TBB Asks: Did you have a ‘dark age’? If so, what brought you out of it? [Feature]

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 until 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.

The post TBB Asks: Did you have a ‘dark age’? If so, what brought you out of it? [Feature] appeared first on The Brothers Brick.