For our weekly TBB Asks feature, nothing is off the table. We might be asking our staff and readers whimsical questions about building sets from memory, but we might also delve deep into their psyches and get really personal. Well, OK, it’ll still be light-hearted fun – but this week, we’re going dark. Dark age! TBB Asks: did you have a ‘dark age’? If so, what brought you out of it? For those unfamiliar with the lingo, a ‘dark age’ is a period in one’s life where LEGO is not present. Sounds awful, right? For many this happens between childhood and at some point in adulthood, perhaps because LEGO isn’t seen as cool when you’re a teenager. But LEGO is always cool. Right, everyone? … Anyone?
Who are we kidding – obviously it is. But even our seasoned staff aren’t immune to a dark age, so let’s see who had one. And if you did too, let us know what made you come back to the hobby!
Daniel: I never stopped building with LEGO but I did slow down a bit during my college years. The launch of LEGO Star Wars definitely brought me out of my slump.
Kimberly: I stopped buying but not building every now and then. Having children was a huge catalyst to coming out of it. We would build together, they would move on and leave me building for hours.
Steve: I can’t remember when it [my dark age] started, but the adult hobby definitely started when I got a job in a toy store. 1992?
Bre: Maybe I’ll call it a “dark bluish-gray age” instead of a straight up dark age. I was heavily involved in sports and other school activities in both high school and college. I was never home. My schedule didn’t leave much time to build. However, if the opportunity presented itself, I was all in. When I graduated college I dove back in, straight into the deep end.
Chuck: I had a dark age from late high school until my kids were around 3-4 years old and we brought out the “plastic inheritance” that I’d saved in a few totes in the basement. I very quickly realized I still really enjoyed building and things have only escalated from there!
Kyle: I tried to have a dark age in college, but then went back to buying sets. I had the Death Star II assembled in my dorm room. And no, it was not a wise purchase for me at the time.
Ralph: Nope. I didn’t buy Lego in my late teens/early twenties for almost a decade, but even during that time, I never stopped building.
Jake: I never went through a period of not engaging with LEGO at all, but between the ages of 25 and 40 I mostly stopped building my own creations, only building official sets and dragging around my massive collection with every intention of doing more original builds, but rarely making more than a doodle. The modular line kept me from drifting away, as it appeared right when my interest in collecting themed sets was waning. I still struggle with carving out time for building my own projects as it competes with other hobbies like hiking and board games (and writing about other people’s creations!). When I was young, a friend and I built displays for a chain of toy stores and even got featured on the local news and a magazine for our creation, so I put a lot of pressure on myself that I have to return to epic builds. Lately, I’ve been finding joy in returning to building on a more intimate scale. Now I have a 10 year old kid and she likes building so sometimes build together.
Theo: I never thought of myself as having one, but the analysis graphs of my Brickset collection show a very definite dip in the number of sets owned from around the time I was a teenager at boarding school. I think the hype around Star Wars’ return in 2015 is where I started to have more interest, but I started university at the same time, so I didn’t have any money for LEGO. (if I had I don’t know if I wouldn’t made a similar purchase to Kyle!)
I kept tabs on various LEGO blogs and on Flickr, but wasn’t u
ntil 2020 that I fully immersed myself back in the LEGO community. I joined Eurobricks not long after everything shut down, so I consider that my ‘year zero’ for being an AFOL. Shout-out to the Star Wars forum for hooking me back in!
There’s a definite theme here! It seems we have our TBB staff’s kids to thank for their return to the best hobby in the world. That and Star Wars!
Tell us about your own Dark Age experience and how you found your way back to the hobby.
Definitely when my children got to the age where we were buying them sets. Most of my childhood sets were left behind in the family home with my younger siblings, so it was a matter of starting again. It also coincides with the AFOL community forming on the internet and old sets coming up on eBay.
I had two Dark Ages, when I was in my early teens I lost my box of LEGO during multiple moves within a few years. It was a bummer but I was kind of being a teenager so it wasn’t heartbreaking. When I turned 21 I had a job that wasn’t hand-to-mouth and a kitchen table I wasn’t using an LEGO put out this amazing Snowspeeder set and then Adventurers came out and I just snowballed back into LEGO, until I wasn’t living alone anymore and I didn’t really have the space to tinker and putter with bricks, so I packed up my lego and sold it on ebay with pretty much instant regret. In my 30’s I had a really well paying jon and a new home of my own and they openned a LEGO store near my work and I just went wild for a few years and I haven’t gone dark since.
When LEGO comes out with a new set that spans across to other hobbies. In my case, the Creator Expert F40 2015 set which got some attention from car blogs in 2015.
I had my dark age when I was attending high school and early years of university. At the end of study at university I discovered LDD (LEGO Digital Designer) and it took me back to LEGO. I started building digitally and then began buying Creator sets. Little bit later I came back to LEGO Technic.