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Collector Psychology
Why we save all this junk We have a psychological need to collect, and there are several types of collectors.
Before you say you don’t collect things, think again. If you have coordinated your home décor you have collected. You had to search for just the right colours, furniture and accessories to bring your world to the place where you are in comfort. Finding just the right piece brought a sense of accomplishment and triumph. The same needs are experienced and met by those who collect bottle caps.
If your spouse wants to know what you want that junk for, tell them you can’t help it. You’re a human being and we are all hard wired to collect. Their stuff serves the same purpose for them so get with the program.
What we collect varies considerably, but it all serves the same purpose, maybe not for the same reasons.
Collectors fall into 5 recognized categories. The Historical, the Compulsive, the Investor, the Accidental, and the Victim. These categories can be subdivided into numerous sub-groups. From where does this primordial need stem? Go back to the cave. We needed to collect to survive. Men hunted and brought their prey back to the fire. Women gathered and hoarded their treasures for sustenance and healing. They collected stories around that fire to preserve their accumulated knowledge to preserve themselves and their offspring.
Let’s look at the Historical collector. It is their mission to preserve the past. Who’s past?
We can easily identify the preserver of the historical past, those who teach us who and where we came from. Museums are packed with our physical history and libraries are full of our collections of knowledge. Been to a museum lately? It can be awe inspiring and humbling.
Most of us don’t collect to preserve the distant past, but to ground ourselves in our heritage. Many immigrants came to our local area with very little in the way of possessions. They did bring their culture and after establishing themselves began to collect and decorate their lives with things that were familiar from their past lives. You can walk into many homes and know immediately their family came from an identifiable area in Europe. Even their recipe box is a collection of family and cultural history. We need the comfort of being able to identify ourselves. We need to prove that our grandparents and parents were people who mattered to this world, that they made it through a war, the Depression. What they left us reminds us that they did their best to give us a better life. Things as mundane as their dishes can be of value to several types of collectors. A true treasure for someone to find that appreciates the esoteric value of century old china. A collection does not have to be a series of one particular type of item. An historical collector can be recreating his personal past. Toys from our childhood invoke many memories, good and bad. It’s nice to find something just like we had as a kid. It can be even better to finally find something we wish we’d had. We can make our life seem a little better by having it now.. We could show off with the best six-shooters and envy the kid with the pedal car. Your dad couldn’t afford a pedal car, but maybe you can now. As a child we comforted ourselves with teddies and blankets. Teddies can bring a lot of comfort to us as adults and fill a void in our psyche created by a world dedicated to change and uncertainty. The past we preserve doesn’t have to be our own. Last week I sold a young man a milk sled. He had no idea what he was looking at. A beat-up, worn looking old sled with a hemp rope tied to the front. It was much repaired and too heavy to be a toy. Remember when farmers brought their milk cans up to the road to be picked up by the dairy? In winter they dragged them on a sled designed to hold 3 or 4 cans. I remember the cans sitting at the end of the lane waiting to be replaced with empties for tomorrow’s milking.
This man is young enough to repeat this history and will keep a piece of our past alive. Did you realize your saving and collecting could be a vital part of history?
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Contributor's Note
This coffee set was saved in a basement for 15 years since her mom died. She had been told as a child that it was a cheap knock off of Blue Willow and not worth much. The Tea and Coffee service is Royal Crown Derby and now sells for $350.00,
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The Mikado, Gilbert & Sullivan operetta
a coffee set client thought was worthless
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