It must be one of mine too, nothing else explains spending hours sorting, cleaning, identifying a mess of rusty/dirty tools and toolbox.
I guess it's the hunter instinct, and hoping to find a treasure among the trash.
I agree; it’s like hunting, maybe more like gleaning. You know someone has been there before you, but you hope they missed something.
But it’s like a lot of other things too. I think the root behavior is hard-wired into our anatomy. Our environment is comprised of a lot of things we are indifferent to, thoroughly mixed with a few things of high interest: I seek and grasp the red fruit on the bush, ignoring the green foliage; I pluck the mollusks off the rocks, ignoring the masses of algae; I pick the few flecks of gold from the pan, tossing the black sand. No one familiar with these activities finds them strange or irrational. Our bodies and brains work in harmony to distinguish and sort the useful from the useless. That’s the source of the pleasure - exercising our natural behavior.
But apply this same behavior to something that isn’t edible or wearable, and you get the look. And honestly, it’s true: equipped with only one right hand, do I really need a hundred handsaws? No.
But I think the hoarding behavior is natural, too: we are smart enough to imagine a future where said item will be scarce and needed. It’s when the potential benefits of hoarding the objects are outweighed by the inconvenience or actual hazards of storing them that the behavior becomes clinical.
So numismatics is widely perceived to be okay, because most people perceive at least the face value of the coins as positive. Philately is somewhat weird, but harmless, because though cancelled stamps cannot be reused, they don’t take up much space. PEZ dispensers, obsolete ammunition, explosive chemicals, used adult diapers...progressively fringy.
On that kind of continuum, I think tools (rusty or not) are okay.
