Spoiler: no.

Slightly longer version…

I like Lego, despite long having been a fully grown adult human. I’m now ‘don’t give a flying fuck about what other people think about what I enjoy’ years old. If people sneer that I like faffing about with plastic bricks and piecing together buildings, cars and miniature blocky takes on characters from Pixar movies, I don’t care.

What I do find strange, though, is a kind of ongoing grumble about how Lego was always better in the old days. Around the time I was updating my best upcoming Lego sets 2026 roundup for Stuff, I spotted a Bluesky post from someone torn about how Lego is a great antithesis for kids on screen and helps people be creative, yet generates “an absolute shit-ton of unnecessary plastic”. That inevitably led to people complaining that Lego isn’t creative anymore, because people just buy massive and expensive display sets rather than huge boxes of bricks.

I’m (fortunately) not old enough to remember the dawn of Lego, but I do have fond memories of growing up with it during the 1980s. And here’s the thing: I and most other people I knew started with sets for building specific things, rather than massive piles of bricks. But I’d often dismantle my sets and make whatever I fancied with the pile of plastic rubble I’d made. And that’s pretty much the case today. It’s just bollocks to argue that no one builds creatively with Lego anymore. My kid did for years. Plenty of adults do too, as anyone who’s ever visited a Lego show will know.

Sure, there’s a tendency towards display sets when people age. But that’s also… OK? I don’t think it’s any worse to spend £100 on a dust catcher for a shelf that you put together yourself rather than a roughly equivalent pre-made ornament. Moreover, that Lego is still Lego. It will last for decades and – if the current owner feels like it – can at any time be turned into something new. (And if your response to that is something something specialist parts, maybe take a look at how the inventive folks at Lego reuse even the most seemingly specific of parts.)

That’s not to say Lego (the brand) is perfect. Nor is Lego the toy. But I do suspect an awful lot of adults banging on about how Lego isn’t as good as it was back in their day are parping their nostalgia horn rather than being objective about how a toy is used by the bulk of its target market and the sheer quality and range of sets available today.