Hobbies, Greed, and Seriousness

As a kid, I used to collect all sorts of things at different times. Card collecting was a big deal. There were baseball cards, football cards, three different brands of Beatles cards, Monkees cards, Outer Limits cards, Addams Family cards, Batman cards, elephant joke cards, and so on. I would collect them by walking down to the nearby U-Totem convenience store on the weekend and buying them one pack at a time, complete with the obligatory piece of chewing gum. During school, my friends and I would bring our cards, show them off, and make trades. There were some kids with meager collections while others had pretty impressive collections. Whatever the size, though, we all were gradually building our respective card collections up, looking at the gaps of cards we were missing and hoping that the next pack we bought contained one or more of them. This was what made the hobby fun, aside from enjoying looking at the cards. This fulfilling process of gradually building up a collection carries on to other things, like stamps, rocks and minerals, coins, or anything else within the scope of one's imagination. But the idea of being in competition with others to see who has the best and biggest collection, if not controlled, inflates and distorts the greed factor in these hobbies. This builds up demands that certain companies have cropped up to satisfy: stamp, coin, gems, rocks and minerals, and trading cards can now be bought by the bulk or by the individual piece, making collecting them too easy and, in my opinion, defeating the whole point of it all. Why, now you can buy complete collections of baseball cards if you have the money to spill out for them. And the new packs don't even have chewing gum!

Since these hobbies generally have their origins in childhood, and children generally are limited in how much they can spend on them, during this time they usually regulate themselves and don't grow out of control. And still the children may be giving their hobbies top priority in their personal spending. When these children grow up, then as adults, if they want to continue their hobbies, they reach a fork in the road. Either they continue all-out spending and end up amassing huge collections, or they place their own limits as to how much they will emphasize these hobbies in their lives. Those who choose the first route can rationalize their extravagance by deeming it to be a good financial investment or by using it as a way to give them a greater sense of social identity within certain groups. The problem I have is, if I were to start collecting something--say, stamps, and then hooked up with other adults in a stamp collecting club, then I'd be surrounded by the fanatics who spend large sums on their hobby. But what if I just want to recreate a sense of the social camaraderie of my childhood and gradually build a collection and share it others who collect their stamps within the same levels of self-imposed boundaries? I don't know if this is really possible, for it seems that in any hobby that adults engage in, be it collecting, bicycling, photography, amateur radio, camping, fishing, running, or anything else, the push is for the participants to compete with their fellow enthusiasts to see who can spend the most and have the most to show off, both in terms of equipment and experiences. This is called being "serious" with a hobby. And if you don't go all out like the others in pursuing it, that means that you aren't "serious", and therefore aren't to be taken seriously in their company. So the enthusiast with more humble aims finds himself more isolated in his pursuits. I find that regrettable.