Hi peeps of the world,
(Disclaimer: I'm not saying that it's bad to just be happy with building the sets as they are)
A thing I've been contemplating over is the shift that I would say has happened in recent years where the AFOL hobby was a creative hobby with large focus on MOC:s, and now more has shifted over to buying, building and placing expensive sets.
I still think that all those creative AFOLs are around, but that they're/we are being overshadowed by those who are happy with just building sets.
I notice this on different social media platforms. On YouTube the buying and placing channels gets more views than the MOC channels, and the same with likes on instagram. In Facebook groups there's a lot of focus on "look at what I bought" and "look what you can buy".
A friend of mine has noticed this pattern in other areas. She knitted a sweater for her child, and her friends where very impressed by this.
Her sentiment was that today we confuse consumerism with creativity.
If I speak for myself, I started collecting Star Wars LEGO back in 1999. For many years we didn't really have a large range of sets from Star Wars, so we had to build or own MOC's to compensate for that, and I would say that it's from that era that communities like Eurobricks, from bricks to bothans etc grew from.
These days LEGO is catering to so many different franchises and pushing out more sets than ever, and maybe the price for this is a lower interest for personal expression and MOCs.
Or am I just hanging out on the wrong platforms? What are your thoughts about this?