The thing that I most loathe about hipsters is really a trait that exists in most of the human population.
I really don’t care if you dress weird for the sake of it. I don’t care if you are lazy. I don’t care if you are benignly attention seeking. I don’t care if you want the world to view you as a “special snowflake.”
I dress weird for reasons of comfort and lack of good taste, so the more hipsters out there attention seeking the more socially acceptable my natural behavior becomes. I actively encourage it. A life of being the standing nail that gets the hammer makes me LOVE being around nails that stand higher.
If I condemned people for being lazy that would totes be the pot calling the kettle black. I am the laziest person on the planet. Particularly in winter when I don’t leave the house for weeks at a time.
Attention seeking? Define attention seeking? Everyone wants to differentiate themselves from the crowd somehow. As long as you aren’t causing pain to the people around you, then it’s really none of my business. If everything you do is really all about flash with no substance then the worst thing I can do to you is ignore you. Problem solved.
And the fact is that every single individual on the planet is a snowflake. Perhaps not special, and but everyone is different. Because I have so many bizarre needs, I tend to cut people a huge amount of slack when they insist that they are different. If I suspect they are wrong, I act the same way that I do when someone tells me about their religion. I smile, nod, and try to act like it’s all true while I talk to them. I have my personal feelings and doubts, but for all I know I’m wrong. As long as their differences never pass beyond a minor inconvenience, why not just give them the benefit of the doubt?
No. My problem with hipsters is that they, as a group, seem to be completely incapable of experiencing unironic joy.
Cynicism is the most annoying trait in hipsterdom. You can’t say “This makes me so happy!” without them finding a way to shit on it.
It’s like they are so obsessed with being smarter than the average person, but they have so little intelligence that they have no idea what “smart” actually looks like.
“I’m a vegetarian.”
“Well fine, if you are a vegetarian that means you kill more animals than everyone!” and then they go into a delightful lecture about the death toll of harvesting equipment on small animals.
or
“Well if you drink milk and eat eggs then you are endorsing the death and living torture of millions of animals, so you are worse than a meat eater!”
or
“But if you aren’t eating organic then you are basically flipping mother earth the bird!”
While every reaction is different, it’s this attitude that I find so toxic to be around and so very VERY unhelpful.
It’s like they see a situation, look at ways that people are doing something positive in this world, then decide that the best course of action is to make the people who are doing something positive feel like shit.
I saw it with the bucket challenge last year. People looked at it, and then rolled their eyes and said, I. SHIT. YOU. NOT. :
“Well only a few people die of ALS. They really should be funding research to ________” and they brought up every pet political or medical project of theirs. You know, because there can only be one cause in the world.
or
“Am I supposed to be impressed that you are dumping water over your head? You really should be volunteering your time, and donating money! You are just doing this to feel important without actually doing anything!” Which, of course, is why the person was criticizing the movement too, but let’s not get technical.
The fact is, that ALS is a miserable disease to have. A lot of people participated in a fun silly thing, experienced the joy of feeling like they were contributing and it raised a large amount of money for these charities, and several research breakthroughs have been found since that I suspect would not have been without the ice bucket challenge. In the future, less people will be in pain because of these armchair activists. Good.
Ah, but it’s sooo much more important to feel good about being better than the “crowd.”
That’s not to say you can never criticize movements, political stances, or anything. I am just sick of people whose main motivation (in my judgement) is to look deep without actually doing any thinking about the issue at hand.
My hatred of Autism Speaks is a seething cauldron of rage that knows no limits. But I hate them because of everything they stand for. I did a lot of research before I arrived upon my hatred. I feel like I, and people like me, suffer because of their ubiquitousness. I try to not chime in often, and I try to chime in with better ways they could expend the exact same effort. I often fail.
But I’ve thought of this long before I chime in. I don’t just look at it and use it to try to make people feel foolish, and score points off of other people. If someone else is making the point, I try to stay out of it. I also try to limit my interventions to times when I hope the person in question will listen to me.
No the behavior I deplore that is so common in hipsters is that they see someone enjoying themselves, creating, doing something positive, trying to help people, and with a sort of sadistic glee think
“Oh! A chance to make myself feel better by making them feel worse.”
I’ve seen it my whole life. When I was in highschool, an online group shared a survey about whether you used the word “pop” or “soda.” We were all having a BLAST, arguing the nonsense argument over which word was correct. Then baby protohipster (in her defense, she was seventeen) shot off a mass email (Yes. I am that old. Moving on)
“I can’t believe you are wasting time with this shallow discussion when there are people starving in third world countries!”
Because discussing language semantics is taking time away from that? The two are completely unrelated!
Now, it made sense for her. She was seventeen. She was trying to find her own voice, and was frustrated by her relative lack of power. It was still a dick move because the people could only respond in one of two ways. They could either agree with her and feel shitty about having conversations that don’t involve human rights abuse, or they could completely dismiss her point, and develop a quite resentment of both her and the starving people in third world countries. Judging by the response, everyone went with two.
Really, there is no excuse for this behavior when you are older than 25. You have a fully developed prefrontal cortex, so theoretically you have the ability think before you make another person feel like shit.
That’s not to say I don’t do it. I don’t exactly have the best impulse control. At least, though, I have the decency to feel BAD about it afterwards. Hipsters are PROUD!
This criticism–it’s a weapon.
Sometimes it’s the flailing fist of the wounded. Someone is in so much pain and is not being listened to that they lash out without thinking. It’s not an ideal situation, but if I’m not the one in pain I try not to judge. They can’t help it and really they shouldn’t be in pain in the first place.
Best and most effective use, it is a surgeon’s tool. It’s used very sparingly, and only with preparation. It’s the last resort, because you know it will leave a scar. Sometimes you have no choice and it’s best for all.
The way hipsters use it. . . Well, they clutch it to them like a baseball bat, eagerly salivating at the chance to use it. They don’t care about the damage they do. All they want is to feel powerful and using this baseball bat makes them feel powerful.
Hipsters aren’t the only group that uses it. Honestly, I feel like every group greedily clutches the baseball bat these days. Rednecks, the Elderly, The young, liberals, conservatives, hippies (oh God, don’t start me on superior hippies. I have a hard time seeing the difference between them religious fundamentalists).
Everyone gets offended when the baseball bat is used against them, so uses the baseball bat in retaliation or to preemptively strike. It’s very stressful because we wind up with a society where people are afraid to talk because saying something foolish comes with such extreme consequences.
Give me a person who is unashamed to unabashedly embrace what gives them joy and allows you to do the same. These people are few and far between, though, and I would classify none of them as hipsters.
The "Diane is weird" files 