The Struggle Is Real — The Challenges Of Being An Adult Fan Of LEGO

It’s a hobby that we take far. Very far. Further than many, and that can be scary…

Hey, that rhymed! 😁 You might think a hobby is just a hobby, and that’s true to some extent. Plenty of people have hobbies, though not as many as you’d think, and that number seems to be declining. When it comes to LEGO as a hobby, it’s a thing of its own. While I wouldn’t go as far as calling it a subculture, there are certainly traits that make an adult fan of LEGO (AFOL) different — though not unique — from many other hobbyists, and in a world that is embracing diversity more and more, I think it’s worth delving a little deeper into the community and its members who see the world in colourful bricks.

Some studded context

Before getting into the daily challenges of AFOLs, I thought it’s best to understand the origins of both the community and the person who would eventually identify as an AFOL. While everyone’s story varies to some extent or another, there are certain commonalities that most of us AFOLs connect on almost instantly.

We got into LEGO as children. It was most likely a present we got for Christmas or birthday because our parents thought it was a good idea to experiment with our interests. LEGO bricks help form neural pathways as children, develop creativity, per Manali Mitra can be a great workshop tool for organisations and, as Andi Nara suggests, can also help with stroke recovery. Building blocks are a fairly common toy, and many AFOLs today had parents who themselves were exposed to LEGO at one point or another and enjoyed playing with them.

The LEGO hobby is “genetic”. It often gets passed on from parents and grandparents to children.

In my case, it was a family friend from the UK who brought me my first-ever LEGO set, at the age of 7. From that point on, it was clear to my parents that these bricks were my favourite toy and cost be damned, they did their absolute best to surprise me two or three times a year with a set, even if it was the smallest of sets on the shelves — think a $10–25 set today. The most expensive set I managed to buy as a kid was a helicopter that would be in the $30 range today.

Growing up with LEGO does not necessarily mean there are no gaps or hiatuses in our active interest in the hobby. Once I discovered girls, LEGO became a passive interest. Something I cared deeply about, but wasn’t actively involved in building sets. This seems pretty universal. Getting involved in relationships, college, basically the shift from teenage years to adulthood tends to put LEGO on the back burner. But…

The moment an AFOL becomes financially independent, the true fan comes out to play.

Getting comfortable financially tends to be a trigger for many of us. Suddenly, the sets we’ve always wanted, are within reach. Suddenly, we find ourselves not just longing for the $50+ sets, but also being able to afford them. We also realise just how much the range of LEGO sets has expanded over the few years we haven’t kept a close eye on the hobby, and that’s when we go nuts.

This whole craze has been going on for decades, but LEGO only really understood the adult fan community in 1998, with the advent of the LEGO Mindstorms collection. Tormod Askildsen, responsible for AFOL engagement at the LEGO Group, admitted that customer feedback from the LEGO Mindstorms fans single-handedly changed his perception of the adult community they inadvertently built over the years. As someone deeply passionate about LEGO robotics in general, I can genuinely understand the fans. It really did cater to the adult, inventive builder. I myself have built numerous Mindstorms MOCs (MOC = My Own Creation), like the Synesthesia demo or the chromatic smart lock.

Did The LEGO Movie in 2014 help fuel the craze? Perhaps. But by then the AFOL community was firmly established, and being an AFOL came with a sense of pride.

On a more personal note, I think what managed to propel the community into the mainstream was the LEGO IDEAS line, where fans could present their own ideas and compete for the coveted opportunity to see the Danish toymaker turn their MOCs into actual sets. Many years into the program, that is still the theme I care most about. I tend to buy most of the sets, even if just to support the original fan creator, as they get a cut from every sale.

But it is a quirky, sometimes challenging hobby

They’re just toys, though, aren’t they? Yes, and when you put it like that, it’s hard to imagine anything else but endless hours of fun. How could one possibly associate colourful little bricks with any kind of struggle, but let me tell you, the struggle is real. Having been a fan for three decades, I can confidently state there’s more to this hobby than meets the sole — that’s a very LEGO pun, and if you got it, congratulations, you either hate or love LEGO. 😉

Let’s start with stigma. I am well aware that seeing stigma and LEGO in the same sentence is the last thing you’d expect, but it’s real, and I feel it will take years for the community and its members to be fully embraced. To the public, some hobbies are more appropriate than others for an adult. Add to that the fact that guys are often seen as utterly incapable of growing up, and you got yourself a pretty tough situation. Being a LEGO collector and playing with them beyond the age of 16 is sometimes met with weird looks. Being over 30 and still playing with the bricks is definitely met with some suspicion of dealing with an adult who hasn’t quite grown up, or is intending to at all. Like ever…

To the sourpusses telling AFOLs to grow up, stop pushing your sad, shrivelled, empty lives onto others. If growing up means sad and boring, then keep that shite to yourselves. Stay inside, save a life, it might be contagious...

Thankfully, this is not universal, there are people outside the community who totally understand our hobby and roll with it. They have their own, and while perhaps a bit more tame and less eyebrow-raising, they understand and support us in our quest to find happiness in boxes full of plastic.

Inside the community, of course, it’s a different story altogether. In many ways, we know each other without ever exchanging words. I do think though that, perhaps due to stigma or some other reasons which I haven’t yet identified, many AFOLs out in the world are surprisingly quiet about their hobby. Just the other day, I found out that someone else I know, was potentially as big a LEGO fan as I am. Her collection is definitely very close to mine in size, perhaps even bigger. 😱 But when AFOLs discover each other... We have bricks and bricks to talk about. 🤩

Cost is the next challenge we face. As if it weren’t enough already that we’re playing with toys, understanding just how costly this hobby can be is something that most outsiders don’t realise, and when they do, they’ll just flat out consider us prime candidates for the nearest nut house.

What outsiders don’t get about AFOLs, is that we know exactly how crazy we are, and that makes us totally sane.

Yes, LEGO is a premium toy. We know how expensive it is. We invented the PPP acronym (I hate acronyms.) that stands for Price Per Piece. That’s how aware we are of the cost of not just every set, but every piece we buy. That makes us hunt down the best deals we can find, take advantage of every LEGO sale or GWP (Gift With Purchase) and LEGO VIP offer. We buy LEGO bricks by the cup whenever we have the chance and the pieces on the PAB (Pick A Brick) wall happen to be the ones we need. We are so acutely aware of the cost this hobby comes at, we have become the best penny-pinchers you’ll ever meet. You can bet we did our best (most of the time) to make the allocated monthly LEGO budget go as far as it possibly can. And when the spending does go above budget, we will absolutely have the best, most rational of explanations you’ll ever hear, but never understand, unless you’re an AFOL yourself.

Everyday life. We don’t just buy sets, we build them too. This poses certain challenges. First of all, time. There is a limited amount of it every day, and we suddenly face the dilemma of cooking versus building another stage of a LEGO set, or working on a creation of our own. You can bet most of us have jobs — otherwise we couldn’t afford to buy LEGO — and sleeping, unfortunately, is still a requirement for survival. That leaves us with very few hours left in a day to build stuff and when you have a backlog of say 5–6 sets to build, 10 pick a brick cups’ worth of pieces to sort, you have yourself a problem. Is it a first-world problem? Sure. But a problem nevertheless. I certainly have developed the ability to watch movies and TV series while building or sorting LEGO. The ultimate exercise in multitasking.

Storage and space. As if time weren’t big enough of a problem already, storage is an even bigger one, and the longer you are in this hobby, the more acute it is. We display many of the sets — I certainly do — and that takes up a lot of shelf space, something that gets increasingly challenging, and you find yourself having to take apart older sets, and every time I do that, my heart breaks a little. But then, of course, you have loose parts that need sorting again, and space for storing the loose pieces. But there’s more because at any time of the day, we also tend to have a few boxes of loose pieces lying about the living-room, and potentially an open set we’re in the middle of building. Long story short, there’s a pretty good chance you’re literally going to stumble into LEGO if you happen to visit an AFOL, which brings me to my final point…

Social life. Contrary to general opinion, we do have one. While many of us will fall into one of the introverted boxes of the Myers-Briggs personality spectrum, there is zero evidence to suggest the ratio between introverts and extroverts isn’t more or less equally split.

Sans hard statistical evidence, though, I’d still argue that AFOLs tend to fall more into the introverted category.

That doesn’t make AFOLs, anti or asocial. In fact, there is a virtually non-existent chance that an AFOL would be antisocial. Yes, we can be nerdy as hell, and opinionated to the point of borderline religious, but I can’t say I ever heard of or witnessed antisocial behaviour from an adult fan of LEGO. That being said, building LEGO sets or MOCs tends to encourage a less social lifestyle than say playing football, tennis, or snooker. This means we predominantly build alone. As building LEGO takes time, we have less of it for other social activities. We also tend to stick to the people we know or those who seem open-minded enough to accept or even celebrate a hobby like LEGO. And yes, we can talk about more than just colourful plastic bricks. 🙄 Most AFOLs tend to be pretty smart individuals and accomplished professionals, so groups where intellectually stimulating conversations are welcome, are the ones we tend to join. In case we cannot find any, we just go home and play with LEGO.

LEGO is a Plan B that never disappoints. 😉

When all is built and done…

Well… in the LEGO world, and most certainly in the AFOL world, nothing is ever truly built and done. These plastic bricks trigger endless creativity, and it’s a hobby that recursively feeds itself. I won’t deny, there is a slippery slope to watch out for, and in extreme cases it can turn into an addiction. It’s one of those hobbies where at one point you really have to be pragmatic and learn to prioritise. But as far as addictions go, it’s still one of the better ones, that’s for sure.

While I happily identify as an AFOL, that’s not all I am. That’s not what any of us are. Yes, we take our hobby pretty far, sometimes far enough to be off-putting to some, but we’re everything else, like everyone else. Sure, we happen to see the world in bricks and minifigs and given the chance we’ll go straight ahead and build it too, but beyond the millions of bricks, we’re just dudes, dudettes and everything else in between, having fun, enjoying life in our own quirky way.

Hi. My name is Attila, and I’m an AFOL.

Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, LEGO fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer! Read my Hello story here! Subscribe for more stories about LEGO, tech, coding and accessibility! For my less regular readers, I also write about random bits and writing.