We’re all collectors in one fashion or another. What we collect is guided by personal preference and nuance. How much we collect is determined by wealth and mental health. Billionaires collect Bugatti’s and politicians. Middle class people collect sports memorabilia and comic books. Hoarders collect old magazines, broken blenders and sometimes cats.
But all of them are collecting.
I suppose it’s inevitable that over the course of a lifetime that a person would accumulate some things. Once you have a large enough accumulation of similar items then you have a collection, and that makes damned near every air breathing human a collector of some sort.
Most of the time, the collection and the desire to collect are harmless enough that we call it a hobby. But, every now and then one of the collectors wanders into absurdity and decides that nothing can be thrown away because all of their things are the precious. On a scale of mental from one to ten I think this lunacy is about a three until their shit starts to attract rats or overflows into the neighbors yard. Then the derangement is maybe a four with the distinct possibility that the health department is coming for a visit followed by a shitpile of dumpsters and an A&E film crew.
Comparatively speaking, the citizens of the West are wealthy and it appears we have a minor mental imbalance, that we call clutter or hoarding lite. Clutter is to hoarding as marijuana is to heroin I think. Kind of a gateway drug. If I understand it correctly, there are two methods to solving clutter. You either throw shit away or you acquire more space to store your stuff. That’s why we have storage units, garages, sheds and big Tupperware totes.
Because people hate throwing away functional stuff. You never know when you’re going to need it is solid logic and I find the thought perfectly understandable. However, the decision over whether any item may be needed in the future is pretty subjective and everyone is bound to have their own opinion on the value of a possession. As a result, our struggle to define utile is often futile and that indecision creates clutter.
And clutter isn’t a collection. Because there’s no sense of order, and you’re not considering a cabinet with some nice lighting to display what you’ve accumulated.
Some woman in America actually wrote a book that proposes a solution to the clutter dilemma. She thinks that if you hold an item in your hands and if that item brings you joy then you keep it. No joy and you throw it away. I’ve got to admit that when I first read her solution that I laughed, and immediately thought she was some entitled twat that had never had to save for a rainy day. After some reflection I decided that she was an entitled twat who had never had to save for a rainy day.
I have a drain snake. It brings me no joy but I’m not going to throw it away because at some point I’m going to need the fucking thing. I’m going to need it because a toilet or sink pipe is clogged with something disgusting, and I’m not inclined to throw five hundred dollars at a plumber when I can solve the problem myself. After I clean the shit off me I can maybe think about spending the saved money on something that brings me joy.
In defense of this woman and her theory, it could be argued that once the drain is clear that I no longer have drain backup anxiety and that’s joyful. But being able to flush the toilet without poop spilling on the floor is not joy so much as it’s relief.
And so my sewer snake is useful and I’m not going to dispose of it regardless of the fact that it brings me no joy to hold it in my rubber gloved hands.
I think that people experience pleasure from having lots of things in their possession. Sometimes the quality of those items brings joy and sometimes the quantity of those things brings joy. I remember my father had a shirt with a stenciled saying that read, the person with the most toys when they die wins. Everyone thought the shirt was cute because my father liked having more than one of the same thing. Tools for the most part. Also he very much disliked throwing things away. I think that the positive reaction people had to his t-shirt was based on the concept that all of us agree that there’s a competition going on and that we’re all participants. An abundance of things means you’ve been successful I guess. I noticed that after he passed away that a group of people who were aware of his inventory started hanging around like Canadian pickers waiting to see if my mother was going to throw or give anything away.
They were the serious competitors, and I think about half of them were capable of helping themselves if no one had been looking. Some of them convinced themselves they had claim because as they would tell my mother, my father would have wanted them to have a particular item. Whatever tactic they employed aside, they were still competing to add to their collection.
Everyone collects things, but some people are equally interested in collecting information.
The three best examples of information collectors in the Western world are Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs. I’m not convinced that any of the trio knew in the beginning that they were in the information collection business. They may have thought naively that they were selling operating systems, phones and electronic gossip capability. But in no time and with the help of tracking software, cookies, and algorisms they all realized that the money was going to be made in the harvesting and selling of information.
Your personal information, and most importantly, your collection tendencies. Bill, Mark and Steve are at the top of the heap as far as the collectors of information go, at least in the visible realm. I have no doubt that the Chinese, Russian and American governments are relatively adept at information harvesting as well, but they tend to be subtle. They want the information, but they prefer you remain unaware that they know all sorts of shit about you.
Billy and the boys are the pro’s, but amateur information collectors abound. These people are everywhere and they have a commonality with Mark and Steve in that they want the information for their own personal use, and ultimately their own personal gain. This gain isn’t necessarily monetary, but the adage that knowledge is power rings true for them even if they’re not aware enough to decipher their own motives.
Basically these people are nosy fuckers. They will always find a way to scroll through their laundry list of questions each time you encounter them. They have no real interest in how your family is doing but they will ask the question regardless just to see if they can acquire some information that might be useful to them later. These people are fond of bad news. They generally don’t give a shit if everyone in the family is doing well. They want the dirt so that they can store it away and then bring it up when the time is right when they can cause the most damage.
I’m not sure why these collectors behave this way. I think that it makes them feel superior when they can humiliate or embarrass their competitors with some nasty gossip that they gleaned under the guise of giving a shit about you. But, whatever their motives, you have to be careful to not feed these trolls. When confronted with a troll interrogation you need to firmly declare that everything and everyone in your immediate circle of family and friends are doing spectacularly well. Collector trolls hate that shit and will soon tire of good news and make an excuse to move along to their next information source.
I should add that these dirt collectors fucking love the Facebook. In the old days they had to work the phones or mingle with people, but now they can amass voluminous amounts of shit by friending you on Fakebook. Flakebook even supplies the collector with images they can use so they don’t even have to read.
I think that over the course of time I’ve learned to identify the garbage collectors and treat them accordingly. What that means is not leaving any of your garbage out when they’re around to collect it. Learning this skill has brought me much more joy than a sewer snake.
I think that it’s well within the realm of possibilities that acquiring this ability would also bring you joy.