Collection Pieces vs. Functionality

This is a tough one. My son got a gift certificate for $15 at the local comic book store. I love walking around that store. Every shelf is eye candy, and I find myself just mesmerized. I want one of everything. I've gotten a lot better about collecting over the years, but I still find the pull of comics to be nearly irresistible when I'm around them. Jack had a lot of questions about how comics work. He didn't understand that regular issues are a serial format, and that there can be all kinds of variations to these individual issues. Sure, there are some one-shot issues, but the larger story and story arc structures can be hard to wrap your head around if you're not familiar with them. Then there are the crossovers, the alternate universes, origins... all kinds of stuff. And these things are all like crack cocaine to comic book collectors. So while I didn't want to encourage Jack to necessarily start collecting, there's no way you can walk into a comic book store and spend a $15 gift certificate without knowing at least something about how issues are organized, so you can buy a few books that make sense either by themselves or put together. He's struggling in a similar way with his Nerf gun collection. He has a lot of guns, and continues to add to his collection. In the meantime he has other toys that he keeps but does not use. I'm trying to get him to understand that if there are things he's not using, he needs to think about why he's holding onto them. I've been guilty of the same thing, and I've written about this fairly extensively in the past. I keep the things that have emotional value, that are sentimental, or that I just can't bring myself to let go of because I spent so much time and money collecting them in the first place. But now I'm trying to flip to a different system of evaluation and look more at functionality. Does Jack use the Nerf guns? Yes, actually. Every single one of them. And when he has friends over, they will have Nerf gun wars and he pulls out his entire arsenal in order to share out his guns and make sure everyone is sufficiently armed. So in this sense, these guns are all functional. But trying to get a 10 year old boy to understand that there is no reason to hold onto toys if you're not using them is tough. They're perfectly good toys in his eyes. Why get rid of them? I could make the same argument about some of the music equipment I have that I don't use. It is perfectly good stuff. But why not sell it? Why not just get rid of it, because it frees up space? Why not get rid of it for the sake of the peace of mind it creates? Here's something interesting. I had a guitar that I bought when we lived in California. It was a black Les Paul copy, and I decided after I'd had it for a little while that I was going to repaint it. I attempted to sand the old paint off of it, did a shitty job of it, and then did a further shitty job of trying to repaint it with a color-shifting paint. Then I sanded THAT paint off, then I tried to spray the entire thing with a sandable primer to even it back out. In the meantime I had gutted the guitar, ripped the old fretboard off, glued on a new fretboard (that had no frets)... and then at some point I lost interest. The guitar sat in the garage for years. I picked it up this weekend, sprayed some more primer on it, and then realized that the primer I had just gooped on there was self-etching primer and not the sandable primer I need to spray in order to continue to try to level the body out. I looked at it, then took it out back and propped it against the trailer and stomped on the body, breaking the neck off of it. In that moment I had decided to be done with it and throw it away, but I didn't want to go back on my decision and then fish it out of the garbage later. I wanted to break it irreparably so I had no choice but to throw it away. And you know what? When I threw it away, I actually felt better about having done it. I felt less stress because not only was it not taking up any more room, but it also wasn't a project that was looming over my head. Another unfinished thing that my eyes fell on every single time I went out in the garage. Getting that feeling of release can be addictive. I quickly started thinking about other things I could get rid of but I just as quickly came to the realization that I'm not quite there yet. I'm not ready. And I don't think you can force someone to be ready, just as I know I can't force Jack to minimize or consolidate. He has to come to it on his own terms. But are there ways I can help him along, and guide him into at least considering his options? Again, this is a very tough thing to have to deal with. We all like stuff, to a certain extent, and all of this stuff to some extent brings us joy. But it also brings clutter, and general stress, and the obligation to store and care for these things. These collections. So is it better for us to come up with systems of trying to pare down? There are so many systems out there, you can take your pick. But in many cases these systems work just about as good as fad dieting. Unless you're committing to a lifestyle change, you're not going to change over the long term. You're conducting what is essentially the equivalent of invasive spring cleaning. Which is good, don't get me wrong, but you're putting yourself at risk of creating empty spaces that you're going to turn around and fill up with more stuff. Embrace the empty spaces. The empty spaces are not a bad thing. Consider the empty spaces that abound in an art gallery. It is the empty spaces that make the art that much more significant because they focus our attention on those pieces and provide a buffer, somewhat, to the other pieces. They afford us the opportunity to look at things one at a time. We can step back and take in a room and see how the curator has structured the collection if we want to. But when we take a step back and look at our own homes and living spaces, are we seeing a similar particular attention to curation in the arrangement of our stuff? I'd venture to guess that there are plenty of cases where curation is not even a remote factor - it is about functionality. And when we have too much stuff that is functional but we don't have space for it, what do we get? Clutter. In this situation, what can we do to shift to a curation mindset? It is all about careful attention to the process of identifying what is important and what fits. Perhaps the art gallery approach is not as far-fetched as it might seem. Embracing the space and giving each item its opportunity to not be crowded in and jumbled up with everything else. What else happens when we have clutter? For me, I can't find things. This is a problem when it comes to tools in particular. If I can't find something because it is not properly organized, I'll think I'm missing it when I need it. And I'll buy a new one when this is the case. I have three different screen door and window repair tools for this very reason. The tools I have seem to have migrated to different locations, and I'm trying to consolidate everything and put it all in one place. Not an easy task. But also not dissimilar to the KonMari method of 'tidying up' in which the focus is to move way from having the same things in multiple areas and simply organizing those things. There's more to it than that, obviously, but I'm oversimplifying simply for the sake of saying that these different systems of decluttering and minimizing have their merits. Just as different diet plans have their merits. But it is about the larger system and what works for us that will ultimately determine if it is sustainable. It is our mindset at that meta level of looking at things in different ways. And for me, it seems to come down to that tipping point at which collecting can be reduced down by examining functionality.