The Psychic Benefits of Card Collecting

I thought this was an interesting article - towards the end he talks about how art collectors are in it partly for the enjoyment and partly as an investment.

"The best illustration of psychic benefits is the art market. Art collectors buy paintings for two reasons. They are interested in the painting as an investment — the same way they would view buying stock in General Motors. And they are interested in the painting as a painting — as a beautiful object. In a recent paper in Economics Bulletin, the economists Erdal Atukeren and Aylin Seçkin used a variety of clever ways to figure out just how large the second psychic benefit is, and they put it at 28 percent.7 In other words, if you pay $100 million for a Van Gogh, $28 million of that is for the joy of looking at it every morning. If that seems like a lot, it shouldn't. There aren't many Van Goghs out there, and they are very beautiful. If you care passionately about art, paying that kind of premium makes perfect sense."

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6874079/psychic-benefits-nba-lockout

I started collecting about 14 years ago, and got really serious about six or seven years ago. I can say without hesitation that I've never had a more fulfilling hobby. Sure, it's nice to know that my collection has a significant monetary value, and I do keep a tab on what that value is, and I do have my collection insured. Nonetheless, if I didn't love baseball to begin with, and if I didn't feel like this hobby was pulling me closer to the game and its history in some way, I wouldn't have kept doing it. I'd have found some other way to use my time.