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 Bulgarian hipsters, and that fact that the “hipster” word is still so widely used, reminded me of this unpublished piece I wrote a few years ago.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 It’s a little outdated, which has its own sense of irony, but I should really finish more of the things I start… so here goes: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.

These days it’s so easy to get caught up in the facts and details of the latest battle that people usually forget the history of this great war. For example, approximately seven to 12 years ago (note: actual figures will vary based on age and friend circle) this battle could have been titled the douchebag, anti-douchebag conflict. But at some point the term douchebag became too popular and so hipster was opted. Funny enough, prior to douchebag, the preferred term was in fact hipster. So the latest group of anti-hipsters really ought to give credit to the anti-hipsters of the ‘90s for coining the term. As a reference the timeline and differentiation of hipster eras and douchebag eras can be determined by reading through the online archives of The Onion and determining which was referred to more often during that period. Since everyone of even moderate intelligence can agree that The Onion is funny and always has been it provides a safe unbiased chronology. More on history, the term hipster, according to its Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_%28contemporary_subculture%29  actually goes back way before the ‘90s to the Jazz age. So the anti-hipsters of the ‘90s should really credit the anti-hipsters of the Jazz age because surely they were the first to point out the loathsome behavior of the original hipsters.

This hipster-douchebag relationship is actually quite interesting because sometimes they mean the same thing and sometimes they mean the opposite. Sometimes hipsters are defined by their not caring about being cool, but sometimes they are defined by the fact that they pretend not to care about being cool, but actually probably care too much. Meanwhile the person insulting them with the hipster label claims they are the one who doesn’t actually care about being cool despite the fact that they cared enough in this case to make the anti-hipster rant. The exact same or the exact opposite can both be said about douchebags depending on what they’re doing at the time. The truth is that all of us care sometimes, and other times not at all.

Not to take sides, but this war of hipsters and douchebags is entirely the fault of the anti group. Anyone who ever goes on a rant or makes a statement calling anyone else a hipster or a douchebag is the guilty party. I will explain this better shortly, but first I must describe the battles which define the war. It is most commonly embodied in a rant from an anti about how these hipsters/douchebags are full of themselves, hypocrites, uncool and usually in some way making life worse for the anti. This dynamic has entered into many different realms.

It includes music, sometimes the complaint is that the hipster parades around celebrating a band not because they are any good, but because nobody has ever heard of them. Or sometimes douchebags ruin music when the band you liked now appeals to a wider audience either because the band themselves became douchebags and changed their principles or their sound, or because a bunch of douchebags starting liking the band in addition to you. Either way douchebags have ruined the experience of liking the band.

It includes sports, sometimes liking sports in general is uncool because sports in general are already too mainstream which means they are not to be liked by hipsters, unless it’s a sport that isn’t popular at all like wheelchair fencing, or if the liking is done ironically, even if that has all the same traits of actual liking. Or sometimes douchebags ruin sports when you liked a team regardless of whether they were winning or losing but now that the team is winning all these douchebags show up and cheer for them. But since they are not true fans because they didn’t like the team when they were losing, it bothers you to share the experience with fake Johnny-come-lately fans that can in no way feel the same joy you do.

It includes city life and the apparent disrespect both hipsters and douchebags have for established culture and manners. I could keep going, but just note the general principle extends to basically anytime you’ve ever liked something. The result of these rants is that sometimes people who listen to the rant will agree with the sentiment. But curiously there is never retaliation. There is never debate. And it’s not because anti group combatants don’t have the confidence to confront the hipsters and douchebags, although that may be true.

The reason there is never retaliation and there is never debate is because hipsters and douchebags don’t actually exist. It’s been a one way war the entire time. This is the key to understanding how to rid the world of hipsters. It’s basically the same shit as The Matrix …“Do not try and bend the spoon… only try to realize the truth… there is no spoon.” Even if you’re absolutely sure that you’ve seen them, and you can describe their behaviour, they don’t exist. You may have even taken a photograph of a twentysomething guy with a beard, wearing suspenders and moccasins while using a typewriter in an urban park. It doesn’t matter. There are no hipsters and there are no douchebags because nobody, not even that guy in your photograph, identifies themselves as either a hipster or a douchebag. Odds are that the guy in the photograph goes on daily rants himself about the exasperating hipsters in his life.

If nobody identifies as being a hipster or a douchebag and there isn’t even a real enemy in this war, we must conclude that a hipster is only a theoretical concept with no real world application. Essentially it is a manifestation stemming from our hate of people that have a differing opinion of cool, which stems from our personal fear of not being cool, which stems from our insecurity about being unoriginal. As long as we remotely and occasionally believe that cool matters at all, and we all do from time to time, then we are guilty of the crimes of a hipster no matter what subculture we identify with. As soon as the anti expresses hate about any aspect of the coolness/uncoolness of a hipster they have committed the hipster’s crime of caring too much about cool/uncool despite the insistence that this is the motto of these fictitious hipsters they hate. You might be skeptical right now, but hear me out as I explain how to use this information to make hipsters disappear.

Getting rid of every hipster on the planet is possible and isn’t that hard to do. It takes a little bit of honest self-confrontation and remembrance of these three things.

1. All people are not going to agree about what is cool all at the same time, that’s just not how cool works and it’s the differences we experience in life. It is never wrong or right.
2. Understanding the past is just as valuable as understanding the present (because it keeps repeating).
3. And most importantly, nobody is as original as they want to be but we all try, desperately.

When one truly understands these three things all the hipsters in the world will disappear. That means really understanding inwardly and outwardly how these things apply to us.

There are douchebags and hipsters all over the world, because a douchebag or a hipster is someone with a differing working definition of cool. But be very cognisant that an individual’s own definition of cool changes continually. There are many traits about our former self that we probably think are really douchey or hipster. I’ll demonstrate on myself. I am a hipster, and I am a douchebag because: 

In high school I loved the band Blink 182 after I heard the song "Dammit" on the radio. Now that I have reached the age of majority the band seems like complete douchebags because they’ve completely sold out and write songs appealing to current 14 year olds though they are damn well in their late 40s by now. But they had long since sold out, even in the sense that I mean it now, by the time I heard them on the radio back when I was 13. I am an Oakland A’s fan, but technically I am not a lifelong Oakland A’s fan. I was a fan prior to both the Moneyball resurgence in 2000 and their latest playoff run in 2012-2014 and felt accordingly happy and vindicated during those times after being a fan through the really shit times in the mid to late ‘90s and late 2000s. But I actually became a fan of the team around 1990 when I was five years old, the year after they had won the World Series and when they had the league’s most valuable and arguably most popular player in Rickey Henderson. I am a band wagoner, just from a different era. I brag to people about the fact that I had a Facebook page back in 2004 the first year it was created. Seriously, check the date I joined on my timeline, but Facebook should never be equated with originality, it is the biggest bandwagoning trend of the century to date.

The biggest problem with each of these things that I thought was cool at some point, or currently still do, is that I didn’t help in the creation of any of them. I was not a member of Blink 182 and I was not the first fan. I have never played baseball for the A’s and was not their first fan, and fortunately, I am not Mark Zuckerberg. To go with the Bay Area’s corporate start up theme, I didn’t create any of these companies, I merely caught a stock on the way up and think I deserve praise for having such a fine eye. Further, I condemn everyone who caught on later as having an inferior penchant for recognizing great because they didn’t do it as quickly. Therefore, new Blink fans, new A’s fans, and new Facebook users are douchebags. Ah yes, but on the contrary they may think I’m a hipster, in the think-I’m-cooler-than-I-actually-am sense, for wanting credit for catching on before they did.

In this process of identifying with these things I am completely forgetting each of the three lessons above. If had remembered that there is never a consensus on cool at a particular time I would appreciate the newest generation of A’s fans for resembling my same enthusiasm when I started to like the team in 1990 and can’t hold it against people if the course of their life only led them to the A’s recently. If I had remembered to understand both the past and the present I would know back in 1997 there were surely Blink 182 fans from the Cheshire Cat days who hated me for making the band seem too popular and less cool, and therefore I have no cool leverage and cannot fault those who became fans in the last five years for making the band way uncool because all Blink 182 fans are inherently the same, no better and no worse. They just share a great appreciation of music written for 14-year-olds. And if I remembered I joined a once less popular social network which became a worldwide phenomenon after I was invited to join by a friend after a friend invited her after a friend invited her after a friend invited him after Mark Zuckerberg stole an idea about a website that was only marginally different than other websites that already existed, I would know that I am just another piece of repeating shit trying desperately and failing to find originality.

Everyone is so insecure with their lack of originality that they desperately try to hold on to something they identified with, even if it wasn’t originally theirs in the first place. It is natural to want credit because we were one of the first to like something. But the credit and appreciation should go to the creator of the thing that was liked, and holding on just masks our own insecurities without dealing with them.

As soon as we realize that we are ever changing but mostly unoriginal beings on an ever changing planet we will realize that person who we ourselves were just a moment ago is a total douchebag and we are now a hipster because our definition of cool is always changing as we move on to the next new thing, the next rising stock. As soon as we realize how unoriginal we are, and how many of our greatest ideas are just undetected plagiarism and things we shouldn’t actually take credit for, but how great we are despite it, this will all go away. Ego will be disassembled and replaced by humility. We will have an understanding and remembrance of a time when we thought something was really cool but no longer do. We will begin to see ourselves in that hipster we used to hate and realize that the only difference between us is that we have grown a little, and that’s not something to hate at all.