A good old cynical but accurate look at the youth of today from Elite Daily:
The pedestrian subculture of wasted youth known as Hipsters has experienced a strong rise in our culture. With hipster fueled events like Coachella and Burning Man reaching new levels of popularity in the mainstream media, you will surely know who they are.
The all too familiar young, urban 20-something-year-olds dressed in skinny jeans, lumberjack shirts and donning thick-rimmed glasses, live in neighborhoods like Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Silver Lake, Los Angeles, and Austin, Texas.
Toting cheesy mustaches and craft beer, the hipster is definitely one person you can easily point out and subsequently choose to avoid. This term, hipster, is hardly new. Its derivation comes from Norman Mailer’s description of middle-class white men who fetishized jazz culture in the 1920′s, ’30s and ’40s; the term also finds roots in 1958 when Jack Kerouac applied it to the members of the Beat Generation.
For most of the twentieth century, hipster was used as a vague, pejorative term for a person with trendy countercultural interests.
Generation Y douche bags
The Generation Y reincarnation of the hipster counterculture is typically represented by well-off, white boho kids who are entranced by everything Pabst Blue Ribbon, American Apparel and Coachella. While we have a great deal of respect for individuality, we find it incredibly tiresome when the masses of bored suburbia subscribe to a counterculture that they have nothing to do with.
Typically raised in successful families and having attended private schools up until they graduate from college, the hipster finds a way to emulate pedestrian urban icons. With the boredom of suburbia seeping from their pores, the hipster latches onto a trend and rides its wave to a point like no other. With self-assured comments like bohemian tossed around, the hipster thrives off of group assured originality. The find their current wave erases their suburban past, adding a touch of creativity to their mundane lives.
There is something about people acting like children and having what seems to be no real serious problems in their life that irks others.
Imagine this: you nonchalantly decide that your life will be based around a cultural style, rather than a successful career, so you subsequently proceed through a litany of mediocre, minimum wage job with like-minded friends just so you can claim fame of staying original – well, while selling out sours the creative roots of a trend, choosing to never even try is a completely different story. The hipster refuses to subscribe to any position or career that would destroy their cultural reputation.
What started as a group of entitled boho chic kids only a few years ago has quickly become a term used to describe many of the most impactful social and technological happenings of Generation Y. From Instagram, Coachella, skinny jeans to the #Occupyprotests, the quickest term of generalization has become the word, hipster.
Disgusting
The term is a loaded in a condescending way to describe young adults without a substantial focus in their lives. Hipster has recently entered newspapers and media, and has become synonymous with young adults fresh out of college without a solidified career path.
Unfortunate for them, the true hipster is far from the post-graduate looking for employment. The true hipster is 32, works in a skate shop, has mastered all beard growing techniques and can list five distilleries in Bulgaria that you have to try.
Hipsters killed the American dream
Even though they are young adults, and often college-educated, hipsters possess a certain air redolent of childishness. They are like college-educated babies.
The Yuppies of generation X have passed. These were the kids driven by success and excess; they fought and won their trophies, and hung them proudly on their office wall as symbolized proof of their hard work. Their cultural icon is Gordon Gekko smoking a cuban and taking over Wall Street.
Generation Y? Well, we have the hipster. The kid who shucked trophies and dodgeball because everyone is special and deserves their own gifted program. Everyone feels is a unique snowflake, so we resent being lumped in a group. The hipster does not want to try because success and being number one means he has to disregard or hurt the feelings of someone else to win. Their cultural icon is Paulie Bleeker from Juno, eating popsicles and playing guitar while referencing dead president’s sex appeal to sound intelligent.
Is this not a perversion of the American dream? A group driven by a pursuit for nothingness. Their cultural elitism is the claim that they are less successful than the guy in a suit who supports his family. To them, any hint of corporations, group think, success, wealth, or winning is bad. To them, niche products, dilapidated housing, vintage clothes, sloppy looks and anything thrift is good. They will always apply to retail or low end positions because it enforces their hipster image of not selling out.
But are they really not selling out? Being a hipster is like joining one giant country club where everyone is a member but nobody will admit it. While you may think that Pabst t-shirt is vintage, we all know you bought it from the same boutique website 3 million other hipsters did, too. Their flannel and horned rim glasses looks cool when they happen to walk into Citibank alone, but if you took one step into Williamsburg then you would see the same look on twenty other males.
They wear skinny jeans, ironic handlebar mustaches, V-neck shirts and dumb hats. They wear big glasses — that’s a key thing usually — asymmetrical haircuts, wool caps in the summer, Yasser Arafat scarves [kaffiyehs], American spirit cigarettes, and drink Pabst Blue Ribbon or cheap beer. It’s all about people trying so hard to look like they’re not trying hard. Is this individuality?
Widely recognized as being rich, white trash, these are the people who desperately try to stretch out their adolescence as far as it will go. Hipster may have to do with an attitude or mindset, but it is more about fashion. It’s all about people trying so hard to look like they’re not trying hard.
Is generation X is at fault?
Indulgent parenting has spawned a generation of entitled hipster douche bags. How has such a widespread plague struck our beloved Generation Y? We have grown up amassed in self-entitlement. From the smiley sticker faces on your homework as a child to the participation trophies that are handed out to any person ever dressed in a sports uniform, there has been far too much emphasis placed on our feelings as opposed to the accomplishments an individual reaches in their own life.
Instead of striving for greatness every passing minute of their lives, we have been raised in this bubble of protection and equality. Many parents of Generation X were faced with one option after turning 18 or graduating: living on their own to start their own lives. So they coddled us to vicariously compensate for their strenuous journey to success. It is sad to say that parents and liberal (ie wealthy) politicians are solely responsible for raising a bunch of douche bags.
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