What Makes People Collect Things? | Hacker News Reader

What Makes People Collect Things?

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I wasn't into collecting, until I got a really cool list comprehension macro at someone's garage sale. Now stuff is just piling up around me.

100% guilty of this...

I had 1 - and I was happy. It was nice. It was my favorite thing.

Then I got a 2nd one. Suddenly, I needed more. I needed them all. It felt like Pokemon.

Now I have over 160 of them. Oh god help me...

Knowing not to own 2 of things to avoid collecting more things is nice. It's strange that it seems to only require 2 of some 'thing' to create an urge for a collection. I'll need to start throwing more things out. Pick my favorite of the two and give the other away.

What is the 'them' in this case? Just curious.

porns

Icons on his desktop.

True story.

Videos one of my favorite YouTubers.

I downloaded my favorite one. Then I downloaded another funny one. Now I have an archive of their entire channel.

I saw an episode of Horders on T.V.. The psychologist and team went to this older gentleman's home and talked him into throwing away his book collection. He mentioned a lot of the books were 1st editions. Know one payed attention to the "crazy" old man.

At the end of the show, one of the hosts was surprised all the books were taken out dumptster by some other crazy Horder.

I can relate. My mother hoards old magazines thinking someday she will need the information in them. She hoards magazines, reader's digest books, you name it.

Before my father died, he kept her in check. Throwing piles of old news papers out. Growing up it was a common scene to hear her yell at him that he threw something out she needed.

My mother use to write a news letter for a government agency. She is a very good, articulate writer. She is so good that one time I was suffering through a creative writing college course, came home got some help from my mom, and the college professor told me I had a career in journalism if I didn't like engineering. It was a family joke for many years.

I have a little bit of this myself. My wife yells at me to get rid of things. History repeats itself... I take broken electronics apart for their parts. Kids toys break, toy gets put on my work bench. I eventually get around to taking it apart to harvest parts like LCD panels, MMC slots, etc...

I'm getting better. I realize some when I blow dust off of it, it's time to throw out.

I think it's a mental thought process that what you have has some value to you. Not like value as in it is worth something to someone else but a cost saving thing. I would rather use a harvested MMC or LED than go to Digikey and buy a bag of them and wait a day or few for it to arrive. The value is in having instant access to it while on a project. At least that is how it is for me.

I've got the instinct to hoard - particularly when it comes to electronics. Most recent example of the condition for me: I had a bag of old wine bottle corks gathered maybe 15 years ago, boxed away. I needed a stopper and one of those corks fitted the bill perfectly. Perhaps that's just reinforcing unhealthy behaviours??

In part for me it's about waste - it pains me to throw away plastic (for example) knowing that it came from a finite resource and had so many different inputs. There's so little effort made to recycle - I swear that within a century or two we're going to be mining old landfill sites.

People throw out TVs when the power button fails, throw out whole computer base-stations (aka towers) when a HDD fails, scrap cars that just need new piston rings ... as a society we seem particularly bad at addressing these things; corporations move ever more to accelerate [the appearance of] obsolescence. To encourage the throw-away society.

I wonder if there's not a structure that can be used to gather in and warehouse, for example electronics, and make them available without cost - maybe using something like prisoner labour. It definitely doesn't seem to be immediately financially sustainable to (for example) gather in all the working components from household goods. A second-hand washing machine controller might cost £100 for an old machine, commercially; when in reality it's just saved from someone's scrap. Given a new machine can be had for £200, it's not financially valid. But that scrapped controller can give 12 months more service to a complete machine - how can we engineer in a greater value to repair and recycling than the immediate financial saving/cost? Should we?

Another psychological bias exploitable by Free To Play games?

As an added bonus, if items A..E can be randomly obtained on equal probability, getting the last item is harder then instinct suggest. Thus, "Complete Gacha" lead to 1k $ spends.

I collect things. I regard it as a mental OCD defect and try hard not to add to them. Sometimes I have been able to dispose of one or another collection, and have never regretted it.

For anyone thinking of starting a collection, I suggest not picking heavy ones.

I collect heavy, hard to move things like cars and pinball machines, and my life would be a lot simpler if it was stamps.

Explains my Amiibo addiction.

Does this work for spouses?

>April 1, 2015

"People are more likely to build a collection of something once they possess two of them."

Really? Did they spend a lot of time studying that?

Research isn't just about finding new and unintuitive effects, its also about scientifically confirming and measuring what we know - or think we know - intuitively.

After reading that, through a great deal of time and effort I discovered the corollary to that, which is people who own a first item are 50% more likely to acquire a second item.

Why, did you knew beforehand what the most common "tipping point" was for collecting stuff?

If anything, 2 is quite surprising.

Think of the flip side: you have two of a thing. You have three options:

1. Eliminate one from your possession by selling, gifting or trashing it. 2. Just have two of a thing. 3. Get a third, and call it a collection.

The research implies that few people like option 2, and prefer option 3 to option 1.

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