the insufferably hip

MissPickwickian · Posted: Sat Aug 09, 2008 9:55 am Post subject:

There are people who are, in one way or another, so insufferably hip and cool and happenin' that they are impossible to communicate with. We're not talking about white-bread popularity; the standards of jocks and cheerleaders have stayed pretty constant for the last 50 years. We're talking about hipsters, alterna-people, Young Intellectuals, etc, those who base their snobbery on whatever is new.

There's a guy at my school, the son of a good friend, who is one of these people. He's gay; I probably am; he's bullied; I'm bullied. We basically grew up together, though we never became close friends. When he was fourteen he hooked into the internet and became hip almost overnight. He was sick of things I had never heard of. He replaced his wardrobe every two months. He started using words like "sell-out" and "fierce." He has become very good at ignoring me for reasons I don't understand. I overheard him tell someone that he liked me as a person but avoided me because I wasn't "indie" and could not possibly understand him because of this mysterious handicap.

If you surf the internets, you find that hipness reaches dizzying heights in some places. I find that forums and zines for intellectual types are grossly trendy (see www.bookslut.com for a great example of this). For instance, I am apparently quite uncool in my desire to study the Holocaust, or even use that word (cool people say "Shoah"). In cool circles, it is said that the Shhhhhhhhoooah has been so corrupted by bourgeois emotionalism that intellectuals are not to touch it. Ever. Of course I-don't-give-a-damn and they-have-no-right-to-dictate-my-interests, but it does make me feel alone and out of touch when I read about it. The same thing is true of irony. I have a great sense of irony, but generation X draws itself into such black holes of ironic and counter-ironic (i.e. the ironic mocking of things that are already ironic) smirking that I am surprised they have yet to tear a hole in the space-time continuum.

Who ARE these people? Even the existentialists and the punks had deep and consistent philosophies that propped up their countercultures. The hipster philosophy seems to be, "OOOH! LOOK! The new iPhone!" Scratch the surface, and you just find more surface. It's surface all the way down.

The point of this post: I would like to see some culture that is not trend-based. Where might that be?

In addition, this shall be the unofficial "I hate hipsters" thread.
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