I just want to hold things again

Been thinking about collections lately. When I was younger I was an avid collector of Things. I had a sticker collection that covered the entire inside of my bedroom door, a robust collection of whale figurines and plushies, the classic “cool rocks” collection, books, and even goldfish at once point (mom nipped this one in the bud).

As an adult, I’ve mostly qualled this tendency in favor of having neatness and order in my home. The only real physical collection that I have anymore are my books-- I don’t think I’ll ever stop collecting books. The child collector is still in me though, and the urge is, at times, very strong. I’ve pretty much diverted that urge to digital spaces where I collect things like art and music in digital form. I’d say that this website, in a way, is a collection!

This is satisfying in it’s own right, but also makes me feel...weird? Uneasy? My general distrust of how software companies use my money, the threat of media being pulled from online platforms/not actually owning anything online, and the growing surveillance of the internet are all major factors here. Aside from that though, the joy of sharing a physical space with your collection is lost. Such a big part of why collecting is fun is the act of picking out the softest whale plush in the store or peeling the sticker and choosing a spot on the back of the door to put it. There’s versatility in how we interact with physical collections that is reduced down to the same few touch screen button clicks in digital ones.

I was reading a blog from Jenn Frank where she talked about the loss of tactility in our lives, and I really felt this in my bones:

“I think you’re right.” I said, adding something about “embodiment” and everyone feeling ungrounded, like maybe there isn’t a consensus reality anymore. Yeah, a gradual, corrosive disembodiment.

This quote, namely the word “disembodiment” in this context, triggered a vague memory of watching a weird horror movie years ago about a pandemic where everyone gradually loses their senses. The movie showed all of humanity losing their senses one by one, but it ended without ever showing the loss of touch.

I remember my friend and I being annoyed by it ending without getting to touch. During the movie, one of us brought up how it was hard to imagine how the movie was going to show the experience of losing your sense of touch, and we were looking forward to seeing how they would do it. You can get by without sight, hearing, smell, or taste-- people do it all the time. But without a sense of touch, you are entirely unbounded from reality.

I’m not saying that technology (smartphones/tablets in particular) has gone so far as to eliminate our sense of touch, but it has flattened it. With everything that once had unique shape and texture being shoved into our slim, rectangular phones, we are deprived of a sense of touch that, until recently, was just part of existing as a human in the world.

Along with the physical flattening of just about everything, there’s an emotional flattening as well. Personally, I feel a distinct difference in emotional investment when I spin a record vs when I stream an album on Apple Music. If I had read House of Leaves on a kindle, no chance I would have gotten so entirely consumed and as scared shitless as I did.

I’ve been trying lately to think of ways to cater to the part of me that has the urge to collect categorized things I care about or think are cool. I’m trying to balance my desire to own (and by own I mean actually own, not own a license to something) things without cluttering up my apartment (the fact that I can’t afford an apartment big enough to accommodate owning just some freaking art and zines is a whole other topic...). One of the ways I’ve tried recently to strike this balance is by buying a used FiiO X3 mp3 player to home only music from the small handful of CDs that I own, and my Bandcamp collection.

It’s been a really lovely experience to go on walks and listen to music without needing to have my phone. There’s some really nice tactile feedback to the X3 that makes the experience of listening to music more unique than on my phone where these same mp3s live in the exact same place as streamed music. It's given a semi-physical, but very manageably compact, form to my collection of mp3s that I've purchased over the years, and in turn has breathed new life into these songs that I own!

Anyway, all this really is to say that I miss physical stuff and being able to look around my home and interact with the things that I love and find interesting in all their various and uniquely shaped ways.