About a decade ago, when I was in college, getting up early on Saturdays in order to hit the quality supply at the thrift store bag sale, smoking bidi cigarettes and driving around with my hall mates rocking out to pop music we made fun of a few years earlier, apparently I was a "hipster." I always just assumed I was a typical 19-year-old trying to discern my identity, but whatev.
Unfortunately, what I wasn't smart enough to do was label my very average late-teen exploration as some sort of defined cultural movement, start an ironic blog about it and then land a book deal. I also wasn't smart enough to move to a large northeastern media market and convince some Baby Boomer editor that I was hip, which means that, 10 years later, I have a steady job with benefits and a mortgage, rather than spending my days writing Web-based "cultural criticism" about the death of my youth. Or something.
I officially feel like my parents and their friends, who most definitely did NOT spend the 60s and 70s smoking pot in Haight-Asbury, and yet constantly have to remind their children that they weren't at Woodstock because they were in eighth grade. The sad fact is that, just like the vast, vast majority of people my parents' age weren't really part of the counter-culture, the vast, vast majority of people in their 20s today do not live in fashionably shabby outer boroughs of NYC wearing trucker hats and drinking PBR, or even wishing that we did.
But teenagers still dig thrift stores. Maybe it's not "hipster" culture that should die, media.
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