Selection Vs Completion

I just got round to watching Season One of The Sopranos. Only taken nine years, but in my defence, it has been shown at quite ungodly and inconsistent times on terrestrial T.V., and it is the sort of programme that demands viewing in chronological order. Thus, having missed the beginning, I studiously avoided the following six seasons for fear of spoiling the whole series for myself.

On the strength of ten episodes the strategy was right, as I am already snared into a compulsive need-to-know what happens next. On the strength of hyperbolic reviews on Play.com and amazon.co.uk (I prefer the opinions of those who buy a product to those who are paid to have an opinion), I could buy the remaining six boxes of DVDs now, or even the complete series in one box and eBay the duplicate Season One. But I wont.

Firstly, this involves splashing out over £100 in one go, for a small saving if you buy the series. But second, I know myself well enough to wonder whether I will still be as interested by Season Four. The last time I was in a similar position was when, having won a copy of Six Feet Under Season One via (ironically) a BBC website, I bought the next two seasons. Still haven't quite made the end of season 3, so the last two seasons will be a long time coming. In the intervening years they've halved in price too. And I really like Six Feet Under!

Herein lies a problem. I'm a collector, in principle a completist. My wife would probably redefine that as an accumulator, but for someone who suffers the collecting "disease" (and I've exploited such folk for much of the last twenty years), the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. My own greatest weakness is music, and the racks contain several CDs that have barely left their cases but that have to be there "to complete the set". The same with books.

Consequently, those two "missing" seasons of Six Feet Under bug me, even though I know I wouldn't get round to watching them for months or years if ever. Part of this is conditioning as a good twenty first century consumer. We all buy crap that we don't need because we've been trained to think, believe even, that it will make life feel better. Be better. Not so, but we do it anyway.

Collecting takes this phenomenon a step further though, into the realms of a psychiatric disorder. On occasions, when I did my selling face-to-face in a real - rather than virtual - shop, I saw collectors on the brink of hysteria for fear of missing a "crucial" episode in the history of a pulp super-hero, or a variant of a model commercial vehicle ("Yes, I want both numberplate versions!"). This obsession is not terribly different to that found in some forms of autism and/or obsessive/compulsive disorders. The dispassionate observer might be tempted to say "But it's only a comic" and even add "so get a life" for good measure. That would be extremely ill advised.
Not least because the collector may react violently !

The adage that "less is more" conflicts head-on with collecting and with much of modern life in the "developed" world. Collectors want, need to have the lot, and more generally the preponderance of mediocrity in so many contexts may be proof that in demanding choice we end up with more stuff that is simply unremarkable.

In a previous post I referred to Peter Gabriel's quality control, which is reflected in the relative sparsity of his catalogue. The exception proving the more general rule that choice, far from being consumer led, is more often down to supply. The collector will buy their fifteenth Darth Vader action figure because this one has his head twisted to one side just so. He didn't know he wanted it until he saw it, because he didn't want it. Completeness now dictates that he must have it.

More generally, the joy of branding means that we'll buy more clothes than we need and all manner of domestic goods and services that we'll never use. This is not a new phenomenon, but it does seem to have run away from any level of rationality in the last twenty years or so. Gordon Gekko's "Greed Is Good" from Wall Street was embraced by many a child of Thatcherism and what we have now is a greater level of disatisfaction amongst ordinary folk with "how little" they can afford than I think had been the case even during periods of genuine austerity. Of course there are lots of people struggling, particularly since the latest generation of Gekkos managed to screw the financial system so thoroughly, but for most of us, we don't know we're born!

No, I don't have an answer. You might argue that just as advertising tobacco products has been banned to limit temptation, so we should stop advertising anything without qualitative merit. Not really going to happen is it? That way lies totalitarian state control and mediocrity of the worst kind (Soviet car, anyone?!).

Perhaps, ironically, the change will be made through choice. Just as the banking crisis and M.P.'s expenses have brought about changes in perception that cannot be undone, at some point we may begin to realize and believe that when we are told that items exist because of demand, we'll say "well, not from me" and refuse to buy. But I'm not holding my breath.

Now, I'm off to sell some stuff to people who didn't know they needed it!