His fantasy world is a different thing.
But if he never saw another Lego set/site/catalog, then he would adapt to a Lego-less world, as he seems to have done.
Despite the eons-oriented fantasy world, he's purely short-term. And even the fantasy just so happens to have all the good stuff happening *right now*.
Chris is a here and now person, but if he is excited about something or wants something really bad, that becomes his here and now even if it's in the future. The future becomes his now.
For instance, sitting alone, he really wanted a boyfriend-free girl, and was willing to look ahead and plan how he could get said girl, to birth Crystal. That took forethought and effort for something that was not immediate, but it was something he wanted *really bad* so it occupied his attention.
But put cartoons in front of him that are enough to distract him, and he'll temporarily forget about his boyfriend-free girl and Crystal.
And even when he had a "girlfriend", if another girl called him, he started "cheating" because that girl took over his immediate attention.
He cannot proactively delay gratification, he can only think ahead when his gratification has been delayed by outside forces.
Of course in recent years, his delusions have occupied his attention more and more, so it's harder for stuff in front of him to compete unless it's something is *really* wants (basically a few kinds of toys, or vagina), and even that still gets incorporated into his delusions. Barring some sort of drugs that inhibit his imagination, that's where he's going to live more and more.
I don't know if they prescribed him anything, but in addition to a drug that kill imagination, he'd need a drug that reduces impulsivity. That would go a long way toward fixing his behavior. It still wouldn't fix his shitty entitled attitude or his stupidity, but that might enable him to delay gratification enough to sort glass for money, grumbling that he deserves better. He'd have to stay hungry and have no enablers though.
Everyone knows Cole lives in Carnegie Hall in an apartment with a big fireplace.
No, Cole lives in Carnigee Hall. It's a subtle distinction, I know, but Chris clearly stated that it was Carnigee Hall.
Interestingly, Carnegie Hall does have apartments, some with big fireplaces. However most of them were market rate and the occupants were evicted in 2007 to convert to museum space and such. They had to slowly wait for the people in the last 7 protected, rent-controlled apartments to voluntarily leave by buying out the tenants or waiting for them to die. The last tenant left in 2017.
Jokes aside, Carnegie Hill, the neighborhood near where Cole lived, has become a decently affluent place ($2.2 million median price vs $1.2 million for Manhattan as a whole), depending on how close you were to the Carnegie Mansion site, but I don't think Cole actually lived in Carnegie Hill proper.
had evaporated on him.
