It can be cathartic even just to hear other people say "oh yeah, me too"—so I'm adding my voice to that chorus. I think it's a combination of feeing the "weight of years" (I'm two years shy of 50 but still feel it) along with just the
overwhelming amount and availability of content, and the work it takes to make sense of, and mine, your own little corner of it. I also think it's harder for those of us who are not "digital natives" like people born in the last 20 years are—we were simply wired to discover, absorb, and treasure content in a much different way, and we're still applying that to new constructs whether we like it or not. Our present content scenario was the stuff of wild pipe dreams as kids... which is equal parts awesome and "ok... what now?" Paradoxically, a buzzkill.
I do find some comfort also in the fact that I've gone through this several times in the past, even when I was much younger—so it feels like sort of a normal psychological response to a similar scenario. The first time I can remember it clearly was in my teens when I turned into a voracious comic book collector and reader. I scooped up whatever random dusty back issues happened to land in my local shop, and loved them simply because they were available, and they were little time capsules to earlier points in stories that at that time were still going for the most part. I didn't have a full run of anything, just a chequerboard of points along the timeline. But then older cousins/friends started saying "oh, you like comics?" and dropping
monstrous old collections on me. Suddenly, so much of the thrill of the hunt was gone... and it weirdly felt like work to figure out what, if any of it, was good (Dazzler? Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos? What the eff is all this stuff?) or valuable. And I remember even then being sort of ground to a halt to reorient myself to "what is it about this that I love? what are my ground rules around this? how sucked into this vortex am I gonna allow myself to get, and to what end? why do I feel like a librarian?" And then how about when Marvel Unlimited went online and I could suddenly read every old back issue that I salivated over as it hung behind a counter with a $400 price tag on it? It didn't feel like I was privy to something special anymore... it just felt like a corny old serial. And hey, look at that, when you take the thrill of the hunt and the exclusivity away, the first 30 issues of the X-Men are basically the exact same arc, just with a different location and villain each time. Buzzkill.
Then it happened to me with CDs. Then MP3s. Then giving vinyl another whirl. Then streaming. All of which eventually tipped in their own way, and I blew them up and started over with new rules for myself. I was drawn to surround for a number of reasons but the finite amount of content was also a draw (and still is) if I'm being honest. My completist tendencies remain intact, but at least there's
some kind of guardrail. Ha!
@scooob actually brought this up a while back in a thread discussing the Jethro Tull reissues - even just
those, for a
single artist, requiring hours upon hours to consume let alone digest.
https://www.quadraphonicquad.com/fo...he-tull-reissues-do-you-own.31847/post-611381
I responded in that thread with a book that has helped me make sense of this phenomena and find some peace with it (I'm a walking existential crisis, so you might not need it as badly as I do):
https://www.quadraphonicquad.com/fo...he-tull-reissues-do-you-own.31847/post-611416
YMMV.
