Word: hipsterism
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There are definitely positives to being on the lower end of this age bias. I’ve only once paid for lunch at work (and that was when I went out with my young, hipster coworker), because I’m the youngest person in the company. When a seat opens up during rush hour on the Seoul Metro, the older men in suits stand by, and I only have to fight with the other young women in the car for it. When I go out with my Korean friends, the older ones take the lead and organize things...
...Hipsters were usually middle-class white youths seeking to emulate the lifestyle of the largely-black jazz musicians they followed. But the subculture grew, and after World War II, a burgeoning literary scene attached itself to the movement: Jack Kerouac and poet Allen Ginsberg were early hipsters, but it would be Norman Mailer who would try and give the movement definition. In an essay titled "The White Negro," Mailer painted hipsters as American existentialists, living a life surrounded by death - annihilated by atomic war or strangled by social conformity - and electing instead to "divorce oneself from society, to exist without...
...word would fade for years until it was reborn in the early '90s, used again to describe a generation of middle-class youths interested in an alternative art and music scene. But instead of creating a culture of their own, hipsters proved content to borrow from trends long past. Take your grandmother's sweater and Bob Dylan's Wayfarers, add jean shorts, Converse All-Stars and a can of Pabst and bam - hipster...
...Such cultural mishmash is ripe for parodying. In 2003, author Robert Lanham wrote The Hipster Handbook, trying to codify the rules to hipsterdom, like "You graduated from a liberal arts school whose football team hasn't won a game since the Reagan administration" and "You have one Republican friend who you always describe as being your 'one Republican friend.' " There's also Hipster Bingo and, of course, Look at This F___ing Hipster (the link obviously contains strong language). Chronicling hipsterdom's extremes, the LATFH photo blog was a viral sensation, netting its founder, Joe Mande, a book deal...
...Some of this ridicule is a bit unfair. As stores like Urban Outfitters have mass-produced hipster chic, hipsterdom has become a part of mainstream culture, overshadowing its originators' still-strong alternative art and music scene. Those people, of course, no longer identify as hipsters, but they're not the problem. The hipsters who will be the dead end of Western Civilization are the ones who add nothing new or original and simply recycle and reduce old trends into a meaningless meme. It's for that reason that when Williamsburg's hipster playland is in crisis, there aren't many...