Generation Hate

I can't believe I read through this entire article before realizing it was written two years ago.  It's called Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization and it's irrelevant crap except that it got me thinking.  I would be a happy girl if I never heard the word hipster again.  It's way overused.  I've heard it used to describe punks, emos, club kids, and that kid in flannel.  I don't really see any similarities between them all and it's absolutely futile to point out their differences.  Yes, they're privileged, they're annoying and basically just immature.  I wish we had something else, my generation that is.  This article is basically a critique of our generation itself and has the delusion that previous generations were less shallow.

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the "hipster" – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

Yeah yeah yeah.  Ok, we're consumers.  But no worse than our parents.  Have you seen the world that we've inherited?  You can have it back, I don't want it.  Yes, I've hung out with these kids in bars.  Yes, they look like assholes until you meet that friend of a friend.  He's in a band, he wears tight pants, you've already written him off and then he tells a joke about his mother and catholic guilt and you laugh in spite of yourself and think "maybe the kids are ok" and finish your can of pbr.

We're not all entitled little rich kids.  Some of us ride bikes because we're actually poor despite our fancy undergrad degrees that got us that great retail gig or simply because bikes are an awesome form of transportation.  Why am I trying to defend myself?

We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.

 You're right, it's a lost cause.  I hope this is the end of Western civilization.  Let's party till it's over.