Eighty Thousand Bricks and Nothing Else to Do

If I had unlimited money and a warehouse, I would fill it with Lego and never leave. This is not a joke or an exaggeration—I have thought about this seriously and the only honest conclusion is that I would be happy. It would be a life well spent.

Blake Baer and Jack Bittner, seventeen and eighteen years old respectively, appear to have beaten me to this particular psychological space. They built a diorama of Erebor—the Lonely Mountain from Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit—using eighty thousand individual Lego pieces. Not eighty thousand as a rough estimate. Eighty thousand counted and placed and assembled into something that looks like a production still from the film. The full documentation is on their Flickr.

I was seventeen once. I used those years to do considerably less impressive things. There’s no bitterness in that, just a recognition that some people at a given age are already operating at a level others spend decades trying to reach. Go look at what they built, then look at whatever you were making when you were seventeen and feel your feelings about it.

The Lego envy is real. They could spare a few bricks and I would be grateful.