Why We Collect: What Stamps, Snow Globes, and Coins Reveal About the Human Soul

A reader writes in to ask why humans love to collect things — stamps, coins, rocks, books, snow globes — and what this impulse reveals about human nature, psychologically and from a Catholic perspective. It is one of those questions that seems small until you sit with it. Then it opens.

Most collectors will tell you they began without meaning to. A grandmother's stamp album. A handful of smooth stones from a lake. A single edition of a book that led to another. Before long there is a shelf, then a cabinet, then a room. The thing itself is rarely the full explanation. Nobody collects bottle caps only because bottle caps are beautiful. Something else is happening, and it is worth attending to.

The psychology of accumulation

Behavioral research offers one layer of the answer. Collecting activates the brain's reward circuitry in ways that extend well beyond the moment of acquisition. The anticipation of completing a set, of finding the missing coin or the elusive stamp variety, draws on what psychologists call the goal-gradient effect: motivation intensifies as one approaches a perceived endpoint. The collector who needs one more piece to finish a series is not behaving irrationally. She is following a deep feature of human attention, one that Aquinas would have recognized as the will orienting itself toward a conceived good and moving with greater urgency as completion comes near.

But the goal-gradient framing alone leaves a puzzle unsolved. If completion were the real satisfaction, collectors would stop. They rarely do. Finishing one collection tends to initiate another. This suggests that what is driving the behavior is not merely the resolution of a particular desire but the desire for desire itself — the sustained experience of being drawn toward something. The collection is a structure that keeps longing alive.

Antonio Millán-Puelles, the Spanish realist philosopher, described the self's native orientation toward being as a kind of benevolence the person extends toward itself — a love of one's own existence that seeks expression and continuation in the world.[^1] Collecting, on this reading, is one way the self extends itself into the external order: I am here, I persist, and these objects bear witness to it.

Creativity, limitation, and the drive to order

Vitz, Nordling, and Titus, in the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person, describe human beings as creative by nature — capable of bringing into existence arrangements and meanings that were not there before, though always working with what is given rather than creating from nothing.[^2] Collecting is a minor form of this creative capacity. The collector does not merely accumulate; she arranges, sequences, contextualizes. A coin collection is not a pile of coins. It is a narrative — of empires, economies, artistic choices, the passage of time. The collector imposes intelligibility on the world, which is precisely what human reason is built to do.

The same framework acknowledges the double limitation under which humans live: natural limitation — our bodies are finite, our time short, our relational reach narrow — and moral-spiritual limitation introduced by sin.[^3] Both limitations matter for understanding why collecting feels urgent. Against the awareness of finitude, the collection becomes a kind of answer. It is bounded, containable, surveyable. I cannot know everything, but I can know these stamps — every printer's mark, every perforation count, every overprint variant. The collection offers a small domain of mastery in a world that resists it.

This is not pathological. It is an honest response to the human condition, provided it does not calcify into something more disordered.

What John of the Cross noticed

The Carmelite tradition supplies a cautionary register. John of the Cross, in the Ascent of Mount Carmel, traces a descending arc in souls who allow attachment to creatures to harden into compulsion. In his account, the first symptom is not vice but lukewarmness — spiritual duties performed from habit rather than love, the inner life gradually colonized by the pull of external things.[^4] His diagnosis is not that creatures are bad but that disordered attachment to them displaces the will from its proper object. 'They have forsaken Me, Who am the fountain of living water,' God says through Jeremiah in John's text, 'and they have digged to themselves broken cisterns that can hold no water.'[^4]

The collector who spends money the family does not have, who withdraws into the hobby to avoid intimacy, whose peace depends entirely on what is on the shelf — that person is not suffering from a love of stamps. She is suffering from a will that has turned a good thing into a substitute for the one Source that could actually satisfy it. Jordan Aumann, in his Spiritual Theology, puts the structural problem precisely: when the will loves objects inferior to itself, it is degraded to their level, but when it loves what is superior, it is elevated.[^5] The collection, loved for its own sake and made into a private absolute, pulls the will downward. The same collection, held lightly, can be an occasion for gratitude, for shared pleasure, for the exercise of memory and attention — and so carry the will upward.

The question is not whether to collect but what the collection is doing in the soul.

Relational creatures reaching for permanence

The Catholic anthropology in Vitz, Nordling, and Titus describes the human person as irreducibly relational — oriented not just toward goods but toward other persons, and ultimately toward God.[^6] One thing that rarely gets noted about collectors is how relational their hobby actually is. Collectors write to other collectors. They join clubs. They attend fairs. They argue strenuously about fine distinctions that matter to nobody outside their circle. The collection, whatever its subject, tends to generate a community.

This makes sense. The human person has natural volitional inclinations toward love and justice, toward goods that are shared.[^3] The stamp collection is also, for many collectors, a form of memory — of a parent who kept albums, a trip taken together, a phase of life that would otherwise be hard to hold. Collections are often memorials. They preserve what time would otherwise erase. The desire behind that impulse is not merely sentimental. It is metaphysical. We are creatures who know we will die, and we arrange objects partly because we cannot quite accept that the meaningful things should simply disappear.

Benedict XVI, in a Wednesday audience on original sin, observed that no human being is closed in on himself — that being human is essentially a relational structure, and that sin is, at its root, the distortion of that relational order, first with God and then with others.[^7] The collecting impulse, when it is healthy, is a small enactment of the relational self: reaching outward, connecting with others who share the fascination, preserving something for whoever comes next. When it is disordered, it turns inward — the collector sealed off with his objects, substituting possession for communion.

What the collection is really for

The Augustinian line remains, after fifteen centuries, the most compressed diagnosis: our hearts are restless until they rest in God.[^8] Every collector knows the restlessness. The satisfaction of a new acquisition lasts hours, sometimes days, then the appetite returns. This is not a design flaw. The Catholic tradition reads it as a sign — an appetite structured for an object that finite things cannot provide, which means that every new acquisition points, silently, past itself.

Human beings are creative, limited, volitionally oriented toward goods, and constitutively relational.[^2] Collecting expresses all four features at once. It is a way of being human. The spiritual task is not to suppress it but to hold it honestly — to enjoy the stamps or the snow globes or the smooth stones for what they are, to let the community they create be real, and to notice, when the restlessness returns after the latest find, that the restlessness is the reminder, not to make another find, but to allow onself to be found by the One who searches for you.

In the end, we all want to be a part of His collection.

Notes

[^1]: Millán-Puelles, A. (1962). La estructura de la subjetividad. Rialp.

[^2]: Vitz, P. C., Nordling, W. J., & Titus, C. S. (2020). A Catholic Christian meta-model of the person: Integration of psychology and religion. Divine Mercy University Press.

[^3]: Vitz, P. C., Nordling, W. J., & Titus, C. S. (2020). A Catholic Christian meta-model of the person: Integration of psychology and religion. Divine Mercy University Press.

[^4]: John of the Cross. (1991). The ascent of Mount Carmel (K. Kavanaugh & O. Rodriguez, Trans.). ICS Publications. (Original work published 1618)

[^5]: Aumann, J. (1980). Spiritual theology. Sheed & Ward.

[^6]: Vitz, P. C., Nordling, W. J., & Titus, C. S. (2020). A Catholic Christian meta-model of the person: Integration of psychology and religion. Divine Mercy University Press.

[^7]: Benedict XVI. (2008, November 12). General audience: The fall and original sin [Papal address]. Vatican Publishing House. https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/audiences/2008/documents/hfben-xviaud_20081112.html

[^8]: Augustine of Hippo. (1991). Confessions (H. Chadwick, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published ca. 397–400 CE)