Recently I packed up my entire collection and put it into 9 plastic tubs and I haven't bought a video game title in over a month. Shoot, this is the first time I've been on the site in three to four weeks and I'm a guy with 1,000+ items and 5,000+ edits, so I've spent a good chunk of time here on VGCollect!
I don't know what it is, I just recently stopped caring about video game collecting, which for me is actually a good thing in the mental and financial sense, I'd spend about half of my money on video games and I'd be glued to my phone or computer reading news about upcoming video game releases, checking eBay for deals on games I would never play, etc. It would get to the point where I'd have 10-20 things showing up in the mail each week, I'd open them, put them on the shelf, and that was it. I'd be upset after e3 conferences and Nintendo Directs and things like that; video games were controlling my whole life. I was buying things for the sake of buying things, just to have them but I was never using them. I'd get mad at myself and try to hide my collection and not show it to my friends or family. I was depressed all the time, especially looking at the amount I spent on things I was never going to use. It reached a peak when I was about to hit the "Buy it now" button for a $90 copy of The Croods for Wii U on eBay, but for once I stopped myself and thought, "is this really going to make me happy? Enrich my life? Make me feel better?" The answer is no. Since I've stopped buying and gaming, I've been feeling much better, I've made new friends, gotten new hobbies and occupations, and overall I just feel happier, more confident, hell, I feel like a new man! I think I should sell most of it and just keep the consoles/systems I really care about and will maybe want to go back to eventually, maybe I'll actually use my games for videos and the like. Sadly for me that means I will likely spend very little time here on the site, which makes me a little sad because everyone on this site is great and it's hands down the best tool and community for video game collecting.
I guess what I want to ask is if anyone else has ever felt this way? Did you swear off it forever? (Probably not if you use VGCollect, haha!) Go back to it eventually? Or does collecting simply make you happy and you love it and collect because you love video games? For me at first, it was a combination of having money to buy things I wanted and wanting the things I had, but over the past two years I've squandered so much time and money on games I don't use, I don't even care to think about it.
Let me know your thoughts!