Hoarders

What do guitars, guns, books, and motorcycles have in common? In each case I have several people in my Facebook feed (and I suspect my semi-randomized demographic is not too far off the average) who just love to talk about how much they love to own them. I mean, not just that they love them, but they love to buy them, even if they already have a sufficiency (which, in 3 of the cases, is 1). People make all sorts of dumb jokes about how they spend all of their money on them, and how their wife (in 3 of these cases, it’s almost always guys. And it’s the same 3 cases) objects and they have to deceive her in some funny way.
It’s not about the usefulness of the item. You can only ride one motorcycle at a time, you can only read one book at a time (and there are libraries), you can only play one guitar, or shoot one gun at a time.
I suppose, in their defense, you could say it’s a collector’s urge. If somebody collects stamps, rare coins, comic books or baseball cards, nobody thinks it’s weird. Well, maybe a little weird.
A more negative view would be that it’s a hoarder’s mentality, and that, taken to an extreme, can actually be a psychological disorder. I imagine its roots are in insecurity, and fear of a shortage.
But I suspect, in the case of these things, it’s a kind of advocacy. People who say “I just can’t stop buying guitars” and post pictures of their latest acquisition are sometimes great musicians. I suspect that they are more often mediocre musicians who just have to keep reminding people how obsessed with music they are. Gun nuts are a special kind of weird. They want to buy more and more because they are afraid the government is going to come and take them away, which is just straight up bad math. If the government does decide to take all their guns away, that just means that the government will get more guns.
Bibliophiles definitely are advocates, they tend to believe that the key to world happiness is everybody reading more books, which I don’t entirely disagree with, but they still get confused at the difference between owning (which may impress more people) and just reading, which is a very solitary matter.
Anyway, that’s my rant for tonight. Carry on doing whatever you love doing.