What motivates ultra-completist collectors? Futility.
David Tilley, co-author of the Lamley Group (a toy car hobbyist blog I discussed last week), has a tagline that he often posts with his photos: “I like green shades and I cannot lie.” This is a clue to his style of collecting. Tilley, like a small group of the community, is an ultra-completist.
If I could sum up my research this semester in a single conclusion, it would be that collecting is a strange hobby. Some of us do it, some of us don’t. It is, of course, closely tied to capitalism — it’s about the accumulation of wealth, albeit a kind of wealth other than currency or real estate. Collecting is the point where consumerism and personal interests mix, the point where liking something becomes the impulse to buy dozens of examples of that thing. But, when we look at the group of collectors I’m calling ultra-completists, the hobby and its motives are even harder to understand.
“Completist” (or “completionist”) is not my own term. It’s a widely used term that refers to a collector who aims “to acquire all items in a well-defined set that can, in principle, be completed.” This is, perhaps, the ultimate goal for most collectors: to have one of everything. For example, a Led Zeppelin fan might try to complete their collection by buying every one of the band’s singles and albums on vinyl. An avid Fitzgerald reader might buy up first editions of every one of his books. A fan of a particular Hot Wheels model will try to buy up every release of that model.
An “ultra-completist,” then, is exactly what it sounds like. The term has appeared on a few collectors’ forums online, and I want to flesh it out here. The ultra-completist collector is someone who aims to complete a well-defined set that cannot be completed. The ultra-completist is a collector who, by definition, chases an impossible goal. In doing so, ultra-completists spend much more time, money, and mental effort to their collections than an average person would find reasonable.
What motivates collectors to devote so much to completing a task that can never be finished? Why buy every single Hot Wheels model that is released every year, knowing that there are production variations with different paint colors, factory errors with mismatched wheels, and special edition models that you’ll never see in your local stores? Why strive for an impossible sense of completion? Because that impossibility enables the longevity of collecting. In other words, the futility of achieving completion facilitates the enjoyment of the hobby.
If there is always another model to collect to complete a set, then you never have to stop doing what you love. Ultra-completism creates a hobby that is endless, one that the hobbyist can never fall out of. There is no way to be finished with this kind of collection, because there are always other unattainable items to buy. This state of always-already lacking certain items enables the collector to keep on collecting.
So, let’s get back to David Tilley’s green shades. As you can see in the feature image, Tilley likes to collect the same model with slightly different paint colors, due to variations in production. Sometimes, the distinctions are almost absurdly minute. He’ll post a new paint-variation model that he’s spent double-digit money on, and the difference in paint color is so small that it doesn’t even show up on camera. But still, Tilley has to have that model. He’s an ultra-completist, and he enjoys searching for that ever-so-slightly different shade of green.
It general, it is the pleasure of having, or the pleasure of finding, that motivates collectors. It’s normal for everyone to enjoy buying and owning things. Ultra-completists take this further than most collectors. For people like Tilley, the finding is much more important than the having. His exciting new finds end up in a storage case where he doesn’t look at them that often. The having, for most collectors, is enough. For Tilley, the having is just a byproduct. He enjoys the finding, the hunting, the searching. And if he can never have a complete collection, then he never has to stop hunting. He strives for an impossible ultra-completism — because it means that he never has to stop finding.
