My life is increasingly accelerated and myopic. Your life might be, too, but you’ve been to busy to realize it.
I’m a technical artist and instructor of digital graphic arts. Both careers mean that little of my knowledge is permanent. Unlike, say, being a cooper, where one learns to make barrels, then spends a lifetime perfecting one’s craft. Instead, most of what I learn becomes outdated in a short time. I need to update my skills continually.
Likewise, the tools of my trade become obsolete almost before I get them home. I’ll spend thousands on a computer, knowing I’ll be needing to buy a new one before I finish paying off the last one, and I’ll be fortunate if I can sell it for a tenth of what I paid for it.
It doesn’t end with work, though. At home we’re still watching a standard-def CRT television, and we need to upgrade to HDTV, but as soon as we do that, a newer, better HDTV will come out for less than we paid for the TV we just got home. Even if we can put up for the quality of the HDTV that looked so good until we heard about the latest and greatest new HDTV, we’re still screwed. These things aren’t built to last. It’ll die on its own in a few years, forcing us to buy a new one. The same is true of most every bit of technology I own. The iPod, cell phone and XBox, all of which fill important niches in my life, will all be worthless on a very short time line.
In stamp collecting, I find the antidote to all of these problems.
Stamp collecting is a completely pressure-free activity. There’s no concept of things becoming obsolete or irrelevant. When I mount a 120 year-old stamp into an album, I realize it took over a century for that stamp to wind up on that page. There’s nothing time-sensitive about it. My albums are printed on archival, acid-free paper that will last longer than I’ll be alive. In fact, there are albums in my collection that are over a century old, and they’re just as usable today as when they were first printed. There aren’t many things are there that you can buy and think “I can have this for the rest of my life if I want.”
You could spend $60 for Gears of War 2 for the XBox 360. If you sell it as soon as you beat it you might be able to get $30. That’s only if you do it within the next few weeks, because as the hype dies down, the price drops. Wait until GoW 3 comes out and you might as well just give the game away. A game like that only has about 40 hours of entertainment value, then it’s over and done with. In contrast, I just picked up a used copy of Scott’s International Postage Stamp Album , Vol. I, for around $60. It covers the first 100 years of postage stamps, from 1840 to 1940. I honestly don’t expect to have it filled in my lifetime, so with any luck I’ll get decades of entertainment out of it. But if I do get bored with it, I’ll likely be able to re-sell it for more than what I paid for it.
So, it’s a completely deadline-free activity that only gains in value over time. It’s the complete opposite of most of my life!