Lego turned 50 on Monday, a fact that was discussed on many blogs and in comment sections, allowing me–and those of my generational range–to bathe ourselves in recursive online nostalgia, gazing back at minutiae long forgotten and worlds of possibility long closed to us. I admit that I indulged–hell, I bought myself a Lego advent calendar this past Christmas season–though not without a fair amount of sadness and something approaching embarrassment.

This sense has stuck with me for days, driving me to ask myself and others: Has there ever been a time during which adults gazed at their own navels and and tried to recapture their youth as the Internet era?

Pundits on the right and left decry the infantalization of a certain generational range. Conservatives point to a “special snowflake” syndrome, arguing that adults in their 20s and 30s have never known strife or difficulties and as a result are ill-prepared for the responsibilities of adulthood. Critics of capitalism bemoan the infantalization of the market economy, of the primacy placed on short-term wants and acquisitions over savings and planning for the future.

In many cases, I’d chalk both arguments up to stock generation-gap panic.

Still, I can’t help but wonder if our fascination with toys and childhood does suggest a maturity gap. A lack of a sense of responsibility. A refusal to come to terms with decreased possibility, a feeling that we are entitled to the world. A delusion, perhaps, that comes from middle-class upbringings, from joining the perpetually underemployed postgrad intellectual class, from social and familial safety nets. A delusion validated by our thirst for iPhones and Wii’s, Heath Ledger death gossip and Lost spoilers. An economic luxury and intellectual dilettantism whose days may be numbered if the economy continues on this path.

Yet all the same, and while I am fully aware of the absurdity of this statement, while looking at the Lego retrospectives on Monday, I was gripped by a real sense of loss, an immutable sense of something that I would never be able to hold again. A loss of possibility and wonder that seemed implicit in those worlds my friends and I would build and share as a child. This sense is nothing new–people felt the resonance all the same in 1941 when Charles Foster Kane uttered “Rosebud”.

After all, that sense of loss is what growing older is all about. Coming to terms with the fact that possibilities are not as wide open as they once might have seemed,

This is the process of maturing. Only refracted through the recursive nostalgia of Legos, presented in day-glow vibrancy by the Internet. So Lego is our Rosebud. Is that so wrong? Are we unprepared for the responsibilities of adulthood, or merely basking in a redundantly stored wash of nostalgic memories enabled by the technologies of our age?