I do put this at the feet of the Collector gene. I've always had a collector's mentality and impulse. Perhaps my parents triggered it early by adding to my collections of Tintin and Asterix on every birthday, Christmas, and "accompany grandma to Mass". By age 10, I was buying American comics, and soon decided to "pull" certain series instead of randomly picking things up. More and more series, as it turned out. Our family was an action figure family, with different kids collecting Masters of the Universe, G.I. Joe, Transformers... In my teens, I was choosing favorite authors and getting all their books on one go. I was taping every Doctor Who and Star Trek episode that aired on TV. When a hobby store finally opened in my area (followed by my movie to a bigger city where comics/games stores were a thing), I starting buying a lot of role-playing games, even if I knew I could never possibly play them. I got into collectible card games. My comics purchases ballooned until I had to quit entirely or ruin myself financially. And so it goes.
When I got back on my feet, I started buying a lot of DVDs, usually sight unseen, the way someone today might click on a streaming item to see if it was any good. I do my research, and I have a good sense of what I'll like, so those blind purchases were generally worth it. As streaming became THE format, I stopped spending so much money on discs, discovered TCM and watched a lot of older movies there, until I felt like it was cycling back, but by then I had a subscription to the Criterion Channel that filled those needs better. But if I don't own the physical media, is that still collecting? I say yes.
There's a combination of symptoms. Reviewing everything I watch on this space (or giving impressions, really) means I have a motivation to keep doing it. Joining Letterboxd (or a similar platform, earlier) is the real disease, because now it's about clicking/rating/reviewing as many items as possible (over 7400, at this point). You've seen projects come and go here, whether trying to watch something from every country, or every year, or silly buggers like movies that have the same titles as Doctor Who episodes. These have "forced" me to seek out things I never would have otherwise found/watched. It's not unlike chasing baseball cards with misprints, or the Golden Pharaoh to complete your Super-Powers action figure set. You're doing it because you feel compelled to do it, not because the chased item is any good. I've watched horrendous stuff in pursuit of my collection, which only really exists as a, well, COLLECTION of checkmarks on a website somewhere.
There's, in fact, a reason why I haven't reviewed any TV shows in more than a year on This Week in Geek. While Letterboxd does have miniseries, it doesn't really do TV, so it doesn't feel like "collecting" when I watched it. Unless it's a long-running franchise that I cover here, episode by episode (Trek and Who, principally), I just can't motivate myself to do it. A symptom of the illness: A recently made an account on Serializd, which is a Letterboxd equivalent for TV shows, in the hopes of motivating me to watch my backlog of television series I meant to watch/finish. Will it work? Maybe once I'm done clicking my television back-history. But I can't imagine it'll be healthy...
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