Comments on: The Complete Guide To Completists http://danspira.com/2007/09/20/the-complete-guide-to-completists/ an edited assortment Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:20:43 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: danspira http://danspira.com/2007/09/20/the-complete-guide-to-completists/#comment-4111 Thu, 31 Mar 2011 08:38:21 +0000 http://danspira.wordpress.com/2007/09/20/the-complete-guide-to-completists/#comment-4111 Interesting article on how to treat people who suffer from a Hoarding Disorder:
http://www.supportsolutions.co.uk/briefing/issue_10/hoarding.html?page=hoarding

Is there such a thing as information hoarding?

Has the Internet become just that — one big informational clutter which we endlessly sift through and refuse to purge?

Also: Why do I derive so much satisfaction from placing a link to that article (that I came across, three-links-deep from something else I was reading) into a comment under this old essay?

]]> By: danspira http://danspira.com/2007/09/20/the-complete-guide-to-completists/#comment-3177 Wed, 19 Aug 2009 15:43:54 +0000 http://danspira.wordpress.com/2007/09/20/the-complete-guide-to-completists/#comment-3177 http://xkcd.com/625/

]]> By: danspira http://danspira.com/2007/09/20/the-complete-guide-to-completists/#comment-3065 Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:18:40 +0000 http://danspira.wordpress.com/2007/09/20/the-complete-guide-to-completists/#comment-3065 Another piece of the completist puzzle (or is it a completist collection?) can be found in this great article by Bill Harvey,
The Psychology of Collecting. I especially appreciate the author’s smug refutation of the Culture of Expertise. In these matters, passion, interest and insight will always trump conventional institutional affiliations and doctoral degrees.

(Having said that, the above and below links contain two interesting “expert” opinions, from the fields of psychology and neurobiology: (1) The urge to collect develops in early childhood, when feelings of comfort and safety are associated with objects. (2) The urge to collect is connected to the mammalian instinct of keeping a reserve of spare food, squirreled away somewhere. I’m not 100% convinced of either, but together with Bill Harvey’s Categories of Collectors, there are definitely some interesting sub-surface dynamics going on with this phenomenon.)

Also featured on that site is an article by Danielle Arnet, Why We Collect.

Another thought: The completist urge seems to be separate from the hoarding urge, and the concept of collecting overlaps with both of those urges.

…and another thought: There is such a thing as a Creative Completist, the person whose grand project does not involve collecting material objects, but rather, creating some sort of intellectual property. This could be a complete commentary on a work of literature (recently seen: the complete annotated lyrics of all Grateful Dead songs, ever) , or an unabridged dictionary of a language, or a catalogue raisonné of an artist, or a book about Salt, or a webpage devoted to ongoing musings on the Completist concept. What’s the inner psychology of *that?*

]]> By: danspira http://danspira.com/2007/09/20/the-complete-guide-to-completists/#comment-2875 Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:40:46 +0000 http://danspira.wordpress.com/2007/09/20/the-complete-guide-to-completists/#comment-2875 New incoming link this post: “Completist projects” (http://joannao.blogspot.com/2009/01/completist-projects.html)

(no pingbacks for non-Wordpress sites, I guess)

One commentator makes a great point: “Completism can often threaten your enjoyment of your object of completion … usually in the form of a time-sink and all its attendant opportunity costs. But immersing yourself so deeply into something can also drain the joy out of something you hold dear, i.e. the unsuspecting scholar’s curse. (…) it’s much better to be a spectator of a completist project than to be the person behind such a project. ”

]]> By: Jerome B http://danspira.com/2007/09/20/the-complete-guide-to-completists/#comment-2593 Fri, 11 Jul 2008 20:23:04 +0000 http://danspira.wordpress.com/2007/09/20/the-complete-guide-to-completists/#comment-2593 Well, you’re certainly right about using the word “completionist” out of ignorance. It would be incorrect for me to say that I haven’t heard the word “completist”, but in my own mind, there is no doubt that when talking about the subject, I would say “completionist”.

Thank you for being the one to teach me my random thing of the day to learn. ;)

]]> By: There’s No Such Thing as a Synonymous Synonym « Meme Menagerie http://danspira.com/2007/09/20/the-complete-guide-to-completists/#comment-2534 Mon, 02 Jun 2008 13:41:21 +0000 http://danspira.wordpress.com/2007/09/20/the-complete-guide-to-completists/#comment-2534 [...] are dropped. What feels like a violation however is when a word is introduced for no good reason: completionist, or out of pretension: the word “architect” used as a verb which is, of course (in my [...]

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