Confessions of a Lego Maniac
Why a middle aged man began building Legos.
“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”
This Nietzsche quote sums up my relationship with Legos pretty well. For many years i was a Lego mocker, someone who thought that Legos were baby toys and who scoffed at my friends who collected and built the modular brick sets. I was a grown man, I thought, and the days of snapping bricks together were long behind me.
And yet today I type this next to two huge, expensive Lego sets, sets that have thousands of pieces and took me days upon days to build. I now sit at night, hunched over a tray with Lego pieces on it, building new sets. I have come to understand the relationship between certain bricks, and I have begun to be able to see how the pieces work together to create something out of seemingly nothing. I have even begun inheriting my friends’ kids’ unwanted sets, because it’s become known that I am now a Lego guy.
How did I get here? It all began shortly after Brittany died; the days were long and empty. I have the genetic disposition towards believing that buying things will solve my inner pain, and so I was cruising around Amazon aimlessly when I came across a Lego set that piqued my interest - the Seinfeld set. It’s a recreation of Jerry’s apartment from the show, but it’s constructed as the set of the show, so it has big klieg lights and stuff (which I don’t think actually add much to the build, by the way). In her final months Brittany had done a full Seinfeld rewatch, and I often joined her and would tell her my own New York City stories inspired by whatever trouble the gang was getting into during that particular episode. It was nice, and it was fun, and the idea of building this set for her took on some meaning for me.
I didn’t count on two things: one, I didn’t count on how fun the process of building would be. More on that soon. The other thing I didn’t count on - it would spark the collector area of my brain. I didn’t realize this, but Lego sets retire. They go away. They become pricey on the secondary market. No Lego set is forever, and they usually stop making them a year or two after releasing them. You have this window of time to snag one.
I’m a collector. I’ve worked hard to repress this part of myself, but it still arises at times, and the idea of these sets being limited edition activated some part of my brain that had lain dormant for a little while. And then something else happened: I found a good deal on the Seinfeld set, and as any collector knows if you don’t buy something when it’s a good deal you’re basically losing money, because you’re going to end up buying the thing anyway.
From there I stumbled into the Beatles Yellow Submarine set, which was also retired but which I again found at a good price (I used the site StockX, which was created as a sneaker reseller site but which actually has a robust Lego economy. What’s nice is that the site double checks all items to make sure they’re complete; while that adds fees, it beats buying stuff on eBay and finding out you got rooked).
By now I was feeling a little hooked, but maybe I still had time to get out, to forswear the hobby. Unfortunately I stumbled into the Star Wars side of Lego sets, and now I am a hopeless addict. Here I found sets that were almost insane builds, sets that make huge ships that now have begun clogging up my shelf space. I found sets that are beyond my financial ability - an $800 giant MIllennium Falcon! - but which offer me an aspirational savings goal.
None of this would matter if the process wasn’t fun. I have bought a couple of Eaglemoss ship models in my day, and they’re nice, but they just go on display and I never think about them again. These Lego sets, though, they become a nightly ritual while I’m building one. They offer me a daily oasis of calm.
A couple of years ago I was diagnosed with clinical inattention, which makes a lot of sense because I have a hard time sitting still and I find that my attention has, over the past twenty years, all but disintegrated. Doing something with my hands really helps, though, and over the years I’ve plucked up a few tactile hobbies, like cross stitching. It’s hard for me to sit in front of the TV these days and actually watch something, but if my hands are going I can focus better on the movie or show.
This is part of what Lego does for me; I watched all of The Righteous Gemstones while building Lego sets. I had wanted to watch the show - in fact, Brittany had really wanted us to watch it together because she knew I would love it - but sitting down and doing it was tough. The Lego building activity gave me the right focus to sit and enjoy the show.
Like I said, I had taken up cross stitching a few years ago, but the hobby didn’t quite stick. There are a lot of reasons, but one of them was that the action of sewing didn’t give me the pleasure I wanted out of it. It wasn’t quite tactile in the right way. Lego, though… the satisfaction of feeling those bricks snap into place is unparalleled. Especially when they’re more complicated or stranger bricks that require a little bit of work to click.
The bricks themselves are delightful to hold and touch. The smooth sides contrasted with the bumpy tops gives me something to play with in my hands when I’m not actively putting pieces together. And when the set is a good one, like Yellow Submarine, the colors of the bricks themselves are wonderful Visually they’re simply good to look at
What keeps me coming back, though, might be the feeling I have when I’m about a third of the way through building a set. I do not have a brain for spacial relations, I do not have a good understanding of how things fit together. I just don’t see the world that way. When I’m in the early stages of building a set I’m often not really sure what I’m looking at or what I’m doing - there will be some kind of abstract shape with many layers. I trust the instructions and just carry one.
But then there’s a moment where I snap a brick into place and all of a sudden I fundamentally understand what I am building. It all becomes clear and obvious, and that perspective shift is a joy. Eureka! I get it! And from there what had been a kind of abstract project coalesces into something meaningful.
Building Legos has actually been positive for me in other ways. I am an impatient man, and I am given to frustration (this, apparently, is tied in with my clinical inattention), and Lego sets can challenge me to remain patient and keep my cool. I was building the Ultimate Collector Series Landspeeder, working on one of the engines, when a piece fell out. The thing with these big sets is that you can’t just always pop a piece back in; sometimes you have to basically disassemble everything you were working on in order to get access to what you need. These sets get very complicated, and so it was with the Landspeeder. The little piece, which would connect this engine to the main body of the model, popped off and I knew I was going to have to redo about a dozen or more steps of construction.
Very normally I’d just give up at that point. “Fuck this,” would be my mantra in these situations. But the Lego was expensive enough, and I had spent enough time on it, and it was big enough that I felt that I needed to actually get this done. I called it quits for that night, but the next day I came back and I calmly disassembled the engine and got back to work on it, this time making sure I was putting it together well enough that the piece wouldn’t snap off again. Patience, who could have imagined?
There’s one last secret element of my conversion to Legos. When I was a kid I went through - as all nerds do - a model building phase. The problem is that I don’t have good hand/eye coordination. I was clumsy gluing the parts together. I was no good at affixing decals. And when it came to painting the things - Jesus, what a mess. I would build a model and it would end up looking like a misshapen horror, nothing like the gorgeous boat or whatever on the box. The hobby intrigued me, but it left me feeling like a loser.
Side note: it did introduce me to the joys of huffing glue. The thing about having a substance abuse disorder is that you’re born with it, and even at 11 years old you’re getting high off weird shit.
Lego is different. The models come out looking pretty good; you can definitely fuck it up, you can make mistakes, you can half-ass the decals they sometime include in the sets, but generally speaking because you’re using building blocks the thing you end up with looks an awful lot like the thing on the box. It’s gratifying to spend all this time on a project and to be happy with the outcome. They look good - if slightly embarrassing - on my shelves.
The lesson I never learn is that you often become what you mock. How does this happen? I think that, especially when it comes to nerd stuff, we mock things because we are afraid of the affinity we have for it. We mock to draw a line in the sand: “I’m a dork but at least I’m not a LEGO dork.” But the truth is that, given enough exposure to the thing we’re making fun of, we can become connoisseurs of that thing.
The reality is that being a nerd is about liking stuff; as much as there is a ton of negativity associated with the culture, the heart of nerddom is the fact that you like a thing. As I get older and farther from the humiliations of my youth spent in a world very hostile to people who read comics and bought toys I find myself able to sink into this aspect of my fandom with more ease. I can just like a thing; I don’t have to keep a wall up between me and it in order to maintain a certain level of cool, I don’t have to draw a line so that I don't get too into it. I just let myself like it.
Maybe that’s the final appeal of discovering Lego in middle age - I have finally given myself permission to just enjoy these things I like. What a concept.