecting for the sake of collecting.
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as of writing this...
I'm watching the movie Twister at work. This movie is supposed to be a thriller, but in the first few minutes I was already laughing at the dad getting carried away by the tornado. "I CAN'T HOLD ON ANY LONGER!", THEN LET GO YOU MORON! Don't even know why he tried to keep the door closed to begin with, the family seemed pretty safe after the tornado ripped the door off and taking his ass to Oz.