Shopping for groceries is always an interesting trip for me. I tend to go to places like Target so I can get everything at one time, like food and toilet paper, which go hand-in-hand, of course. After I finish shopping for the necessities, one thing crosses my mind: Toys?! It is not just any toy section: it is always Legos. The quintessential children’s toy that can bring happiness no matter what age you are. What is it about these magical assortments of plastic bricks? Part of the joy is the final product, but that’s just the breaking point for me to bust open the wallet. Legos go beyond the cool centerpiece of my coffee table, currently a Super Star Destroyer (there’s not a lot of room for coffee), but it is a various amount of factors that fulfill many human, or just my, desires.
12 hours of pure awesome. My finger tips disagree with me
I have been playing with Legos for practically my whole life. I built my latest masterpiece a few weeks ago, a Millennium Falcon, Han Solo’s infamous starship that can run the Kessel Run in under twelve parsecs and shot down Darth Vader’s Tie-Fighter during the attempt to blow up the Death Star (Fun fact: I am also a huge Star Wars fan). After finishing, I started to wonder why, at the extremely mature age of twenty-three, was I still playing with this so called “children’s toy.” As I look upon this majestic Lego starship, I thought about the previous five hours it took to build it. Sure the final product looked awesome and I can point at it when my friends come over and say, “Impressed? I know.” The journey to build it was actually quite spectacular, a feeling that I never had as a child. While building the Millennium Falcon, I got excited when I realized I had built the chess table where the gang plays holo-chess in “A New Hope” or the gun turrets that are used to fight off a speeding squad of Tie-Fighters. A combination of nostalgia and accomplishment fills the nerd-mind as I stack these seemingly simple blocks together. There is a sense of pride after finishing a cool starship but even beyond that, it becomes a trip down memory lane.
Whether Lego knows this or not, they are definitely making a ton of money off nostalgia, or maybe just me. With the increase in exciting brands like Harry Potter, where someone can actually build Hogwarts with Harry Potter and wands and all that magical crap (I am not as big of a fan. Don’t hate me). Children will build these now and years down the line. Lego will probably re-release them, and those children will grow up and fall into the same nostalgic, carbonite-freezing trap that I have been imprisoned into. Lego has become more than simple four-by-four Lego bricks: they’re a mirror to our lives. As we grow older, we gain more complex and interesting facets, just like Legos. Everyday is a block that we add to the Lego sculpture that is our life. We can look back and see how things come together to create aspects of ourselves and yet we may not know how today’s brick will affect the final masterpiece (Things just got real!). Maybe I am looking too deep into this, or not deep enough. Regardless, one fact still remains: Legos are fun and whether or not these feelings are true for you, it will put a smile on your face, just like screaming your lungs out to 90’s boy band songs (I personally like the Backstreet Boys), the wonderful artificial flavors of drinking Squeeze-its (red was my favorite, it tastes like red), and fighting with the Might Morphin’ Power Rangers (red was not my favorite, he does not taste like red). Too bad life does not come with instructions, but I guess that is also half the fun.
Reasons I Am Broke 
Lol nice post =P
btw, wutcha mean by 4 by 4 lego bricks? arn’t most lego pieces 4×2??
Also, I’ve been on/off reading this book and this reminded me of it. And i know you dont really like reading books so I’ll just drop a couple of passages of it concerning Legos and deeper life meanings of it (in this case, Democritus’s Atom Theory) =D
From “Sophie’s World” by Josh Gaarder:
“[Philosopher poses the question to Sophie] Why is Lego the most ingenious toy in the world?…
Rummaging on the top shelf of her closet, she found a bag full of Lego blocks of all shapes and sizes. For the first time in ages, she began to build with them. As she worked,some ideas began to occur to her about the blocks.
They are easy to assemble, she thought. Even though they are all different, they all fit together. They are also unbreakable. She couldn’t even remember having seen a broken Lego block. All her blocks looked as bright and new as the day the were bought, many years ago. The best thing about them was that with Legos she could construct any kind of object. And then she could separate the blocks and construct something new.
What more could one ask of a toy? Sophie decided that Lego really could be called the most ingenious toy in the world…
[Philosopher to Sophie] So now you see what I meant about Lego blocks. They have more or less the same properties as those which Democritus ascribed to atoms And that is what makes them so much fun to build with, They are first and foremost indivisible, Then they have different shapes and sizes. They are solid and impermeable. They also have ‘hooks’ and ‘barbs’ so they can be connected to form every conceivable figure. These connections can later be broken again so that new figures can be constructed from the same blocks.
The fact that they can be used over and over again is what made Legos so popular. Each single Lego block can be part of a truck one day and part of a castle the day after. We could also say that Lego blocks are ‘eternal.’ Children of today can play with the same blocks their parents played with when they were little.”