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What Is The Collecting Mindset? · Gwern.net

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The activity of manufactured collecting is puzzling; what explains the enormous resources spent on what is, by and large, neither lucrative, prestigious, nor entertaining? Is it just a misfire and quirk of human psychology poorly adapted to industrial society where ‘collectibles’ can be varied and marketed 24/7/365? W hat is the “collecting mentality”? Is it a dimension of which hoarding is the extreme? When I was a kid, I went through a collecting phase with Pokemon cards, and to a lesser extent, Neopets; many of my peers were instead obsessed with Magic: The Gathering, Warhammer, Runescape etc. At the time, it made perfect sense to me to obsess over how to get a shiny Charizard (and to my classmates, to the point where the principal had to ban cards in school); but eventually it sort of wore off, I stopped walking 2 miles to the local card shop to check if there were any booster packs, the album of cards gathered dust, and when my Neopets account was banned for overly-aggressive stoc

--- title: "What Is The Collecting Mindset?" description: "The activity of manufactured collecting is puzzling; what explains the enormous resources spent on what is, by and large, neither lucrative, prestigious, nor entertaining? Is it just a misfire and quirk of human psychology poorly adapted to industrial society where 'collectibles' can be varied and marketed 24/7/365?" created: 2021-03-31 modified: 2022-02-25 status: in progress confidence: possible importance: 3 css-extension: dropcaps-de-zs ... What is the "collecting mentality"? Is it a dimension of which hoarding is the extreme? When

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