The fanged little monster stares back from a thousand handbags, including my fiancées. Its dead plastic eyes betray nothing of the cultural sickness it embodies. Labubu, the spiky-eared demon born in a Hong Kong studio and mass-produced by the millions, isn’t just a toy. It’s a mirror. One reflecting a civilization that confuses dopamine hits with identity and blind consumption with culture.
Many see it as a craze. I see it as a diagnosis. A society unable to grow up, performing nostalgia on cue, desperate for novelty that requires no effort, no risk, no thought.
It’s Pokémon for people with credit cards.
A generation raised on participation trophies, instant gratification, and algorithmic stimulation now lines up to gamble on toys. Adults chase mystery boxes like slot machine addicts, desperate not for the toy itself, but for the chemical thrill of maybe getting the rare one — the engineered prize at the end of a marketing funnel. It’s Pokémon for people with credit cards. Cabbage Patch for the emotionally underdeveloped. Pay, open, squeal, repeat. Childhood rituals reprogrammed into adult addiction. There’s no skill, no taste, no discernment— just an endless loop of synthetic anticipation followed by monetized disappointment.
Labubu’s design follows a familiar script: menace coated in cuteness, sharp teeth softened by wide eyes. It straddles horror and innocence with surgical precision, engineered to make consumers feel edgy without ever being truly disturbed. Nothing in its aesthetic is accidental. It’s rebellion tailored for retail, moodboard darkness polished for display. It flatters the buyer into thinking they’re subversive, all while slotting perfectly into an algorithm-approved feed.
When Rihanna and Kim Kardashian hang these things from their Birkins, no one should mistake it for commentary. There’s no defiance here, just participation. The same ritual, performed at a higher price point. The toy becomes a status signal — proof that you’re tuned in, that you’ve consumed what you’re supposed to, when you’re supposed to. There’s no thought, no distance, no irony. Just pure compliance, branded as taste.
The blind-box mechanism strips away any pretense of collecting. This is simply gambling in disguise. Open the box, hope for a rare pull, post the results. Repeat. The resale market thrives not on value but on engineered scarcity. Adults treat toys like crypto tokens, speculating on plastic demons while calling it a hobby. It’s not a love of objects — it’s a love of odds.
The ‘Kidult’ Market
The psychological scaffolding behind this behavior is clear. The “kidult” market caters to adults who have sidestepped adulthood entirely. These aren’t vintage collectors preserving something meaningful — they’re addicts cultivating new dependencies in real time. The blind box offers a jolt of surprise in otherwise joyless lives. It’s less nostalgia, more anesthesia. And it’s not limited to toys.
I have friends — grown men — who schedule their lives around the release dates of new video games, treating launch day like a religious holiday. They don’t just play; they preorder, livestream, unbox, and argue online over frame rates and character skins. The stakes aren’t real, but the emotional investment is. Others binge endless waves of comic book content, adult LEGO sets, Funko Pop collections, and high-end anime statues, entire paychecks poured into things once meant to be outgrown. Adult bedrooms resemble toy aisles. Social media feeds are full of thirty-somethings fawning over cartoon merch like they’re curators of culture instead of victims of it. The obsession doesn’t stay niche. It scales, monetizes, and globalizes.
Labubu: The Monetization of ‘Kidult’
Labubu’s journey from Hong Kong to American malls is a case study in that process. Aesthetic stripped of context, meaning replaced with marketability. Cultural origins blurred until all that remains is something vaguely “foreign” and perfectly sellable. Imported iconography, emptied out and stamped Made for You. America doesn’t import ideas anymore — it imports merchandise.
There was a time when the American cultural landscape thrived on reinvention. Jazz, punk, abstract expressionism, beat poetry, indie film — forms born of friction, rebellion, and risk. Now, we get menacing mascots, anime reboots, and “collabs” between fast-food chains and cartoon IP. Today, what passes for culture is often prepackaged overseas, flattened for mass appeal, and sold back to Americans hungry for meaning but unwilling to do anything difficult to find it. Art has been outsourced to factories; taste outsourced to trend cycles.
Grown adults drop hundreds on plastic while drowning in student debt, rent hikes, and food inflation.
The economics are no less grotesque. Grown adults drop hundreds on plastic while drowning in student debt, rent hikes, and food inflation. The same demographic that claims to care about sustainability is driving demand for factory-churned landfill in collectible form. Each figure is another contradiction — ethical posture on the outside, microplastic heart within. Environmental awareness dissolves the second a limited drop hits the shelves.
Online, the whole mess metastasizes. Unboxing videos. Shelf tours. Trade posts. It’s less about owning the object than performing ownership. Social media provides the stage, and everyone becomes their own QVC host. The toy is just a prop. The real product is the person displaying it. And behind every curated display case sits another lonely dopamine addict, mistaking content for community.
At the root of all this lies something worse: the monetization of childhood. The desire for surprise, once organic and innocent, has been reverse-engineered into adult addiction. Toys are no longer for play — they’re positioned as assets. A child’s impulse to collect becomes an adult’s strategy for clout, profit, and self-medication. Every toy drop is a high-risk bet masquerading as whimsy.
Meanwhile, actual culture gasps for air. While money floods into these imported monstrosities, living artists scrape by. Bookstores vanish. Galleries close. The same people who claim to love “art” can’t be bothered to engage with anything they can’t unbox. The attention that could elevate real work goes to garish little goblins with vaguely gothic ears. The result is a generation fluent in trends, illiterate in meaning.
Labubu will eventually fade. Another trend will take its place, equally cynical, equally hollow. The next monster will arrive, and the cycle will continue: collect, post, discard, repeat. The toys change, the pathology stays the same.
READ MORE from John Mac Ghlionn:
A Generation So Lonely, It Fell in Love With Furniture
