Being a Geek Means Never Saying Goodbye to Toys
I was going to wait to post this until after I saw Toy Story 3, but knowing the general theme, and the fact that I’m now buying toys for a one year old, I feel its time.
As I watch my son grow right now, from a little newborn to the slightly manic toddler he’s becoming, I can’t help but recalling the signifiers of memory which draw me back to my childhood. Memory being a funny thing, with signifiers as slight as a scent, as significant as a photo, as tactical as an object.
My strongest memories from being young all have to do with things that triggered imagination, things that acted as a catalyst and impetus for metal escape into things otherwise not possible, imaginary or purely fanciful. As a kid, I invented airplanes, I made houses, I designed secret underground lairs. The things that enabled this were not toys. They were pencils, graph paper, note cards.
In the end, the world of my toys as it were was a way for me to extend a level of control against my imagination. I designed airplanes because I wanted to have one that was mine. I designed worlds, maps, houses and more because I wanted to have a degree of influence upon these things, eventually.
I can only imagine what my parents thought.
The general themes of growing up are related to the ascension from the “childish” to the adult. The replacing of toy cars with real ones. The replacing of playing house with buying a house. Lego for work. This ascension is coupled with a feeling of loss so deep, that if the articles are to be believed, the filmic representation of such in Toy Story 3 is reducing people to tears, en masse.
This has never happened to me.
That isn’t to say I haven’t grown up. I’m 31 years old, a Senior VIce President at a music company, married, with child. I own two homes, two cars, two dogs, two cell phones and for all intents and purposes am GROWN UP. I pay taxes, have a retirement plan, all that.
But I never stopped playing with toys. I never said goodbye to them.
When I was around four or five, computers entered my life. I was asked recently why I started programming. In fact, every engineer I work with was asked. The answers were indicative of the personalities behind them. One: because I could break a computer and it wouldn’t judge me while I tried to make it right. Another: I like to solve puzzles.
Mine: I like playing god.
What this really means is, just like I loved designing cars, boats, houses and secret volcanic lairs, computers were a method for me to exert absolute and total control on a system. First being Logo, then BASIC, then games, etc.
Computers helped me solidify and understanding of systems and apply that to everything else. Trains, airplanes, etc. I sought the understanding of not only what they were, but how they were. How did a jet engine work? How did a train work? How did an airplane fly?
Ultimately I think the root of what makes us geeks extends into something similar, and maybe ultimately that is what defines us. Not so much the enjoyment of technology, systems and complexity, but a insatiable desire to keep going deeper into the question of “why”
Growing up, my “toys” as it were never ended, but extended into further and further reaches of questioning, play. imagination and enjoyment. A trainset became a town, became SimCIty, became studies of city dynamics, became my research into online communities, etc. My airplanes extended into complex systems and from there to object oriented programming.
I am nostalgic for the past only insomuch that the curiosity that drove me toward the future has been usurped by the practicality necessitated by the present.
But being a geek, I’ve never had to say goodbye to the toys that framed who I was and who I might have become. The toys didn’t end, they just got upgraded.
Question: do you agree? Does being a geek negate or just recontextualize nostalgia?