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You goddamn plebs.

I was also never able to turn my collection into something that was awe-inspiring. I never had a "movie cave" basement worth making a YouTube video about. Instead, I was stuck in the middle. I owned way more movies than a regular person, but I never owned enough to wow anyone. The only reaction to my stock would probably be, "Huh. I don't think I've seen Panic Room in a while."

One of the most shocking realizations of life is finding out that something you bought is worth nothing when you try to sell it back. I've seen enough 18-year-olds in GameStop, arms full of games and hearts full of hope, get angry when the cashier responds to their query with, "Eh, I'll give you $4, or $6 in store credit," to know that a ton of people spend at least a part of their lives thinking that you get equal to what you paid for something when you try to sell it later. Luckily, I'd already had an experience similar to this before I ended up selling a bunch of my movies. I'd bought textbooks for classes, textbooks that had turned me into an even-more-broke college student. Luckily, the school was there with $17 to assuage my pangs at the end of the semester. Trade-in values make you lose faith in economics as a whole.

Criterion

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"That'll be $3.50 for the Criterion edition of Armageddon, 12 cents for the complete works of Hiroshi Inagaki,

and a buck seventy-five for letting me watch your hopes and dreams drain from your eyes."

There was no climactic part where I decided to vanquish my habit by burning a bunch of films like they were my Sith dad. Instead, I went to pawn shops and used bookstores and got rid of them. I never haggled, nor did I balk when I was offered quarters for something that I'd spent $50 on six years earlier. This process didn't earn me a ton of money. I just needed them out.

I ended up, over time, getting rid of about a third of my collection. Every once in a while, I think about one that I sold and sort of wish that I'd kept it. I then remember that, if someone asks me to help them provide a roof over our heads, I have a better response than, "The bad news is that we're evicted. The average news is that I now own all of Digimon!" And I know that it might go without saying, but being able to afford food is pretty rad.

Daniel has a blog.

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