Collecting as ‘kidult’ again – it’s not as innocent as it used to be

It was a Saturday in January and in a stuffy, packed meeting room in Venray I realized: this has gotten out of hand. I was surrounded by folders, boxes, display cases full of Pokémon cards. All alone, searching for the people behind photoless online aliases like SirWesley, Pokémom and IkHeetGeenHennie, wondering what their name was. Four months ago I didn’t have a single Pokémon card in my possession, now I was at a trade show. 33 years old, awkward, on the first stop of my comeback tour as a collector.

A kidult mainly among others kidults. Because that’s what we’re called, in marketing terms, as adults who enjoy toys that are traditionally intended for children. We’ve been around for a while. wrote in 1975 The New York Times about adults finding love for the toys of their childhood. For the generation back then, these were model trains, for Gen Z and especially millennials, these are Lego or trading cards such as Pokémon. Due to the influence of the corona pandemic and social media, kidults are now responsible for a quarter of the total toy turnover in the United States.

The adult collector knows the value of everything, absolutely everything, within seconds

In that pandemic, the craving for nostalgia increased enormously. Suddenly people were mainly at home, alone with their anxiety, stress and boredom, and they had to entertain themselves with the things around them. The past was a way to find peace in the present. Nostalgia, psychologists have said in recent years, can be effective against bad feelings. “A Teat for Adults,” so described an advisor to the major American market research firm NPD nostalgia at the end of last year Business Insider.

sweetener

As a kid in the 90s I saved a lot. Toys made from Kinder Surprise eggs, which one grandpa and grandma brought every Tuesday when they babysat me and my little brother. Small gemstones, which the other grandparents took with them as souvenirs after their many holidays in Alpine countries. Coins from as many European countries as possible – a collection that the euro would put an end to. But also stickers, from Harry Potter or the football cards from Panini, and: Pokémon cards.

I was the perfect age for that. The very first Pokémon game on the Game Boy came out in 1996, I grew up with the series and with the series. I remember how my mother used packs of Pokémon cards as a particularly effective sop during long car trips to the campsite in Italy; the prospect that my little brother and I would receive a package somewhere along the highway, during a lunch or bathroom break, kept us calm and the journey bearable for them.

After that, like most children, I grew out of collecting, it became a sweater that no longer fit me. My time became scarcer and I preferred to spend it on others than on something for myself. Collections went into boxes, and those boxes moved a little less and less, because no one looked at them anymore.

Until it started to itch, the longing for those innocent times. But after less than six months I can conclude that collecting, at least of Pokémon cards, as an adult is a fundamentally different experience and it has lost its innocence a bit.

Behind armored glass

The pandemic has turned Pokémon cards into a commodity. Precious merchandise, propelled by well-known influencers who post packs of cards from the 90s and 00s on YouTube and TikTok opened. Pieces of cardboard that you used to scrape across the schoolyard now have to be behind armored glass. At the end of 2020, a collector in Kampen was even attacked by three men, the loot half a ton of cards. The biggest conflict I had about Pokémon cards was when I went to court with a classmate of my brother’s who had tricked him into a very unfair trade. Packs of cards that used to cost a few guilders in the shop have now been going for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of euros without any effort. People in their twenties and thirties have made a living out of pandemic hype, so eagerly entering the market as providers of rapid tests.

In that respect, it is a pity that nostalgia only knocked at my door at the end of last year and not in 2017. Then I could have been rich. And of course I also asked my father if there were any folders with maps in the attic, believing against my better judgment that I would have kept those maps in perfect condition as a child, while they probably looked like the dog had run off with them .

So I started at zero, but now I’m drowning in the cards and, above all, knowledge. I am in Facebook groups, on Marktplaats, follow and bid on auctions and have an Instagram account where I share a collection and wisdom as if I hadn’t been working for a few months. Adult collectors talk about things like centering and whitening, because perfectly centered cards with no white corners are more desirable. About things like ‘miscuts’ and ‘holo bleeds’, production errors that you may have mourned in the past, but which you should be happy about now because of the rarity. And they know the value of everything, really everything, within seconds.

In the past, a map was simply ‘beautiful’.

Read also a piece about the Pokémon card hype from 2021.

Too mature

After the hype around Pokémon cards, collecting as an adult can no longer be seen separately from money. First of all because when you work you suddenly have money, at least more than as a child. That one holiday package is now – well, it should be possible – a whole box with 36 packages. The fun of opening is still there, but a lot less special, said an acquaintance, who I discovered also saved because he turned out to be in the same Facebook group. He wasn’t doing so well last summer and the nostalgic feeling of the packs of cards helped immensely. But, he said, as an adult you have access to more money, so you keep buying, and buying. At one point he spent 180 euros on a card he wanted. Ridiculous, he thought, and he stopped. After all, as an adult there is no father or mother who steps on the brakes for you. You are not collecting, you are shopping.

‘I spend too much on it’, always comes back in conversations with the aforementioned aliases, whom I know from an auction platform. Haha, just kidding, emoji – but it is. Only I, like many others, speak it well by seeing Pokémon cards as an investment. We may be reckless, but we are also rational. As a child you tear open packs of cards, hoping for that one rare card you are looking for. As an adult you know that the chance of a card from any pack being worth more than the pack itself is slim.

Of almost everything I have, I know I can potentially sell it for just as much. There is a scene in the horror comedy released earlier this year M3GAN which an adult collector suddenly understands. In it, a woman is pressured to unwrap vintage toys so her niece has something to play with. The sadness in her eyes, because she knows it’s worth almost nothing now… I also have those unopened boxes, in plain sight, in the living room. “How can you never feel the urge to open it?” my friend asked. Because now I think like an adult.

But when I stood in front of the closet with Pokémon stuff this week, I thought: maybe I’m too grown up. Because what am I actually collecting? Folders full of maps, special ones too, but there is no line in them, no thought behind them. Some collect a specific set to complete, or all cards of a specific Pokémon. My depressing conclusion was that I mainly collect deals now. I look at a card and see an amount of money. No clear goal other than the hunt itself.

That is also the paradox of collecting, online magazine wrote Vox already in 2021: the adults who have turned Pokémon cards into a lucrative trade are driving up prices so much that real collecting becomes more and more expensive.

I am currently the father who stood next to his son at the fair in Venray and looked up ticket prices on his phone so that he could say whether an exchange was fair. I’d like to be a little more of that little boy who doesn’t care because he just wants the card so badly.

So I grabbed the folder with the rarest cards and leafed through the pages in peace. Gosh, I thought, actually quite nice.