Do you have any collections?

You want a taste of reality? 

Some people collect coins. Some collect books. Others collect people.

I’m not talking about fans, followers, or even friends. I’m talking about something darker—more obsessive, more primal. 

I’m talking about the human collector: the type of person who sees people not as people, but as possessions. Objects to be acquired, admired, consumed. 

Souls turned into trophies.

And in its most grotesque, literal form—I’m talking about serial killers.

It’s easy to dismiss serial killers as aberrations of the human condition, but the truth is more unsettling. 

They aren’t some separate species. They’re part of us. They are the extreme expression of tendencies that exist on a spectrum. 

Control, obsession, domination. 

The need to imprint ourselves onto others, to make them stay.

Serial killers don’t just kill. They curate. They orchestrate. They collect.

They take trophies: locks of hair, a piece of clothing, a photograph, a body part—not for sentiment, but for power. 

These aren’t simple mementos of connection. They’re fetish objects. Magical tokens. Each item becomes a doorway back into the moment they took everything. The moment when they got to feel what it was like to be god. 

It’s about reliving that control. 

Repossessing the unpossessable.

Sometimes, the victim isn’t even the target. The killer is staging a scene for an unseen audience—law enforcement, the media, God, themselves. The murder becomes a performance, the body a canvas. 

And the collection? 

The collection is the story they’re telling. 

A hidden mythology, written in flesh.

Take Jeffrey Dahmer. He wanted to keep people—not just kill them. He longed for them to stay, to never leave. He tried to turn people into statues of submission, frozen in silence. 

He didn’t want sex. 

He wanted possession. 

He wanted presence.

Or Dennis Rader—BTK. His murders were carefully categorized, archived. Each victim became an entry in his self-authored scripture of power. He wasn’t just a killer. He was a librarian of death.

These people weren’t just violent. They were obsessed with curation. 

The serial killer, at that level, is a twisted archivist. A collector of human experiences, of souls, of symbols. It’s not enough to destroy a person—

they need to own them. 

Define them. 

Absorb them.

And if that feels far away from us, maybe we’re not looking closely enough.

Because there are softer versions of this. 

The narcissist who collects lovers like taxidermy. 

The manipulator who hoards the wounded under the guise of healing. 

The influencer who feeds on attention like an algorithm in human skin. 

Digital collectors, energy harvesters, savior-complex hoarders—all performing the same ritual with different masks.

Control disguised as care. 

Possession disguised as connection. 

Worship disguised as love.

The truth is, our culture breeds collectors. We reward those who dominate attention, who absorb identity, who seduce and discard. 

We build systems that treat people like metrics. Souls as data points. Stories as content. Everything reduced to collection.

But the most dangerous collectors are the ones who believe they’re just trying to connect—when really, they’re trying to consume.

The serial killer is just the most honest expression of that hunger.

And maybe that’s why they fascinate us. Because somewhere, deep down, we know the impulse isn’t as alien as we pretend. 

We want to keep people. Make them stay. Control how they remember us. Control how they leave.

But people aren’t coins. They aren’t books. They aren’t trophies.

They are mirrors.

And if you try to collect too many mirrors, eventually you’ll be staring into a shattered version of yourself—

multiplied, distorted, bleeding back.

Welcome to Thunderdome, bitch. 

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As for me… I just collect books. 

(Seriously, four book shelves double-stacked—that’s books behind books—storage containers full of paperbacks. Roommates think it’s a problem. They can’t yet see how there is a quiet, modern day book burning happening. Books are becoming digitized, meaning they can be altered, censored, and even deleted. Why else did Amazon call its e-reader the Kindle and Fire? Why name your book reading device after something that destroys books? In Google, we trust.)