JY Lee | A hipster manifesto

I began wearing fedoras because my mom got me one in the early ’10s. I began wearing fedoras, because my mom begot me in the early ’90s.

Every generation has its idiosyncrasies — eccentric members of society who stand out. Historians display a cruel selection bias toward them and would have us believe that our grandmothers were hippies in flowery dresses who conceived our parents in a mass acid-inspired love-fest.

Similarly, ignorant historians in the future will label us as the hipster generation — whether we like it or not. Professors at New York University and the University of California, Los Angeles have already held panels to discuss hipsters from sociological and historical perspectives.

Some, however, have tried to ignore the hegemony of hipsters with faux glasses. Instead, they argue that our generation will be remembered for its geeks with thick glasses. Although our contemporaries include geeks like Mark Zuckerberg, supercomputer-brained species like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet evolved decades ago. They are the establishment and are closer to our parents’ age.

The geeks — wedged between hippies and hipsters — are more comfortable with the analytic and rational left hemisphere of the brain and display great faith in technology and technocracies.

Hipsters (like hippies), on the other hand, overexert their creative and artistic right brains to the point of seeming stoned all the time. While the left-brained delight in power and prosperity, the right-brained revel in beauty and (arguably) justice.

History is cyclical. America’s progression in the 20th century from the Great Generation — which was shaped by the Great Depression and World War II — to hippies to geeks then hipsters echoes intellectual developments in 19th-century Europe. Think about how the Enlightenment gave way to romanticism, to positivism, then aestheticism and decadence.

Whereas a lone dandelion could enrapture the hippies, the plight of polar bears has a hard time catching hipsters’ attention. Hippies’ downfall was their childlike utopian vision of human goodness and geeks’ downfall stemmed from their idealistic dependence on technology and rationality. While the hipsters generation’s downfall is not in view, it may come down to our dystopian nihilism.

As naive as the hippies were, they were instrumental to dismantling an unjust war and liberating women and LGBT communities. They produced timeless artists such as Allen Ginsberg, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan, as well as industrialists like Steve Jobs — an acid-dropping college dropout who took an enlightenment pilgrimage to India.

Hipsters share the hippies’ self-indulgence, veiled materialism and white upper-middle class privilege, but they contribute a lot less. Hipster aesthetic is blatantly pastiche, borrowing from the past without much originality.

Will some of Brooklyn’s indie bands gain the immortality of Pink Floyd and the Doors? Go judge for yourself at Pilam and Fishtown.

Perhaps it is not our fault that the hipster generation seems so useless. After all, we came of age in an awful economy with mired foreign policy. The promises of Obama’s 2008 campaign seem light years behind us. Up in the clouds of the ivory tower, we grope around in nebulous post-modernism.

Every generation to date has faced historical challenges. The Greatest Generation became the greatest through a not-so-great depression and a tireless war. Although the hippies grew up in material comfort, they lived through one of the most fractured and turbulent periods in modern American history.

The year 2011, with the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring, was an inflection point as momentous as 1789, 1848, 1968 and 1989.

During Occupy Philadelphia and Occupy Penn, I met many hipsters who cared not only about how they looked, but also about how The Other America looked. They were urban farmers and hackers, revolutionizing the way we feed our body and mind. Our obsession with indie may create structures of philosophy, politics and economics that are more free and sublime than ever before.

The essence of a hipster is still in flux, so much so that my fedora contributes to this unfolding historical phenomenon. While a recent article in Forbes magazine chronicled today’s hipsters as a group defined by consumption, I believe there’s more to us.

Fellow hipsters: stop buying Zizek and Butler for intellectual masturbation. Read these authors to engage and heal the world. Maybe then our kids will be proud of their hipster parents.

JY Lee is a College and Wharton senior from Gangnam, South Korea. His email address is junyoub.lee9041@gmail.com. “Wandering Curious Lee” usually appears every other Tuesday. Follow him @junyoubius.

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