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Keeping Your Obsessions Safe

Raggamuffin

Well-Known Member
V.I.P Member
Are you highly protective of your interest/obsessions?

I suppose it stands to reason that anything you invest a lot of time and effort in would be considered extremely precious.

Has anyone ever lost their collection? How did you cope? Did you rebuild or move on?

I've lost my collection twice - which is music. Both times it felt like my world had ended, and I spent many frantic and anxious months afterwards working hard to recoup my losses and rebuild my collection.

Whilst we've been sorting stuff to go into storage I found 2 old hard drives and was over the moon - thinking I might find long lost music. I was disappointed when I found the drives nearly empty, but then it occurred to download a free disk recovery programme. A few hours later and I had over 500 songs that I'd lost for years. It was the happiest I had felt in a very long time.

I'm very critical about categorising the music into genres, and playlists. Whenever I would give people lifts, or have people over my house, I would spend hours fine tuning playlists which I felt would cater best to people.

If someone asks me what a song is however - I feel uneasy. Seems trivial, and egotistical to feel unhappy to share my music, seeing as it's a musicians intention to have their songs heard by all sorts of people.

Perhaps my emotions are just an extension of wanting to keep my obsession safe. I recall an old work employee I used to give lifts to would use a programme on her phone to find out what songs were playing whilst in the car. It literally felt like robbery to me. I was just glad so much of my music is so obscure that her phone programme wasn't able to identify them.

I buy all my music as I like to own it, rather than rely on streaming programmes. I've never enjoyed playlists by other people or things like Spotify which would presume other music I would enjoy. My approach has always been very manual, and involved tens of thousands of hours of searching and research to find my music. Each week I go through hundreds of new songs.

It's funny really - for such a big lover of music, I dislike most music I hear. I suppose it echoes a description a friend once gave to me:

"You're a very particular person."

Ed
 
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I may be strange for someone on the spectrum (or in general), but I don't hold any sentimental value to objects. I've given up everything that I've owned more times than I can count, and it doesn't bother me a bit. All the objects that I have given up, I've given to people who needed them, and maybe that's part of why. Another part is almost everything nowadays is replaceable in some shape or form, even your photos are normally uploaded somewhere. Yes, I guess this is kind of non-permanent (a sudden collapse of the internet would obliterate everything), but for now, everything we listen to, see, or upload somewhere is saved. From my perspective. If you hold sentimental value to objects, it would be an extremely different world, that I do not understand.

I do understand that in this, in general, I am a minority in most first world countries. I however in most cases have no understanding of what people go through when it comes to being attached to things. I guess its a sort of blessing.

I'm sorry to hear about your music, I love music, but it can be found everywhere, perhaps not categorized in the ways we would like it to be, or have to deal with ads, and so on. Everything is replaceable (nearly) and nothing is permanent (factually).
 
Speaking of sentimental value in objects - I'm glad that moving house will mean I can go back to my minimalist lifestyle. My car, my clothes, my staff, my art and photography stuff and a computer is all I will be travelling with when we sell this house.

I too have pondered what if the internet or electricity were to suddenly cease to exist. It had me considering physical copies of what I own - but I view that as needlessly wasting resources.

I've been really caught up in an existential crisis regarding humanities impact on the world and trying to minimise my footprint as much as possible.

I guess that's one of my real problems in life - I never focus on simple issues or solutions; I'm always lost in thought and feeling overshadowed by issues and situations I have no hope of solving. I've been told by numerous therapists that focusing on such things does me a great disservice.

I was barely into my teen years when I was anxiously trying to come to terms with my own mortality and constantly fretting about end of the world scenarios such as supervolanic eruptions, asteroid impacts and Carrington Event solar flares.

Probably a good thing that smartphones didn't exist when I was a child, otherwise I think I would've ended up even further down the rabbit hole if I had access to the internet.

Ed
 
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Aye, I'm protective of it. When it's actually possible to be. Which it sometimes isnt, depending on the interest.

Certain interests can be protected. My gaming hobbies and stuff like that. I dont let people touch my stuff, simple as that.

The other major interest/obsession... which I wont name here because it'll get me all agitated... could not be protected. All I'll say is, this accursed pandemic appeared and destroyed it. Even though I'm now fully vaccinated, the thing has not been restored and probably wont be for the foreseeable future. And what's worse, it might have been restored if the US wasnt filled with an absolutely astonishing amount of useless idiots who are dumber than stumps. With those losers keeping the whole thing rampaging... yeah.

So, the end effect was huge perpetual anger increase, and my already blazing hatred for most people was multiplied, probably permanently. Heck, I dont even use the word "people" anymore. If you were to listen to me in person, the word "people" has been entirely replaced by the word "idiots" to the point where it's automatic. "Too many people at the mall" is always "too many idiots at the mall". My loathing of the general public is REALLY obvious to anyone around me at this point. Amazingly, I have yet to smash anyone over the head with a chair.

And yeah, that's the effect that had.
 
Has anyone ever lost their collection? How did you cope? Did you rebuild or move on?
Yes, this very thing has happened to me. A hard drive with a large part of my music collection failed, and I hadn't managed to back up all of it. So not a total disaster, but lost a large part of my collection. It took a while to recuperate. Now I take care to back it up more regularly, but I also have physical copies of my most treasured albums, so unless there's a fire or flood in the house, I won't lose them.

I also make playlists - I DJed at a local bar a couple of times which was having a rock/prog rock night, actually enjoyed the whole experience, selecting the tracks and making the playlists.

Yes, I am protective - I spend a lot of time on my collection, so naturally I want to protect it. I don't use streaming services, either, except to discover new music. My collection consists of downloaded digital albums and physical copies, mostly CDs at this point. Just got 2 new items today :) I'm also entering my collection and rating albums on RYM, I listen to up to 10 albums per day.
It's funny really - for such a big lover of music, I dislike most music I hear.
I can relate to this. I don't like most current charts or pop music, I'm quite specific about what I'll listen to. When I ask people what music they like, they often say, I like all kinds of music. Or, I don't have any particular genre that I like. Not me, though - I have very definite things I like and don't like.
 
Yes. Unfortunately, my interest/obsession is historical in nature, so my collection is actually irreplaceable. I frequently feel that I am not good enough/able to adequately protect these items that I feel a real responsibility for.
 
That is why I memorize my obsession. With me always :)
 
I have a large vintage photo collection, and the vast majority of it is photos that are unique and one-of-a-kind... So they would not be able to be replaced - at least directly, but they are a physical object so less likely to be destroyed except by natural disaster

The digital photos I take myself (15 years of photos) are all stored on external hard drives plus whatever I can fit on my internal hard drive (at present about 6 years of photos)

I also have five years worth of film negatives stored in binders

Having said that, anything can happen... One friend of mine who is a true professional photographer - it's his job - had a house fire that destroyed virtually all of his photos and negatives... He is also a poet so would have lost most of that... But he has rebuilt his career with new material since then, and treasured anything that survived...
 
I lost the documentation for my gemstone collection because my mother thought it was a trash. Btw how could she think that a list in a closed box is a trash? I guess I'll never know. However, without it my collection was worth less because I have no documentation collected over the years. Thats why I stopped collecting and only now, after so many years, I come to the conclusion that I could come back collecting.
 
I am very protective of my interests, both physical ones (makeup and perfume Collection) and non physical ones (playlists, blogs, etc..) I never share my obsessions with anyone
 
I am more protective of my non physical obsessions. It feels very vulnerable to share things like that with anybody, partly because I have had people in my life in the past who, when I shared it with them it became less special somehow, perhaps because they didn't appreciate it or understand it so I don't really share them with others now.
For things that are physical, I have spent my entire adult life collecting books and refining my library. I don't know how it happened, but several of my prized books have gone missing over the years (I am very careful with them so I have no idea how this happened) so I now refuse to lend out my more rare/difficult to find or sentimental books, and even ask people not to touch a particular subsection of them, as they speak to me on a level far deeper than they would to anybody else and it seems to vulnerable to share them with others.
 
I guard my special interests with my life, but I guard my special disinterests even more so. I still cringe at all the times I tried to give up my collecting before I was diagnosed because it wasn't "normal". The people who say it's not normal are even cringier. Yesterday on reddit someone was saying how much they hated Funko Pop figures and what worthless pieces of plastic they were. Everyone but me agreed and I tried to reason with them but I probably got downvoted to the underworld. One even said they collected nfigures but hated Funko Pops and I wanted to know what was the difference. A lot of adults collect action figures but they don't touch or play with them, how is that different from people how is that different from "dust collectors" like Funkos? And one person said something about Pokemon cards but *they* got down voted.

I like Funko Pops I find them cute and I like having toys of characters from the cartoons and video games I grew up with like Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Ren and Stimpy, Betty Boop, Roger Rabbit, Tinkerbell, Malecifant, and The Simpsons. It's almost like they've been brought to life. I can hold them, touch them or even role play with them. How that can be bad even when you're an adult I do not know.
 
I lost the documentation for my gemstone collection because my mother thought it was a trash. Btw how could she think that a list in a closed box is a trash? I guess I'll never know. However, without it my collection was worth less because I have no documentation collected over the years. Thats why I stopped collecting and only now, after so many years, I come to the conclusion that I could come back collecting.

It can happen sometimes, you can rebuild it, lots of people have done it...
 
2,088 pieces of digitized music carefully edited routinely backed up on two flash drives and two hard drives. With one flash drive always off premises.
 

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