You Ever Get Tired of This?

Damien said:
I JUST had to close the entire browser window because ToySnowman has a bunch of stuff I want on sale and I had like 120 bucks' worth of figures in my cart and I just said 'NO, if I really wanted these I'd already have them. A sale is not a reason.' And I'm HOPING I stick to that, but I am also terribly weak.
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Relatable. I kept looking at Transformers Magmatron the other night on Pulse because he just looks so fun. I barely collect TFs, I don't generally buy beast TFs, and yet, I needed Magmatron. Had to add $20 worth of crap on top to get free shipping. Now I have $96 worth of toys in my cart of stuff that I've passed on multiple times in the past. I decided against it, but I still kept looking at my cart every half hour or so, until he sold out and I felt sad. But at least that weight was lifting without spending the ninety dollars.
 
I get into an existential crisis like, every eight weeks or so with collecting, but I've mentioned on here a few times that I started collecting relatively late in life and lost all my childhood/nostalgic stuff in a fire so I'm only really feeling it for the first time.

Lately, it's been Marvel reissues that are getting to me, and the volume/speed of release. Classified gives me anxiety but only because I have more stuff than I can display well and I love it all. I look at my Star Wars Black Series collection and I fret a little bit about it, but I'm getting a very manageable number of figures a year now so I'm less upset. I've got about 15 McFarlane DC figures more than I should have bought and they're all Batman. I had JUST hit my "stoppit, you are wasting money" stage when I slowed down on MOTU and I broke myself of needing to preorder everything. But yeah, I feel a rising panic every so often.

I dunno, it's funny, I don't have more than I want yet in a VOLUME way, but, like, it stresses me out that I can't enjoy it as much as I want to. I feel the same way about the board games and minis I have. I love them. They make for a beautiful collection. I will die before I get to play all those games. I will probably die before I have a house big enough to properly display my Jedi.

Then again I also have a half-dozen Lego sets I bought because Lego appreciates faster than gold and I didn't want to regret not having them, and I've told my partner if she ever sees me building them I've probably been diagnosed with a terminal illness and haven't told her yet.
 
I was in my storage unit (1 of the 2, that's the first problem) putting some stuff away, and moving bins and boxes around, and realized AGAIN that I REALLY need to thin out this stuff. I have SO MUCH just sitting in storage that I could donate or make some money on, but I just need to buckle down and start going through it.

I don't have a problem selling stuff. I've sold a bunch on eBay, and when the local community college had a yearly "yard sale" event, I always got a space or 2 and sold stuff well below eBay prices to clear it out.

The last 4 years of my work schedule made trying to actually go through stuff to organize and then list it, let alone get it to the post office to ship it out made me lax in that regard, so things just started piling up and then getting boxed in random boxes.

I need to really sit down and figure out exactly WHAT I want to keep, and what I want to get rid of. I already have a small batch of things for donation; some Fortnite figures I bought when the hype was high (and I had wild ideas of adding them to other displays) and a few random basic WWE figures that wouldn't be worth selling once shipping is factored in.

Then I have a box started with figures to sell, including some Marvel and McFarlane DC figures I got when I was caught in the hype of 'Metal' and Todd starting the line. I have no real attachment to a lot of those characters, so most of those can go.

My Hasbro ML collection should really be a mix of Spiderman related characters, and a small set of X-Men and broader Marvel universe. I don't need a vast spread of the MU. Hell, I've already sold most of the MCU figures I'd had, and only ended up with some others because they came with a random BAF part for a character I wanted.

The biggest purge I see coming is WWE figures. I have been collecting the Mattel line since the beginning, and I have A LOT. Granted (thanfully), I was never a completist, but I did grab multiple versions of certain wrestlers as new versions got made. I've sold a good chunk of my 80s WWF era figures already, but there are still more that can go. I have the first elite ring and cage, which I'm wrestling with (heh) whether I want to keep or not. I definitely don't have the display space for it right now, but in my ideal collection room, I would be able to have it set up with some figures in it, and have the rest displayed around it in some manner.

Like @docsilence , I have a bunch of brick sets (some LEGO, some Lumibricks), that I got because I loved reviews of them (and a bunch were on sale at different points) and would love to have a small city block display of them all put together at some point. At the moment though, they're all in a number of large totes in storage.

My father in law passed away 20 years ago and left us with a mess of a house to clean out, and I know I essentially have the same issue, but mine isn't filled with old newspapers, busted electronics, expired cans of food or decades of old mail, but it IS a problem that I realize I have, and need to address now, especially as my wife and I are trying to look for a house.
 
Damien said:
I JUST had to close the entire browser window because ToySnowman has a bunch of stuff I want on sale and I had like 120 bucks' worth of figures in my cart and I just said 'NO, if I really wanted these I'd already have them. A sale is not a reason.' And I'm HOPING I stick to that, but I am also terribly weak.
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This is one of the few aspects of collecting I’ve managed to get under control and keep under control. Even when I tell myself ahead of time that I’m going to play the long game, I rarely, if ever, follow through when the opportunity presents itself.

That’s not to say that I don’t miss bargain hunting for figures, but I miss it the same way that I miss having ice cream in the freezer. I wish I could have ice cream in the freezer AND keep the 30 pounds I lost this year off, but it doesn’t work that way, at least not for me.
 
My biggest turn around was learning that it's ok to miss out on something. If I missed out, I miss out. And I try to equate value not necessarily with how much I spent on it, but how much fun did I have with it. I've thinned my collection and sold off some stuff, a lot of it was probably under what I could have got for it. But I figured, I had that thing for a few years, I'm sure I got $15.99 worth of fun out of it so it's time to let it go.
 
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