Recovery

After a year plus of admittedly obsessive collecting, I've suddenly slowed to a halt. I've probably got 120+ bottles and twice as many decants and samples, which means A) I've been buying multiple bottles and samples every week in this time period [95% via eBay] and B) I have much much more juice than I could use in two lifetimes. I've recognized the absurdity in this for a while, but it's only now that I reached the point when I really wanted to stop, and was able to do so without really stressing about it.

In the past month I've halted my collecting. I'm now planning to get rid of a fair portion of what I've accumulated, because I just don't need it. I can't exactly pin down what caused this shift, but for me it's a combination of:

1. Realizing how much money I've spent on this hobby, and resolving to save much more moving forward;
2. Not visiting Basenotes every day;
3. Getting re-inspired by my other longer-running passions (music and art) and shifting my focus back to these, and;
4. Recognizing that, with every bottle I got, I felt a stronger charge to get my hands on the next one--psychologically, I think collecting is often more about what you don't have than what you do have

Don't get me wrong, I'm still fascinated by scent, and I will enjoy many of my frags for years to come. I'm not getting rid of my favorite bottles, I'm just learning to appreciate them for what they are, and to enjoy them in the moments that I'm wearing them. And I have come to appreciate that in a short time I've amassed a formidable collection, but enough is enough.

I didn't think I had a problem, and as many have pointed out, there are plenty of worse ways to burn through money. Nonetheless, I feel so much relief in cutting back and letting go.

It isn't that I'm no longer interested in smelling new things, and I wouldn't claim that I'll never purchase another sample or blind-buy a bottle again. I just realized that I needed to slow my roll, big time, and it feels right to have done so.

Your point speaks to a real temptation, but given that there are tens of thousands of frags out there, many discontinued, and of course new ones launched every day, I accept that, no matter what I do, I'll miss out on the vast majority of them. Perhaps there are a few out there that I would love more than any I've yet experienced, and I'll never sample them. Whether I try one new scent a year or smell a new one every day, I'll never catch up.

The funny thing is, I'm still discovering "new" scents among the scads of perfumes I've already accumulated. Samples I tested once and forgot about, or things that came in a lot that I completely overlooked. It reminds me of when I'm at a bar, and the DJ spins some song that blows my mind, and when I find out what it is, I realize that I already have that record, and just never listened to it attentively, or all the way through.