Every age has its greatest fears, and what the early twenty-first Century is most afraid of is boredom. Our world provides constant diversion. Nearly everyone under the age of thirty is perpetually texting and looking at their phone. My TV has over 700 stations (and still nothing to watch). Tired of the book you are reading? Amazon has literally millions of books available for instant download. Most readers spend more time shopping for books than they do reading them. Instant gratification is expected in all phases of life, and people can tolerate every feeling save boredom. Fifty years ago, life had far fewer diversions. We had three television stations, a few local book stores, and people had to develop the skills to figure out what they were going to do with their time.
Many commentators have speculated that the current penchant for instant gratification and instant entertainment is one of the reasons that philately is having trouble competing with other hobbies and interests for the attention of the young. One can get a bit bored with pieces of paper. They don't ring bells and light up colors and murder aliens like video games. But it is just this quiet and pensive quality of our hobby that will continue to attract adherents and make philately strong for the foreseeable future. Remember, philately is a niche hobby; it has never appealed to the broad mass of people. It requires education and a desire to keep constantly educating yourself; it requires dedication and the pleasure that comes from maintaining commitment and attaining long sought goals (just as an aside, divorce rates for philatelists are much lower than of the national rate; so collectors are not just committed to their hobby). And most importantly for our age and time, it requires the tolerance of boredom (and even sometimes dissatisfaction) that comes with not always being able to get what we want when we want it.
Tolerance of tedium and frustration is one of the markers of personal success, and philately both attracts people with good frustration tolerance and teaches that tolerance as it confers its pleasures. Collectors learn to enjoy the search for what they want and discover that finding the desired stamp and cover that you need at an attractive price is a wonderful payoff, but it is the quest itself, the process of collecting, that creates the most pleasure. It is no wonder to me that most of the older, serious collectors that I know are people content with themselves and their situations. They have been attracted to a hobby that teaches life's most important lessons: money can't buy you everything you want, and we all leave with our collections incomplete.