Hoarding in the digital age... take two

I wrote about this subject many months ago. I was raised by a family that while not wealthy did tend to hoard all kinds of nick knacks. My grandmother on my father's side being undoubtedly the worst as she had some property to put the various broken down cars, and sheds full of things she hoarded on. She lived in a trailer on the property, but loaded it up with all kinds of things. At one point she would have been like one of those places the reality show American Pickers might drive up and try to deal with her on things.

I had this some too. I collect books. I also collected music, then later movies, etc.

These are all things that take up quite a bit of space and are a pain if you move and have to keep packing them around. It is also a little heart breaking to determine that a box of like 20 DVDs I likely paid $100+ on to purchase in some cases I cannot even give away.

The digital world began to change this. Though the hoarding did not go away.

MP3s. I was using MP3s before the entire napster thing, and really it is the only way I really keep music any more. I do have a box of really hard to find old cassettes and CDs but, most of those have been given or thrown away by now. We have also gotten rid of most of our DVDs except for a few collections like the collectors editions of the Lord of the Rings and such.

I pretty much download everything I watch now whether it is TV shows, movies, etc. Yes, we have Netflix, we have cable for my wife's parents who live with us, we have amazon prime, etc. Yet I don't really use their services. I tend to torrent whatever I want and stick it on a server in my garage to watch at my leisure. I can easily horde a lot of material this way, yet the amount of physical space it occupies does not increase.

Plex server currently has 1174 movies on it

Over 32000 music tracks

Over 4900 different episodes of various TV shows

My personal steam account (I purchase for other family members as well) has over 1430 games

My Gog.com collection has over 260 games on it

My Daz Studio has over 880 products

The Unity Asset Store I've purchased MANY things... it doesn't keep a running total

It has taken me years to hoard this stuff. I am not a wealthy person. I am simply very good at hunting for deals, having patience, and buying bundles. I accumulated a lot of this at about $50/mo buying things.

What I have definitely come to realize as the hoarding has not gone away. It has simply moved to digital space. Am I going to use all of this? Most likely not, but it was a good deal and I tell myself that "I might use it, and when I want to use it it may not be on sale or I may not have the money". That is pretty much always my excuse.

My game purchases for myself have slowed down. I still buy a game occasionally but I realized I have tons of games I want to play that I haven't gotten to. The longer I wait to buy another while I focus on the ones I already have the less it will cost me then.

I still buy bundles and games for other family members. I made a guest computer and steam account for my house about a month ago and started loading it up with all the spare game keys I had sitting around. That one is already up to 169 games and ends up being a good deal as different family members will play on it.

Though I still am very aware of my hoarding. It is always based upon some contingency plan.

One thing I can say is steemit.com has made this far easier for me. I haven't needed that $50/mo since I started using steemit. I tend to get that or more every month that I spend towards my hoarding. The DAZ and Unity stuff at least are tools for projects, and I've also been known from time to time to enhance my steemit posts using them.

Yet, I do believe the age of the digital hoarder is here. If I had to physically store this stuff I'd need a small warehouse.