Why do we collect?

Ask a random person if he ever collected something, and his answer is yes. From flippo's to pokemon cards, or shells of every place you've visited. Some people only collect temporary, and are not motivated enough to keep collecting. Whilst others collections seem more an obsession than a simple hobby. But why do we collect?

One fervent collector of historical documents refers to his own collecting propensity as “a genetic defect”. More likely, collecting is a basic human instinct; a survival advantage amplified by eons of natural selection.

The most common reasons people collect things include:

1. Knowledge and learning
2. Relaxation and stress reduction
3. Personal pleasure (including appreciation of beauty, and pride of ownership)
4. Social interaction with fellow collectors and others (i.e. the sharing of pleasure and knowledge)
5. Competitive challenge
6. Recognition by fellow collectors and perhaps even non-collectors
7. Altruism (since many great collections are ultimately donated to museums and learning institutions)
8. The desire to control, possess and bring order to a small (or even a massive) part of the world
9. Nostalgia and/or a connection to history
10. Accumulation and diversification of wealth (which can ultimately provide a measure of security and freedom)

These reasons match with the personal motivations of the group namely:

- memories
- awareness of culture
- status
- competition
- friendship
- beauty

Thus, make our product worth a competition and beautiful. Making it to sell over the whole world includes the culture aspect and indirectly the status, and making you memorize where you've been and all the good things you have done there.

Yes, our product is going to sell! :P