Hobbies and skills:
Why You Should Start a Collection
Last year, I began to collect fragrances. I felt embarrassed, like it was a guilty pleasure to be locked away. I saw 'collectors' as hoarders*—neurotic harvesters of material goods who fear the responsibility of a real hobby, and instead, retreat to their wallet for pleasure.
But truth dies without nuance. Today, I see that collectors and hoarders are two different ends on a spectrum, where one is a perversion of the other. A hoarder picks up everything their money can touch, perhaps to fill a void, perhaps to to generate a jolt of pleasure in their brain, or purely to make a profit later down the line.
The true collector curates with respect and intention.
The collection becomes a means to an end, a door to a rich world of craftsmanship, heritage, and culture, all reached through purpose-driven research and genuine, unmoderated passion.
This is my testimony for it—I’m delighted to have started a collection of my own, and I want to share what it can do for your own creative life.
I’ll use my fragrances to get the idea across, but the riches of collecting are universal, and I invite you to imagine what your collection could unfold around, no matter how niche or particular it may be.
Culture
Collections are mini museums of personal meaning. They’re not merely a bunch of meaningless things, but windows into the heritage of that art, with you as custodian. True collectors know the story behind their pickups, and can walk you through the lineage of the craft with reverent precision. This knowledge takes ordinary items and transforms them into beacons of culture and history.
To a passer-by, it’s a cool watch.
To a collector, it’s a Jaeger LeCoultre Reverso—an Art Deco classic with roots in 1930s Polo, engineered by the “watchmaker of watchmakers.”
To me, it’s a silver-looking coin.
To a collector, it’s a 1943 “steelie,” an American one-cent coin minted in WWII, and made of steel to save copper for military production.
To a layperson, it’s a bottle of smelly alcohol.
To me, it’s a liquid asset. It’s Houbigant’s Fougère Royale—the first ever fragrance of a genre that defined men’s perfumery for the next 150 years, and the first to ever use synthetic Coumarin, an sweet-smelling compound you see everywhere nowadays.
Craftsmanship
The great writers are the avid readers, the great thinkers are the attentive listeners, and the great artists are those with taste—appreciation is the beginning of creation, and collections are the perfect means to refine that artistic palette.
As you curate items and learn more about them, you may find yourself with the urge to leave the bench and get in the arena yourself—you start creating, inspired by the icons of the past and their technical mastery, be that through sketching comics, designing pieces of high couture, or snapping your own photo compositions.
Calmness
Your interests are not supposed to be easy. Challenge, frustration, and crashouts here and there are part of the creative process—you get pissed off at a guitar chord, or a sauce splits, or a plant keeps withering away no matter how many rescue efforts you throw at it, to the point you question its will to live.
Collecting, for once, is blissfully effortless. That doesn’t mean it’s unintellectual or mindless, but rather, that it needs no extra willpower—your curiosity is the fuel, and so long as it burns, you breeze through it like a long daydream. It makes a nice contrast against the more vigorous hobbies in your week.
If you surrender to your obsessive side, your collection becomes a nice retreat from the world, and a chance for rest and recovery after you are drained by the currents of regular life. A productivity guru may call it a waste of time, but who cares? You need not justify it to a single other soul. Paint Warhammer figurines, flick through your vinyl records, or ogle your movie posters—who says peace and contentment is "unproductive"? Not me.
In my case, I love to work through fragrance samples from niche & indie brands, and make my best effort to understand the scent, breaking it up into notes, texture, and atmosphere. Very unproductive.
Capture
The idea of a “personal museum” stretches beyond the raw knowledge you hold: collections store memories. Every item is a journal entry; it reminds you of an event, a period in your life, and the person you once were, totally irrespective of the cost or glamour. Some do this with blunt honesty, like fridge magnets, concert tickets, or cheesy drunken polaroids, but everything is attached to time, and looking over your collection is like a calm stroll through the past, with every peak and trough included.
When I travel, I bring a fragrance with me and wear it every day. Scent is a powerful herald of memory, so once I get back home, I now have that trip captured in olfactory form. Months later, when I smell it again, I’m teleported back—I can taste the souvlakia of Athens, I can hear the bagpipes of the Royal Mile, and I can see the orange glimmer of the Cypriot dusk like I was there yesterday. It’s a palace of good memories.
Connection
Even if collections were just materialistic piles of crap, they would still serve a meaningful end—connection. Entire communities are built around them, like Youtube channels, forums, in-person meetups—spaces where people can lower their guard and nerd out over the fine print. With the spectre of loneliness ever-looming over us, we should welcome anything that makes it easier to find a tribe and build strong friendships.
On the less dramatic side, collections make great conversation. I remember a four-hour flight breezing by like it was a lunch break, all because my watch-passionate friend used that time to introduce me to the brands, their history, and all the technical fizz behind them—it’s how I know what a Reverso is in the first place, as you read in the example earlier on.
If you like interior design, you might also appreciate the idea of making your space a reflection of your character, and nothing does that better than a showcase of your personal collection. I’m no posh suburban mum from Sussex, but it really is peak “entertaining.” If it were not for the laws of the land (or my lack of stealth), I would break into your house just to check out the whisky collection, or maybe the vintage cameras? Whatever your collection is, it’s always the most interesting part of the space.
Many of us live rich creative lives, but never get a chance to share that delight. The social life that branches from your collecting is a treasure not to be ignored.
So have a ponder: what could you start collecting?
Yours,
Odysseas
*I use the term 'hoarding' in the context of someone with a specific attitude to collecting as a hobby, where they buy everything, curate nothing, and make no effort to immerse themself in the creativity or lore behind it all. Nothing I said refers to the medical disorder of hoarding, which is totally different in nature.
P.S.
I stuck to the more traditional collections for all the examples here, but I know there are some wild ones out there. Yes. Maybe that refers to you. Please tell me, because I find it super interesting, and otherwise, I might have to break into your home to have a look. As usual, it takes me a long while to reply, but I always get there in the end.
P.P.S
The next video is on Obsidian, and the bits of advice I wish I had when I first started using it two years ago. It was a fun one to record, so I hope you like it (coming today or tomorrow).
In the meantime, you can check out this one, on the idea of realistic, anti-hustle productivity.