Here’s a wild thought: most of the things rattling around in our heads aren’t real. By “real,” I mean you can’t physically poke at them. It’s all just synapses firing off inside our skulls, telling us stories about things we think exist.Still, real or imagined, we love to give those intangible ideas a physical form. After all, humans love touching things, especially when they’re soft, warm, or smooth. Most of us don’t like anything with rough edges, literal or metaphorical; for those that do, to each their own.
If something exists only in the mind, it’s like it’s in some sad purgatory waiting for a body to inhabit. So, what do we do? We find a way to realize it by making it into a physical thing so it’s finally “real.” Some people have quite the knack for this, masters of the aesthetics of making the intangible tangible. Others, well, let’s just say not everything that gets turned into reality deserves it. Still, hey, beauty’s in the eye of the beholder, or at least that’s what we tell ourselves so we can sleep at night.
The thing is, touching things is a fundamental human craving. No judgment here; tactile validation is as primal as it gets. Creativity thrives on this. The more we can transform ideas into things we can actually feel, the more satisfied we seem to be with our place in the universe.Now, what about those ideas that we can see but not touch? Are they any less real? Well, no. You must imagine what touching them would be like.
So, when we finally do make something real, when an idea gets packaged into a physical form we can grab, fondle, and stick on a shelf—that’s when it becomes legitimately real. Like a book, for example. It’s more than just a collection of words on paper, because the moment it’s printed and bound, that book is now something anyone can touch. It has officially crossed the threshold from ethereal to material. That’s an extremely important step for ideas to take.
So, what about things you only hear? Like, say, someone rambling on about metaphysical nonsense (I’m certainly guilty of this). Yes, sound waves are real. But what your brain makes of those sound waves is a completely different story. By the time you’ve processed what was said, it’s already morphed into something new. It’s like the telephone game we played as kids—only instead of whispering silly phrases, we’re talking about deep thoughts becoming muddled and twisted beyond recognition. Surprise, none of us get it quite right.
But while this has been a human quirk for ages, here’s where we’ve gone completely off the rails in modern culture: the compulsive need to manifest everything we value into something you can buy at Hot Topic. Ideation has become less about manifesting creativity and more about things we can collect and profit from. The cult of collecting, as I see it, is the true modern religion. Somewhere along the line, we replaced making things we value with buying things that represent them. The scariest part is I understand why we do it.
Collectors are a peculiar breed, and frankly, I’ve long been one of them with a wide variety of items. We exist because of this very human desire to merge the world of ideas with the world of things. In theory, this is fine. Curation, in its truest form, is necessary for human development. Collecting art, books, or something else inherently valuable—these things can elevate a person. But when you’re collecting Funko Pops or coffee mugs with inspirational quotes, you’re just filling your life with junk that will one day haunt you in the form of a yard sale. Worse, you may one day enjoy a stint on Hoarders.
I have this sneaky suspicion that somewhere in each and every one of our houses, we have a box filled with trinkets that represent things we can never actually possess—cartoon characters, pop idols, or maybe a questionable candle that smells like a time we wish we could remember like it was yesterday. Now, as long as we don’t let these corporations run away with too much of our hard-earned money, it’s fine. But that’s the catch, isn’t it? There’s always one more figurine, one more limited-edition poster, or one more T-shirt that, if you don’t buy it now, your life will feel incomplete. Before you know it, you’re broke, and your home is filled with a bunch of stuff that doesn’t mean a damn thing. But hey, at least it looks pretty on a shelf.
I’m just as guilty as anyone when it comes to this, and it took me years to finally put a damper on it. Sure, I’ll hang onto mementos or sentimental artifacts, sure. I’m not heartless. But once your collecting spirals into full-blown consumerism—when it becomes about owning rather than appreciating—that’s when it starts to get ugly. This is how entire industries arise, devoted to capitalizing on our weak-willed desire to make everything in our heads something we can touch, buy, and stockpile.
At the end of the day, the best collectors—the ones who really “get it”—don’t just amass things. They create something more out of what they love.If you’re passionate about something, write about it, draw it, or do something else with it that doesn’t involve forking over another stack of your hard-earned cash to some conglomerate. You’re better than that. So, if you absolutely must buy something, make sure it’s meaningful, something you’d defend in a court of law as having more value than just sentimental garbage. Basically, if you wouldn’t rescue it from a burning building for its importance to culture or history, don’t buy it.
The hard truth is, we all collect something. We’re all trying to bridge that gap between ideas and reality. But what’s worth collecting? What do you truly want to hold onto? After all, collecting for the sake of collecting is like hoarding for the sake of hoarding—you end up with a pile of stuff no one cares about, eventually not even you. But you get so used to its existence that it becomes like an appendage, and trust me, I’ve seen how compulsive hoarding gets and it’s extremely horrible and depressing.
So, next time you’re thinking about picking up that tenth action figure or buying the entire catalog of your favorite pop star’s merch, ask yourself: is this something that has real intrinsic or sentimental value? Or am I just being bamboozled into thinking I need this thing to connect with something intangible? Trust me, your future self—not being buried under a mountain of stuff—will thank you for it.
~ Amelia Desertsong
