Rebooting Life, pt 2 - Collecting

By nature, I'm a bit of a hoarder. I'm not like bad or anything like on those terrible reality programs. But I collect things, and I have some things that I hold onto for sentimental reasons. I do tend to go through a purge every year or two where I just go through and get rid of 10-15% of all my things. I go through the closet and just toss stuff at will. But specifically, I collect a lot of games, a lot of movies, and I have a spattering of other things that I like to have as well like a few vinyls and what not.

I take pride in my game collection. For this site, I have been starting to transition my database of what I own to google sheets, I used to have a subscription to another program, but in an effort to lower my costs a little bit so that I can pay off remaining loans faster, I decided to try to make a somewhat presentable Sheets collection. It is easier to share out here that way.

But in all, I own about 600 physical copies of Switch games. That is by far my largest console collection. Most other consoles have around 30-40 titles in it. I have a bedroom dedicated to just storing video games, not even really the consoles, though I do have some Game Boys and mini-consoles on display as well. I use mostly the tall narrow IKEA Billys, which my Switch games takes 4 full units by itself while the rest of my games take about 5. And it keeps growing... in fact, earlier this year, I added another tall Billy for Switch games and then promptly filled it up as well. I actually just filled out the last shelf available to it this last weekend (there's still some space, but not a ton).

In my recent desire to figure out a way to retire earlier because, well I need to, the collecting aspect of my life has taken a hard look. I had been saying this year that I needed to cut down my titles by like 10%, and I have sold off a good maybe 20 games this year for the switch without rebuying those games, that's a big deal for me. But my buying is far out pacing the selling. I think I need to re-think how I do this... I was thinking that instead, I should really consider dropping down my total switch games to 300-350. That's a sizable drop in numbers.

So my goal is kinda to go through, catalog what I have in my game and movie collections and then create attainable limits to those collections. So if I stick with the 300 game limit for Switch, if a game comes out that I really want to have, I need to find a game in my current collection to let go of as a trade off so that I continue at 300. This would make it much less likely for me to buy new games because I'd have to take a harder look at whether I want it more than my other games, but the sell off of half of my collection would also get me some of my money back. I am sure it wouldn't be hard and fast rule and at some point it'd slowly tick up, but as long as I keep it down and make it more difficult for me to get new stuff, I think I'm fine with a slower crawl. Plus, for the Switch in particular, I think I need somewhere to put Switch 2 games so it'd make sense if I did 300 of each.

I would also kinda wanna do the same across other systems, though I'm less worried about those. I tend to be pickier and there's less to choose from in the older consoles. Part of the problem with the Switch is that it has all the old games being ported, and I kinda wanna have all the best games available for me to play on the system. I mean there aren't a ton of other systems that I can go and pick up Mario 64, Skyward Sword, Final Fantasy IV, Finaly Fantasy VII, Dragon Quest III, and Smash Brothers Ultimate all on the same system. That being said, there probably is still some effort that could be spent to make sure that other systems have games that I actually want, just less emphasis on getting to X number. I think the biggest opportunity for scaleback is PS4 and PS5 which have tended to build up to.

Games aren't the only places that I need to prune. My book and movie shelves have gotten to be huge and here, I am a little more torn. Eventually, I want to get a NAS going in my household to play all my movies off of. Once I get everything ripped and put on the server, I do think I'm going to want to pare down my movie collection to only keep the absolute necessary. Books on the other hand... what do I do with my book collection? Most of them I actually want to hold onto. I did decide over the weekend that there were a few that I could part with because I really didn't like the trilogy but for the most part I want to keep them all, there's not much trimming I can do there so it is just going to continue to grow I guess.

Another collection that I need to strongly consider is my CD collection. This one is stranger honestly. I haven't really bought a CD for... probably 6 or 7 years at this point. I have lately gotten in the habit of buying Vinyl, but I rarely buy new music on Vinyl, it's usually older stuff. I do sort of have the desire to hold onto my CD collection... because I don't believe in digital "ownership." But I also never listen to CDs anymore. This is especially true now that my new car doesn't even have a CD player. I believe all my CDs have been preiously ripped, though I wouldn't mind a second rip just verify that the quality is up to snuff, but it's all there. I don't even really listen to the ripped songs lol. Now granted, I again don't have a NAS set up soI don't have a particularly intuitive method of listening to my ripped songs. Honestly, I should probably just bite the big one and sell off my collection.

Getting the collections under control by giving myself hard limits on how much I can collect, I think, will help my long term goals of retirement. I do think that I've fallen into collecting everything traps too much and I think can do better. Further, ditching half my Switch collection should allow me to re-invest that money into either my retirement or getting my house redone so that I can just be overall happier in life. I like collectiong, obviously, but I need to figure out how to split the short-term happiness of having a bigger collection with the longer-term happiness of a nice house and not having to work. But I think I can get there