There’s nothing like moving to make you never want to move again.
I am very excited to have recently moved into a new apartment. After two years spent in various states of quarantine, I needed a change of scenery. I can’t move to a different city so I settled for a new apartment. While I do welcome the change of residence, I dreaded the actual move. There’s just no getting around it - I own too much junk.
In the last few years, I have come to the self-realization that I have an addictive personality. I don’t smoke or drink in excess or do drugs but my disease manifests itself with my struggle with overconsuming food and my penchant for mindlessly buying stuff.
I buy movies and books and toys and all kinds of crap not because I need them, but because I need to spend money. I feel this urge to buy stuff - big stuff, small stuff, stuff I don’t need, stuff I don’t even really want that much. In the last few years, I’ve gotten much better at dealing with this addiction once I realized it was there - but I still feel the urge to pre-order a new box set or blind buy a new Blu-ray restoration without really thinking if I absolutely need the movie in my life or can even afford it. I tried to stop buying new movies cold turkey but I found that just having the collection made me want to add to it.
Last year I took a calculator and tallied up exactly how much I’ve spent on my current DVD and Blu-ray collection. I don’t want to share the number with you because it’s damn depressing. Needless to say, that’s money I could have spent on travel and experiences that would mean a whole lot more to me than a new three-disc collector’s edition of a movie I already owned on DVD and, before that, VHS. I grew to resent my movie collection and that was a problem - I love movies and I don’t want them to become a burden that I have to carry like a weight around my neck.
Besides financial reasons, I found other reasons to hate my collection. Dating became interesting, to say the least. Figuring out how to warn somebody I was interested in that I had thousands of films spread out over half a dozen bookcases in my bedroom became a not-so-fun game I grew to hate playing.
I haven’t completely made up my mind as to what to do with my collection yet but I am pretty close to just selling it completely. Well, not completely - there are a hundred or so films I will probably keep. These are films that mean something significant to me and that I anticipate watching multiple times within the next few years. But everything else? I think it needs to go.
I think owning a single bookcase full of films is perfectly fine - but I continue to struggle with my addiction and, just like any addiction, you can’t flirt with recovery. As long as I have a massive physical media library, I’m going to feel the urge to continue to add to it and I don’t want to be the guy who owns hundreds and hundreds of movies anymore. I want to be the guy who takes cool European vacations and doesn’t have to worry about whether he’s going to overdraft his bank account when he fills up his gas tank and doesn’t have to lug twenty boxes of movies every time he moves to a new place.
And, to be honest, I also want to be the guy who has to work a little bit when he wants to watch a film. I used to like the effort it took to watch movies in the days pre-internet. I want to put the work in to watch something - to track down a copy, watch the film and then send it back out into the world.
These last few days I’ve been unpacking and setting up my new apartment. As I open boxes and see them full of Blu-rays, I’ve set them aside instead of putting them into their bookcase homes. At first, I thought it was me procrastinating but now I’m starting to realize it’s me coming to understand it’s time to say goodbye to the majority of my collection.
……this spoke to me on level I didn’t know was there. That resentment definitely is present. I think to myself, “how much have I really spent on this junk (mind you , a lot of it is art) over the years?” I mean , I’m proud of my boutique labels; having hundreds of criterion is pretty cool. But there definitely is a felling of “loserdom” that comes with it.