I wish I didn't care as much or at all

The boxes to the center and to the right are where I store a part of my mini-collections - I've mostly been working on listing out [and physically putting away] collecting topic subset cards for the past couple of weeks.

I maintain a loose box of cards to stash 'adds' to count towards my year end achievements and a stash of 'haves' that may have been loose cards otherwise already in my collection - it's kind of 'grunt' work to empty the box but I get the satisfaction of playing around with my actual cards and making sure they are 'officially' part of my collection as opposed to just not giving a hoot.

I’ve started to put away some cards for the following but I think I’ve got to stop somewhere - there has to be a time where I can say I’m done with something at the moment, where I can catch my breath and pat myself on the back.- I’ve got to stop somewhere and there has to be a time where I can say I’m done with something at the moment, where I can catch my breath and pat myself on the back.

I can take myself through a ‘trip’ as a collector flipping through cards that belong to particular themes perhaps - but it feels irrelevant, where I’ve objectified strangers’ [regardless of their status as professional athletes] cards [like having a snapshot of someone else’s personal achievement] that mean bupkis to my life.

It’s because I’m a collector and one-time in-person autograph hound that thinks chasing ink got me closer to the game than it actually did - going through the cards or scrutinizing them because a bit more important because I was looking to get them inked up.

Not to get too dramatic, but maybe through collecting, I’ve kind of marginalized my own life where I wonder if trying to do something with miscellaneous cards are a waste - once in a while, maybe it’s peculiar to see ‘dead cardboard’ I flipped through and passed over at one time ‘archived to oblivion’ like commons from 10-15 years of once ‘current’ players that have moved on [when I haven’t].