IS STAMP COLLECTING A HOBBY?

Free Press contributor Jack Baruth offers a provocative claim.  "Shopping Is Not a Legitimate Hobby."

There appears to be class conflict, or something related, structuring his essay.

The most notorious curators, especially in the male-centric interests of watches, firearms, and sports cars, are finance people, who are highly compensated but can’t make time for traditional, effort-intense hobbies. Curation can be done via the web while you attend a meeting or wait for an email. You need not leave your job to participate. When you do eventually get home, a simple picture of what you’ve bought will get you the requisite kudos on social media, at which point you can put the item in question away and get back to work.

Curating is a highfalutin' version of hoarding.

Curation is considerably simpler than most traditional hobbies. There might be 20 different skills involved in building a wooden cutting board, but curators need and, indeed, can only have but two: the ability to buy and the ability to choose. The former is measured in dollars, and it determines the scope of your curation. The latter is usually measured in the approval of others within the “hobby,” and it determines your curation’s makeup. You don’t need to actually use the things you buy—in many cases, this detracts from their resale value. Ownership is the ostensible point, and that exciting frisson of purchase is the hit that keeps the marks coming back for more.

The ownership he focuses on is stuff that people manufacture for the purpose of selling to speculators: mass-production wristwatches, Funko Pop dolls (don't ask) and possibly Lionel trains that the owners never take out of the box.  That might be different from collecting stamps or coins, although to the extent that mints coin (and extract considerable seigniorage therefrom) special mint-grade or proof coins whose purpose is solely to curate, er, collect, and possibly to show off, or to swap with other curators.

The most common nineteenth- and twentieth-century idea of “hobby” was as an activity with some room for creative effort, demonstrated physical mastery, or a combination of both. Woodworking, painting, acoustic guitar, Civil War reenactment—that sort of thing. One takes joy first in doing it at all, later in the accomplishment—or perhaps the hope—of doing it well. It’s possible to be bad at a hobby, which is not to say that one does not enjoy it still. Often the goal is to create something unique, or at least individualized.

Model railroaders, you all may now R-E-L-A-X.  The painting hobby of some last century person might become the curation project, to use the more restricted sense of the word, of contemporary art museum directors.

Mr Baruth eventually gets into the nuances that distinguish the curating from the hoarding.

Is curation the same as collection? Not according to racing legend and alpha car collector Miles Collier. His landmark—both in the sense of its significance and the actual physical size—book, The Archaeological Automobile, begins by sharply delineating between the historically significant practice of collection and the mere ego exercise of accumulation.

Researching, finding, and restoring an example of every major road-racing Ferrari model to compete during the ’60s? That’s collection. It has a guiding principle, some obvious rules, and a foreseeable end. Buying every brand-new Ferrari and Lamborghini that arrives at your local dealer? That’s accumulation. Collier, whose uncle, Samuel, won the Watkins Glen Sports Car Club of America race in 1949 before dying while leading the 1950 event, is merciless in his contempt for the accumulators, the mere purchasers, the curators. “Sensibility and expertise make the difference between connoisseurship and mere accumulation,” writes Collier. Hoarding, on the other hand, is based, at least in part, he says, on “indiscriminate desire.”

Toward his conclusion, he might be having a "What's the matter with kids today?" moment, or perhaps it's the reproach many model railroaders have for those Lionel guys stacking up unopened boxes.

Yet, curation of one form or another appears to be in a dead heat with video games for the title of “Most Commonly Encountered Obsession Among Young American Men.” Both of these non-hobbies are fundamentally soul-sucking. The video game substitutes the imaginary and meaningless for the real world of challenge and accomplishment beyond the screen, while curation offers nothing but a never-ending treadmill of purchase, unboxing, storage, and eventual disposal. In neither of these is anything created, accomplished, or even truly enjoyed. There is nothing but mere consumption, whether it is the purchase of “downloadable content” like a gun that causes its opponents to explode in a shower of confetti in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II or the anticipated arrival of a Rolex Submariner at the local jeweler. There’s something particularly sad about the latter—imagine spending $17,000 or more on a watch designed to survive ocean depths beyond which a mere glimmer of light can reach, unboxing it on TikTok to a chorus of likes and comments, then very carefully putting it back into its box, so you don’t scratch it, ever.

The hardest-core Lionel curator is cringing at that box being opened!