For me right now, it’s books followed shortly of watching things. And I mean watching things that isn’t YouTube. Recently, I’ve been donating totes of books, books I’ve spent a long time having thrifted for and waited to get without having to cave to spending online.
And those books just sat there for months and months without being picked up to be read. Even books I wanted! I used to have a 5-shelf bookcase filled with books, another 3 shelf filled with books, a structure compromising of a shoe shelf and TV-stand filled with books. Now after donating things, I am only down to a single three-shelf bookcase just packed up with what books I have decided to remain with me.
As for watching things, I’ve discarded over 120+ DVDs from my collection, I still have a hefty amount, like I have nearly 5 full disc books filled with discs of a wide variety of movies and shows to watch should I ever not be online or want time off from being online. All just continue to sit there unwatched as I just keep watching YouTube video after YouTube video.
I just think I am coming around to the acceptance that I just will not give myself time to these hobbies and that they’re probably dying out, I predict that if I don’t do anything in the next couple years should they all sit and gather more dust, I’ll just let them all go.
Comics.
I collected when I was a kid for a few years. That was probably 1990-1993. Lost interest after a while.
I came back to the hobby for brief periods in 2013 and 2017, picking up a few of the Bronze Age key books that I wanted when I was a lot younger. Now I was older and had the money to buy those books.
In the covid years there was a comic-boom, and I was caught up in that. There were a lot of things happening within the hobby and a lot of people making YouTube content around it.
The problem with getting too involved with comics is that they take up too much fucking space. Right now, I have around 4500 books in the collection. That number needs to come down to like 1000.
I’ve been working on a full run of the original X-Men series. I have 21 books to go until I’ve completed the 545 book run. I do still intend to obtain the remaining 21 books; but there’s no immediate plans for buying any old books that aren’t X-Men. I’ll keep those. There’s probably around 400 or so other books that I’d like to hold on to, and that’s how I’ve arrived at my 1000#. I want to get rid of pretty much 2/3 of the entire collection at this point. It just takes up too much space. I still buy new books too, but am finding it less enjoyable (relative to other options) since I’ve moved to a different state. There’s a lot more outdoors stuff for me to do in the new state, but the LCS is also a longer drive now.
Selling them is truly a major pain in the ass too. eBay has a limit of 250 free listings per month. I don’t want to exceed that, otherwise I spend $0.35 per listing, even if the (average buy it now price is $4) listing doesn’t sell. Whatnot is an alternative to eBay, but that really requires actively getting in camera and trying to sell stuff to people. That’s a huge time expense. There’s also other places like hipcomic that auction books but I have no interest in selling there. When I was more buying (rather than trying to sell) those sites always seemed to be overpriced, and so I stopped going. I imagine I’m not alone in that experience. I speculate they have low traffic, and so the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
Wrapping up, yes… I’m falling out of this hobby but more so because I’m almost done with the original goal; but the current state of my coexistence with the beast of collecting is causing me a combination of both anxiety and resentment. The reality is that I’ll have to somehow, someway, spend a lot of time getting rid of these 3500 or so books without being totally ripped off in the process. Getting rid of them doesn’t sound fun at all. Dealing with people is annoying. I don’t enjoy haggling. I don’t enjoy taking 1000s of pictures of comics with my phone. I don’t enjoy salesmanship in any way, shape or form.
What started as a fun “chase that goal,” type hobby evolved into a “this is taking up a ton of space, and you now need to either pretend to be someone you’re not for a long time to get rid of them properly, throw them in the trash, or just get totally fucked over by selling them in bulk direct to some other reseller” type deal. No one tells you that when you get into comics.