Restricting your record collecting / music enthusiasm to a single decade: C / D?

Permanently: well, each to his own, I wouldn't cope well.

sometimes I think I do this unconsciously, but mostly it has to do with particular artist/genre obsessions (funk, Tropicalia, Gary Numan, etc.)

You don't have to restrict yourself to one decade. Just try to stay about 5 years behind everything. It's a good way to pick up used CDs for cheap just as people are tiring of them.

Restricting oneself to a certain decade could be either classic or dud. Somebody who has say 10 thousand albums all from the 60s, from all over the world, all genres, could have a much more interesting collection than somebody who has a small sampling of stuff from every era. On the other hand someone who only collects old jazz for example is probably pretty dull. In other words, I think that being restricted by genre is much worse than being restricted by time.

Nowadays, with all of these new artists really getting into the new wave of New Wave, it's as if I died and went to musical heaven. I had been dreaming of a moment like this for YEARS, but I never for one moment thought it'd actually come true! So to hear of people complaining about this movement and wondering when it'll be time for another musical era's resurrection to come is REALLY irritating me, because I and others like me have been WAITING FOR SO LONG for something like this to happen. While people have been drooling over the mid '60s - mid '70s without ANYONE even raising a peep about how overplayed and tired that whole bullshit excuse of a decade's worth of pop culture was (sorry, I am SO not a fan of hippieism), I have to hear a lot of "Is this whole '80s resurrection thing being played out?" I mean, God, for Christ's sake, I just want to ENJOY this time! I want to be insanely excited that the music I loved best as a teenager is actually considered hip and cool now. And I don't want to do it with a bunch of killjoys in the background muttering and trying to shove the New Wave era aside -- probably in favor of muddy Woodstock-adulating shit in the same vein of the Black Crowes.