If there is indeed any type of gene, it no doubt started for me on my mother's side of the family. They were not collectors per se, and not really hoarders with a problem either - but they just never threw anything away. This stretches back several generations, as can be attested to by the luggage receipts (train, not airline...) I have in my basement from the mid 1800's, letters to my great great grandmother with Civil War references in them, and perhaps most interestingly - land deed records that I have no idea who they even belonged to, which date back to the late 1700's. Much of it (as you will sometimes hear said about cards) is random ephemera that shouldn't have been around for the next 5 years after it was made, let alone the next 150 or 250.
For me, collecting is not so much a completion / order thing as it is a pride of possession thing. I know that at least when I first started buying cards at age 9 in 1986, set collecting was all the rage - and even to this day I know people in the hobby who could care less if the card they needed to complete their set was Mickey Mantle or Mickey Vernon; to them it was about the complete set and the order and symmetry that represented. But that was never me. I am now collecting some vintage sets, but they truthfully are not my priority - and likely will take me years more to finish with.
For me, and this goes back to probably age 10 or 11 - it was when I first realized there were not just brand new Topps cards in packs for sale, but "old cards" (today what we would call vintage...) that that first real audible click occured in my brain that said more or less "Hey. This is going to be a huge interest for you." There was something about being able to hold something that was there at the time from the past that just did it for me. This was the late 1980's for me, so my thought process would go something like "You know, Hank Aaron may be retired and 50 something years old now, but here is his baseball card from 1964, the year he hit 24 homers and batted .328..." In this way, old cards instantly became my little passport to a bygone era. In the 80's, the 1960's to me, even though only 20 years earlier - an era when my parents would have been in high school and college - might as well have been ancient history. Also in this particular example, the fact that the image on the card has a smiling Hank pictured with a bold "M" on his cap was an even bigger bonus. Here was a team that technically didn't even exist anymore! How frigging cool is that? The example almost seems silly to me on the time passage today and doesn't not jive at all. 20 years ago today was 2002. I was married and we had just bought our first house. As far as pop-culture, nothing to me seems extraordinarily different - even though I know it is. This is called getting old. But I digress...
Like the original post mentions, I went through the typical cycles with my collecting. Stopped for the most part buying new packs when I started high school in 1993. Found old cards again with some of the early online auctions as a college senior in 1999. Quit again when I went back to grad school in 2003, and remained dormant in the hobby until after my kids were past the "little" stage when I again got interested around the holidays in 2014. For me it is the pride of possession overall, but I would agree with the notion of it being my cocoon. When I'm flipping through old cards, I'm not worried about work or the bills or the news or anything else. I'm 12 years old again without a care in the world.
What continues to surprise me about this hobby and me personally is it just never gets old. I'm 45 and now have been back at this pretty passionately for the last 7 years or so. And yep, I get off on it just as hard as I can every time just like when I was a kid. I hope to be able to for decades to come.
