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 see both sides of your experience as valid. On the one hand, as a person who admittedly can be cluttered in real life, there’s something therapeutic and empowering about taming a digital collection into something logical and structured, often to a level of detail others might call me crazy for.
At the same time, it’s gotta be a healthy mix for me, between cataloging and actually enjoying the collection. I look at a perfectly catalogued data set of any sort as a long-term goal, but try to keep it from ever being too time-consuming all at once