Why Lego?

So what make an adult (male) bring down the big box of lego from the attic and start building again?
There’s plenty of reasons why, but often people seem to be attracted by the Mindstorms line (robotics), or drawn in by Lego’s line of licensed Starwars spacecrafts, while others get their eyes opened to the possibilities of the hobby by stumbling across some of the impressive creations on the internet. And a few of us just never stopped building.

But Lego is just a toy for kids, right?
No.
Lego is just another medium for creative expression just like clay, watercolours etc.: It’s up to you to decide whether to use it for an ugly ashtray or a beautiful sculpture.
Most kids basically build toys to play with, grabbing the first ten ill-matched bricks, slap them together, and spend the rest of the day swooshing the thing around the house.
The hobby starts when you stop screwing around and start applying adult experience, forward planning, and perseverance – in order to make something that’d actually look good on a shelf.

The main reason that Lego isn’t one of the largest hobby around is because most people associate the material with the crap they made as kids until it was too embarrassing to continue, instead of taking the jump to serious building.

So what have Lego to offer compared to other hobbies?
Well, first of all, having a hobby is far better than not: Too many people drudge away in uncreative jobs and waste their valuable spare time watching television, surf on the internet, or getting pacified by pointless computer games.
The Lego hobby offers an opportunity to create something with your hands, and if the result is worthwhile, you can publish pictures of it on the internet, and even experience the satisfaction of setting your mark on the world in a small way and be admired by the connoisseurs of the world.
And you don’t even have to distribute the finished result among ungrateful relatives at Christmas or birthdays, cause when you’re tired of the model you can just take it apart and recycle the parts for new and better projects.

But the best part is that the material is so versatile that you can participate at whatever level you want – from noncommittal tinkering for the meditative enjoyment of simply working with your hands and making something ‘real’, to super complex engineering projects – because with Lego, you can practically create everything you want if you scale it up sufficiently to use simple building techniques – or scale it down by using increasingly difficult and challenging techniques.

Personally, I’m definitely in the second category, rarely building anything unless I have a new and complicated technique I want to try out and a suitable design to use it for. Consequently I regularly curse myself for getting entangled in near-impossible projects that tend to drag out for months or even years, due to the nasty practical problems I need to figure out before I can resume building.
On the other hand, the difficulties only make the success sweeter as well as the pride of doing the impossible and pushing the boundaries of what can be made with Lego.

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If the stuff above has made you interested in starting with the lego hobby, I've created a little guide to the most important general pages about lego in Where to start, in order to help you find your way around the vast number of pages and fora on the net - or perhaps a local lego club in your area?