In 1985, at the age of eleven, I bought my first comic book: The Transformers #9. From there, I went on to collect nearly a thousand comics over my teenage years, mostly in the Marvel universe like Spider-Man and X-men. Lots of Groo the Wanderer (which my mom always enjoyed) and then into stuff like Watchmen and The Sandman. Bill Sienkiewicz was one of my favourite artists with his work on The New Mutants, Stray Toasters, The Shadow, and Dazzler.
About a decade ago, I got into whisky. What started with a few bottles of Balvenie slowly grew into a 200+ bottle collection. Then over the pandemic, I got into cocktails and my cupboards burgeoned with amari and liqueurs.
I’ve noticed this pattern where I feel the need to “collect them all”. It’s by no means limited to physical things, either. Pokemon Go was addictive for a hot minute, I tell yah. At one point, I had collected everything in The Simpsons: Tapped Out. And then they’d release more things. I spent every day going into the app to complete all the daily tasks. Until one day I tapped out. I deleted the app and never went back in.
Same thing happened in Pokemon Go. A raid was happening nearby and I considered getting in my car to participate. That’s when it hit me that it was time to stop. Boom. App gone. Never went back in.
I always hit a point where I stop. I got rid of all my comics. I stopped playing Pokemon Go. I stopped buying whisky. I reach a stage where I realize that the collecting is unsustainable.
Last year, I considered getting into vinyl. The idea of popping a record onto the player and chilling in my lounge chair had plenty of appeal until I considered the logistics. Knowing myself, I didn’t want to suddenly have boxes and boxes of records on my shelves. No record player was purchased that day. Or since. I can sit in my lounge chair and listen to a streaming service just as easily.
(I recognize that there is a perfectly reasonable middle ground where I only purchase a handful of records and play those on repeat, instead of building a huge collection. There were other reasons I talked myself out of a record player.)
That’s not to say that I don’t have that completionist streak still in me. Nor that I’m not willing to spend lots of money on the various quests to complete things. My restaurant adventures are a testament to that. It is handy, for me at least, to be able to know when a goal is no longer serving its purpose and to be okay with moving on to new things.
Postscript: When I originally started writing this post—much of which was written last year—it was with the intention of recognizing my own habit of “collecting”. It is amusing me to have just written that last line and realize that I seem to be having a recent theme of endings and beginnings.
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