How to Rid the World of Those Insufferable Hipsters

A Bulgarian couple recently stayed with me in Sydney, and somehow we found ourselves talking about Australian hipsters. This quickly brought up the question: Does Bulgaria have hipsters? If so, what are they like? Well, as it turns out, they are pretty much the same. With most of modern life well documented on the internet trends spread across continents faster than ever. Bulgarian hipsters, and that fact that the “hipster” word is still so widely used, reminded me of this unpublished piece I wrote a few years ago. So I thought I’d finally publish it. It’s a little outdated, which has its own sense of irony, but I should really finish more of the things I start… so here goes:

I thought it would stop by now but it hasn’t. I thought there was enough self-awareness going around that people would catch on. But since that doesn’t seem to be the case, because people are still posting stories like this http://valleywag.gawker.com/douchebags-like-you-are-ruining-san-francisco-512645164  I feel this needs to be addressed. There is a longstanding war between the hipsters and those who dislike the hipsters, we’ll call them anti-hipsters, which ought to be settled once and for all. The combatants of this war have changed many times but the core issue is the same, one group of people, the anti-hipsters, doesn’t like the other, the hipsters, because the hipsters think they are cooler than they actually are.

Love Will Pay the Bills

In 2009 I heard a song called "Summer Cat" by a band called Billie the Vision and the Dancers. It was used in a commercial for a Spanish beer that someone posted on Facebook and I thought it was pretty catchy. So I looked up the band and listened to more of their songs. Though a bit silly at times, with some literal lyrics I couldn’t relate to, I found them entertaining and made it to the website of their record label which I borrowed to title this post: Love Will Pay the Bills. I was surprised to find that it was also the record company’s motto. Each of the band’s four albums were available to download for free, in their entirety, for me to keep and play on any device with no licensing restrictions. In return they asked only for donations and did so without annoying popups or adding me to a mailing list where they would continually ask for more. They gave no recommended contribution amount and there was no impression they would try to make me feel guilty if I never paid them anything. I thought it was incredible that they would so naively trust their fans, and the public at large, to provide the financial support required to continue to pursue lives as musicians without any requirement for them to do so. So I took a minute, thought about how much value the music had brought to my life, and how much it would continue to bring now that I had four albums downloaded, and gave them $20. I felt very happy about the exchange.

Reflections on Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

I have been interested in reading Rand for a while now, primarily because she is so frequently mentioned as a source of inspirational ideology… most commonly by modern libertarians and other people whose views I mostly oppose. So I wanted to read her work myself in order to understand her philosophy and then completely pick it apart. I was expecting to be angry at several points during the read, which I was. I was certainly not expecting to be impressed or inspired in any way, which surprisingly, I also was. I expected to come away from reading this book feeling justified in my mostly ignorant dislike of Rand, but the more predominant feeling was a severe dislike of those who I believe have grossly misinterpreted her ideas. Despite this, for all the effort Rand went to legitimize her philosophy as a solution for personal and social governance, I have nonetheless concluded, like many others before, that even though some of it is slightly interesting, her philosophy is riddled with shortcomings and oversimplifications of reality leaving it completely devoid of application to modern policy and governance. Here is a summary of my findings and reactions from the read:

Brief Plot Summary in My Own Condescending Words

Due to a rise of government corruption and communist ideas about redistribution of resources and labor, a group of principled stunning over-achievers, led by John Galt, who consider themselves to be the “motor” of the world decide to abandon their roles as society’s innovators and job creators, to avoid having their abilities exploited and the fruits of their labor redistributed to the lazy and thoughtless, bringing society to a grinding halt.