I’m coming to the conclusion that stamp collecting will never appeal to most young people. I keep running into this time and time again. They can’t imagine doing anything that isn’t all about money.

That’s not philately. Never has been and never will be. That’s why the young are largely not going to be interested because collecting isn’t about money, it’s about enjoyment.

I just saw another example. Someone posted that they were starting collecting after they got an “inheritance” of stamps. First off, something left in a person’s house when they die, that’s not an inheritance. If they specifically put it in their will that you get their collection, that’s an inheritance. Otherwise, it’s just junk. However, when I pointed out that the stamps weren’t worth anything and if they want to collect, they need to stop caring about value, they got mad. How dare I say that something they’re going to spend time and money doing isn’t an investment!

Sorry, but that’s not what stamp collecting is.

That’s why I think stamp collecting is largely dead in the water, because the vast majority of young people who might take it up, they’re not doing it for the right reasons. That’s not to say that none of them are, but the number of stamp collectors now is really dwarfed by the number of people trying to sell stamps. The young, by and large, can’t imagine doing something with no financial future to it, but they don’t have the vast sums of money necessary to build a collection that will be worth anything. Long gone are the days when you could find a stamp and it would be worth a ton of money. The only way to make a valuable collection is to spend a lot of money to acquire expensive stamps.

The young just don’t have the money to do that, nor the time or patience to earn the money necessary. They want instant gratification, which is why all of the stamp groups and forums are filled to the brim with people who are trying to make a quick buck off of something that they found in a flea market or were given or was left over by someone who died.

That’s why we’re doomed. Stamps, today, are just worthless pieces of paper with pictures on them. Pretty much anything issued in the past hundred years isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. I collect because I enjoy collecting. It’s baked into my DNA. Modern kids don’t seem to have that. Only one of my kids got my collector gene and she understands that the stuff she enjoys, it will never be worth a damn thing. Collections are almost always a losing proposition. That’s how they’ve always been. The earliest stamp collectors bought them knowing they wouldn’t be worth anything in their lifetimes. Some people were wallpapering their walls with stamps. Collecting is purely for the enjoyment of doing it. It’s not about making money.

People need to figure that out and I don’t think modern kids can do that, at least not at this point in their lives.