The Dark Ages

[AllThatJazz]

Growing up as a young kid Lego has always been my number one interest, I was just too crazy for those little bricks. My interest surpassed those of my classmates who seem to "grow out" of lego by 11 or 12 years old. I was 14 and still going strong. I began to explore other mediums such as brick filming and simply could not see myself giving it up. It was part of me. Now 19 going on 20, I seemed to have unintentionally walked away from my lego hobby, occupied with other interests and relationships. After all, isn't setting aside our toys just part of growing up? Or does it have to be? Despite this something refuses to allow me to sell or get rid of my lego collection. Something still pesters me from time to time, just itching to make another brick film or build a new MOC. I will find myself unintentionally watching brickfilms and MOC videos on youtube out of sheer curiosity, or something more. I understand I am in the midst of one of the most dangerous times for dark ages and I wanted to ask how you combat your dark ages, what your experiences have been like, or anything dark ages related. I hate to say I am embarrassed to continue this hobby, but as a college student the feedback I could expect to get from my peers is inevitably negative. Any and all experiences are welcome!

[deraven]

Hi AllThatJazz - Welcome to EB!

I think the simple answer is that you don't need to "combat" the dark ages at all; either you're interested in Lego, or you're not.  Sounds like you're a bit in-between, being interested generally but not to the point of breaking out your physical bricks and building something.  That's OK too.  My best piece of advice is simply this:  If you think you're not into Lego anymore, just don't get rid of your collection!  Pack it up and stick it in storage, but don't let it go.  That seems to be the biggest regret we hear around the boards when people pick up the hobby again later.

Now, the not-so-simply bit is this:  Who cares what other people think of your hobby?  If you feel a lot of peer-pressure... I'm going to sound like a parent here, but... maybe those folks aren't great friends if they tease you about Lego.  Plus, Lego is something that has a huge adult following.  I bet if you go to the engineering and sciences department at your college you'll find plenty of folks that happily use Lego there!  

If it's something that brings you happiness and perhaps even has therapeutic qualities, there's really no reason not to enjoy it.  You just need to be secure enough about yourself to either let go of people who are unfairly teasing you about it or simply ignore them.  I understand that can be hard, and you don't need to go around broadcasting your love of Lego every moment to draw attention to it, but what if that same group of people teased you for not eating some food that you don't like because "you're an adult now and should like XXXX"?  Would you eat something you hate every time you see them, or would you just say, "Nah, I just don't like it" and have something else?

Do what feels right, and if that means you take a pause on Lego for now, that's fine.  Just keep it around so you can indulge later when you inevitably come back to it!  

[AllThatJazz]

6 minutes ago, deraven said:

Hi AllThatJazz - Welcome to EB!

I think the simple answer is that you don't need to "combat" the dark ages at all; either you're interested in Lego, or you're not.  Sounds like you're a bit in-between, being interested generally but not to the point of breaking out your physical bricks and building something.  That's OK too.  My best piece of advice is simply this:  If you think you're not into Lego anymore, just don't get rid of your collection!  Pack it up and stick it in storage, but don't let it go.  That seems to be the biggest regret we hear around the boards when people pick up the hobby again later.

Now, the not-so-simply bit is this:  Who cares what other people think of your hobby?  If you feel a lot of peer-pressure... I'm going to sound like a parent here, but... maybe those folks aren't great friends if they tease you about Lego.  Plus, Lego is something that has a huge adult following.  I bet if you go to the engineering and sciences department at your college you'll find plenty of folks that happily use Lego there!  

If it's something that brings you happiness and perhaps even has therapeutic qualities, there's really no reason not to enjoy it.  You just need to be secure enough about yourself to either let go of people who are unfairly teasing you about it or simply ignore them.  I understand that can be hard, and you don't need to go around broadcasting your love of Lego every moment to draw attention to it, but what if that same group of people teased you for not eating some food that you don't like because "you're an adult now and should like XXXX"?  Would you eat something you hate every time you see them, or would you just say, "Nah, I just don't like it" and have something else?

Do what feels right, and if that means you take a pause on Lego for now, that's fine.  Just keep it around so you can indulge later when you inevitably come back to it!  

Thanks a ton for your kind words! I have been away from Lego for some time now but something keeps picking up my interest. Its so great to talk with other likeminded people with more experience then I, so once again thanks!

[deraven]

4 hours ago, AllThatJazz said:

Thanks a ton for your kind words! I have been away from Lego for some time now but something keeps picking up my interest. Its so great to talk with other likeminded people with more experience then I, so once again thanks!

Sure - that's what the boards are for!

I started by Dark (or at least Dim) Ages around the middle of high school.  When I was in college, I was still tangentially interested in Lego, but bought almost none.  I had maybe a shoebox-ish volume of bricks with me that I'd use kind of like a fidget toy and absentmindedly "doodle" out geometric shapes and such just to keep my hands busy while studying - that kind of thing - but didn't really do anything with sets.  If you had asked me then, I'd have probably said that Lego is a great toy, and something I really enjoyed as a kid, but I wouldn't have thought of it as something I still used or "played with" at that point.

Then, towards the end of my initial college years, I started paying more attention to Lego boards like this (back then it was Lugnet, when that was still a vibrant and diverse community), and while I was enthralled by some of the amazing MOCs and participated in discussions, but still didn't build anything.  But I did start paying more attention to the sets that Lego was releasing again.  I picked up a couple of Star Wars sets when those came out, and the calming nature of building a set and the joy of building in general came flooding back at that point.  I didn't go crazy as my funds were pretty limited, but from there my collection steadily grew again.

In the grad school years, as I mentioned in my other reply above, it wasn't really something I pushed out there to people, but not something I hid in any way either.  At my desk at work I had a bunch of the Star Wars micro-ships and some of the minifigs, and the Star Wars element was enough to bridge the gap for most people who might have thought it was a little strange otherwise... so that didn't hurt.   And then- picture this!  A bunch of mid-20-something folks over at my apartment for dinner and games, and we're talking about tabletop role-playing games, and I mention there are a ton of options, even BrikWars because I had plenty of Lego there at home if they wanted to play a Miniature RPG.  So then I let folks into the 2nd bedroom of my apartment that had a significant amount of Lego, and maybe 10 minutes later, just like when you were young and got a group of, like 8-year-old kids from the neighborhood to come over to your place to play Lego, there were all these grad students digging around in boxes of bricks and making all kinds of goofy things, purely for the fun of it.

Fun is universal.  You just need to let it happen, and eventually other folks will get it too.  

[Robianco]

I'm 44 and my whole childhood was Star Wars figures. A very tiny amount of Lego but not much... but Star Wars figures were every single day of my life. Once I got to 14 or 15 I generally got interested in other things... music, girls etc... that continued straight through Uni and into working life. Sold all my old Kenner Star Wars figures when i was around 22 after I finished Uni and went back home. I've had a couple of moments where I thought it would be nice to have them but to be honest they've long since passed. I don't miss them at all. I don't consider them important and I'd have probably sold them by now even if I hadn't then. I've since got into Hot Toys and Sideshow figures. I'm being selective as these things are expensive but I'll take 20 Hot Toys figures over 100s of Kenner or Hasbro figures. These things are amazing. My wife hates them. She'll get over it.

It was in work when someone got the first Lego SW Snowspeeder set and thankfully the three of us in the studio were all SW fans and we all liked it. None of us were that arsed about whether anyone else thought it was cool. In the last 20 years since then I've gotten massively into Lego and certain themes and then sold up on certain themes. I was hugely into custom minifigures... then sold them all. I'm now strictly an OT SW fan but I'm not a completist of sets... I buy what I like... simple rule.

A friend of mine came round to my new house around 6 moths ago and walked into my office. UCS Slave 1, UCS Red Five, Death Star, UCS Tumbler, AT-AT, AT-ST on the bookshelf, various Hot Toys SW figures, Batman books, Hellboy books, 2000AD books... he just turned round and said 'You've never changed'. That's all. As an Adult I didn't need to be anything else but myself. I took a photo of the 60 or so Lego Batman figures I had (all pre-TLBM) which had lots of customs, which I think has had around 7,000 views on Flickr. At Christmas my wife sent it to one of my friends to clean it up and crop stuff out so she could get a canvas printed for me for my office. These are people who aren't fans of Lego... or maybe any type of toy... but I've known them since I was 10 yrs old. We're friends... I'm me. We've had 30 years of life experiences together and as friends we all accept what makes each other ourselves. 

We go out drinking with a wider bunch of lads when we meet up and I've only known some of those for 10 years.. maybe less. Some of them might even have some light hearted banter about owning toys if they knew... Who cares? People have all their own kinks and interests. I found out one of them collects watches and sometimes gets all his watches out on a table, wears white cotton gloves and polishes them... winds them and sets the time. He's a watch geek. So what? We all have something. I'm a season ticket holder at Everton FC. I go to football matches... one of the most laddish, non-toy collecting pastimes you can have. Every single person that goes to that ground can sing songs knowing all the words to songs over decades, wear football shirts with people's names on the back, quote stats, recall goalscorers from various games across the last few seasons.. they're geeks. All geeks in their own way. I've been to evenings with ex-players and at the end of the Q&A or the meal there's a massive queue of people getting autographs... no different from going to a con and getting them from an actor.

In short. Give less of a shit about what people think. Like what you like and you'll be happy.

[ShaydDeGrai]

On March 19, 2018 at 4:32 PM, AllThatJazz said:

(snip...) I hate to say I am embarrassed to continue this hobby, but as a college student the feedback I could expect to get from my peers is inevitably negative. Any and all experiences are welcome!

I appreciate where you are coming from.  I grew up with Lego-envy, never able to afford the really cool sets and had a dark age forced upon me when I needed to save for college and really couldn't afford much of anything (I kept what Lego I had but didn't play with it much because it just reminded me that I could afford to buy any of the new stuff that looked so inviting).  After college I _was_ in a position to start buying again - but I didn't.  I'd gotten out of the habit of building, true, but more to the point, part of me was so busy "being an adult" and having "adult" friends and "adult" hobbies, that I forgot to focus on being me.

I think most people eventually reach a point where they look back and realize just how foolish they'd been at some point decades earlier (be it a first crush, a favored pop-star, questionable grooming and/or fashion sense, whatever).  Too often, our foolish mistake is putting too much weight behind the opinions of people who are making foolish mistakes of their own.  I remember something a Thermodynamics professor of mine said on the first day of class: "Don't bother copying answers from your friends, your friends may be morons and you'll be just as stupid as they are if you assume their wrong answer is better than your own.  Better to be uniquely wrong than a wrong, boring sheep."  

If I could go back in time and tell 22 year old me that it's fine to play with Lego and that it doesn't matter if Carol, Kevin and John all think it's childish, I would do it in a heartbeat.  (Of course, knowing how arrogant and foolish I was at 22, I probably wouldn't listen to myself until Future Me revealed that Carol was sleeping with Kevin behind my back and John still has all his Kenner Star Wars action figures from 1977 in a foot locker in his bedroom...)  I wasted several years and thousands of dollars on hobbies and distractions that were never nearly as satisfying as my return to Lego and I wish I'd had the courage and forethought to embrace my inner AFOL much earlier.

 

On March 19, 2018 at 8:17 PM, deraven said:

(snip...) I bet if you go to the engineering and sciences department at your college you'll find plenty of folks that happily use Lego there!  

Actually, I used to be a professor in an engineering department and I not only played with Lego in my spare time, I used it in my classes and assigned design and prototyping projects with it as homework.

 

In the end, you need to focus on what makes you happy, embraces your innate creativity, and, if possible, finds a way to make the world a better place while doing it.  If Lego makes you happy, do it.  If you make a brick film that puts a smile on a stranger's face or inspires someone else to get into the hobby, this is a good thing.  If your friends can't see this, it's their problem, not yours.

[ColletArrow]

Well, this is interesting, as I think I'm in a similar boat to you @AllThatJazz. I'm now in my first-year of University, studying Civil Engineering, and wondering how I'm going to continue this wonderful hobby that's kept me entertained for, well, most of my life so far.

Going back a bit, the thing that helped me during my high-school years was finding (accidentally, of course) another student in my year who enjoyed LEGO. I can't remember how we discovered we shared the hobby, but we instantly became friends. Interestingly, of the people I knew at that school, he is the only one I'm still in regular contact with. We got pretty used to being "nerdy" at that school together; it seemed many really weren't and hated you just for being able to do maths (it was probably only one or two, but you extrapolate when you're young). Continuing to VI form, I found yet more "LEGO nerds" to involve myself with. They used their bricks for tabletop games rather than model-making as I do, but the common medium was enough to link us. Overall, surrounding oneself with like people helps. That's why we're here, after all.

Back to the now, I seem to be entering a "dim age". As my bricks are all at home, and I don't particularly want to start spending money on more (I never did spend much on them in the first place), I've switched to using LDD and these boards to keep me interested. I just have a lot of catching-up building to do when I go home for the holidays! It's far from ideal, but on the other hand I'm here to work and study, not build.

I hope my incoherent ramblings are useful, or even just slightly interesting. Either way, it's nice to know there are others out there walking the same path and having the same doubts.