People like to collect stuff. I don't mean that in the hoarder kind of way (though that's certainly a thing). I used to be all about judiciously growing my CD collection, but from high school, it was about a decade and change before iTunes, and subsequently Amazon, started selling music digitally. I don't think I got much over 300 discs, if that. Now I can say that I have well over 8,000 songs, most of which I legitimately bought. And since I first started developing my personal music cloud almost three years ago, I've played songs over 43,000 times. We can count all sorts of things.
When I started to really get into roller coasters, I was counting those. Oddly enough, despite running a coaster nerd site for two decades, I only just recently exceeded 200 rides on my track record. Like a lot of things you might collect, you might reach a point where you think, "These things aren't really different or interesting enough to go out of your way to collect."
I know some people are fanatical about collecting airline miles, like George Clooney's character in Up In The Air. I've gotta say, that one seems odd because you're gonna be sitting on your ass for every one of those miles, probably not doing anything super exciting.
These days, I'm mostly fanatical about collecting money in retirement accounts, since I didn't do it in my 20's and early 30's, because I was an asshole. But I don't want to work forever, so now I find myself trying to put away 20% of my gross every year. I'm mostly only getting to 15%, but that's still feels pretty good.
There's one other thing that I decided to, for some reason, pursue. We do love our cruises, and pre-pandemic, Disney Cruise Line's loyalty club topped out at 10 cruises to reach Platinum. We knocked that out in our first three and a half years, and nine of those cruises were in the latter two and a half. But then, emerging from the pandemic, they introduced a new level, the Pearl status. That required 25 cruises. It kinda makes sense, because you couldn't throw a Mickey Bar without hitting a platinum member. When they introduced this, we were at 23. The Europe trip this summer would get us to 24. We had to schedule one more to get the credit. That was last weekend.
What do we get? Mostly epic bragging rights, I guess. We can book and check-in earlier, including get dibs on excursions and other things (well, after concierge, anyway). They're giving free photo packages that we're not interested in, too. But the reward isn't the point. I think that humans have a innate need to count things. I don't know why. It's just how we're wired. Everyone has a thing.
Now that the achievement is unlocked, I might need something new. I know that my Playbill collection has been a little stagnant since the Covid. Maybe we need to get back to Broadway. Or the West End.
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