Over the last 2 years, I’ve noticed that I spend WAY more time carefully cataloguing my collections of digital media (games, anime) than actually experiencing those media.
I would spend months carefully renaming the files, grouping them into folders by franchise, creating watch order files, remuxing videos so they would only have one audio and one subtitle file, reencoding videos that I considered bloated, reencoding videos that had flac or 5.1 audio to opus stereo, putting all my files into a spreadsheet along with other information, etc. etc.
Today I realized that my obsession is pointless. I’m just wasting my life doing something that’s not enjoyable, instead of experiencing the media I’ve collected. Who am I making those neat-looking catalogues for? I will never pass on my collection to anyone. I am just lost in my unhealthy obsession instead of enjoying life.
So yeah. Today I’ve decided to stop wasting my time. I will keep archiving (because I believe that in the future, the governments will make it very difficult to share copyrighted media online), but I will stop trying to make my collection look nice and tidy.
I will also delete stuff that I’ve watched/played that I didn’t enjoy. I’ve come to a realization there’s no point archiving it if I’m never going to use it again.
Anyways, I hope this helps someone realize that obsessions with cataloguing your hoards are unhealthy and a waste of life.
I’ve been collecting genealogical data for the last 15 years. You better believe I keep that organized, otherwise I would be screwed.
I agree. As I get older I want more out of my hobbies than just fun and stress reduction. I want to grow, learn a useful skill, engage with media that resonates with me emotionally. Organizing files accomplishes none of those things. Low value way to spend my time.
nah i enjoy collecting music and sorting things 😤😤😤
Did you recently have a wake-up call that made you think death is coming soon? I have, and it made me re-evaluate my archiving, in the sense that:
(1) For me, it’s only worth organizing if I can find some memories later.
(2) There are some great tools like Hazel (on Mac) to auto-sort.
(3) Otherwise, it must be autotelic.
There is joy in being AUTOTELIC, when you enjoy the process of something for its own sake. No one else has to know or understand, as long as it matters to YOU!!! I want everyone who sees this to know this word, it’s very powerful and meaningful.
AUTOTELIC
Ahh yes, the “good will”.
I didn’t know there was a word for this. Can’t thank you enough.
Inside of me there are two wolves One wolf obsessively categorizes all files pertaining to their purpose.
The other wolf employs a search index service that annihilates the need for the files to be organized (for the most part).
I feed them both obnoxious amounts of time tinkering with their efficiencies. It gives me a sense of control in my out of control life.
The data hoard must grow.
I’m not going to stop hoarding anytime soon.
I don’t like not being dependent on subscription streaming services and DRM platforms like Steam.
I’m caught in this trap and it’s turned my love/hate of hoarding into hate/love. I currently have 40TB+ of files to organize, but put it off because it’s such a chore.
But, I do it because not organizing it would mean I wouldn’t know what I have and where to find it. With proper organization and tools like Everything and VVV (Virtual Volumes View), I can find anything within seconds, as long as I know something about what I’m looking for.
I am happy about your change op, meantime if others feels pointless in Their sorting fun, please try to find community. We have all type of members - dragons which have huge space and keeps it online, ants enjoying working on data sets to keep them tidy and neat and bees adding new stuff for ants to work on!
I do it to make other people happy. Seeing them happy brings me joy.
Like for real I never watch any of my content. I don’t watch media in general I just play video games and ride my motorcycle.
I just use filebot
Honestly this might be your opinion, but for me it actually is enjoyable. The whole putting everything in it’s place, documenting it all and all that stuff that’s where I get the actual enjoyment.
It also means that the people around us can more easily enjoy the media that we’ve collected, since they probably don’t enjoy the same collecting and organizing process that we do.
For example, I’m planning to re-organize my media for Jellyfin on TrueNAS, what with organizing the folders and file structures, and creating better ways to rip DVDs, Blu-Rays, and audio CDs. I enjoy that process, but it also makes it more convenient for my family members to access and watch that media when they would like to as well. So there’s more than just my personal enjoyment that’s increased from this.
I don’t think your efforts should be seen as “pointless” just because you’re the only person who would ever be able to appreciate the fruits of your efforts. Self-actualization is an important part of finding peace with your mortality. Whatever it is you gotta do to get there, you gotta look within yourself to find that. For some people, creating a personal art museum that nobody else but them will ever see is what helps them get there.
Is that what remuxing means? How do you do it?
Well I’ve been looking for way to save everything in offline mode only stuff you want, and I came across this group just, I spotted your article here and it’s made me think well why not…
Create a community driven nostalgic looking frontend that is categorised for eg. save sites to text and save sites to text with images/ save pdf/save video/save iso etcetc so you basically havwe a bridge to the web through this frontend it’s own simple browser that can extract and download the content for offline frontend use cases with the format of your choice then you could have shares on a website or server of these builds people have made with the mb/gb/tb/pb and so one file size to download from their own links provided these could also be apart of the frontend.
Now that would be wicked you could also provide choices to install a chat tool inside your build for running a community that’s either online or offline so you can actually go offline any time with a button and online with a button to get back to the community when you like, now that would be so cool using special build crawlers to drag down and vbuild data into custom archive frontends you could theme them as wellthat would be nice man.