There's this new sentiment in the society of finding something rare with high value to flip it and make a bank. But the way it's being pursued... It just doesn't feel right.

It almost feels like it's gambling, because it's a sentiment that leaks into modern collectibles, like card games.

I'm not saying people don't value collectibles, or value nostalgia, or that some of these things should be limited to niches - the reality is that I can't quite put it into words, but a lot of it seems propped up... Or it's a false game everyone is knowingly playing, like a big Ponzi scheme.

These superman copies, or the first editions of mtg, or even some modern vintage games, were never intended to be collectibles - people used them and played with them, created memories, and the production runs were really limited in comparison to modern day production runs, that make those items actually rare... Like few hundreds or thousands have survived in good condition - which is an achievement for toys, games and comics that get used a lot.

Nowadays people buy stuff with high production runs, they never even create memories with the stuff... They slab stuff into a "hermetic" container right away, and get it graded...

It just feels fake.

Again I don't doubt people see value in this stuff, I just feel like they're valuing for the wrong reasons, and I can't wrap my head around how is that even sustainable.

Who is going to value the memory of "remember when I bought 5 booster boxes and pulled card X from the pack, with gloves on, put it in a sleeve and sent it to be graded straight away? Now those were the days!"

It's like people want to compress the randomness of time and social behavior into a predictable cicle of months, with minimal effort and to extract the maximum value out of it.

Am I overthinking this?