Ugh, hipster parenting is so vain
Pam sent me a link to this article about hipster parents who are convinced they have tapped into eternal youth. They’ve got the same fashion and music as kids who are 18 or 20, so they figure they’ll be permanently in touch with Kids These Days, including their own.
When you read that article, can you see the veil waiting to be lifted? Vanity is tangible. (Shiver— do I know where mine is right now?)
- I want to take bets on what a hipster midlife-meltdown will look like. What if it’s spectacular?
- I wonder how much this obsession with having cool kids has to do with being embarrassed about your own uncool youth? That’s a losing proposition— if a whole generation has a hipster childhood, that’s no longer rare or cool. What a drag. Bonus: you still have the same uncool childhood.
- I’d really like not to project so obviously on my children, when I get down to breeding. Oh, the irony of trying to be cooler than the cooler-than-thou people…
- Many critics, I think, tend to miss the point of “generations” by focussing on what amounts to essentialism. I crave the analysis that starts, “Do you have the original mindset to back up that haircut, or are you just another white, middle-class, heterosexual, married, consumer parent with a new coat of paint?”
- Doesn’t the anti-corporate attitude belong to Generation X, by rights? Are hipsters just Gen-X as a fashion industry, or am I missing something?
- Those grids of white people... those are really scary, yes?
I have a morbid fascination with hipsters that I’m trying to figure out, obviously. I don’t exactly fit the definition, but I can pass (at this moment I’m wearing sassy glasses and listening to The Fiery Furnaces while making websites and living with an indie musician, for example). I suspect my hipster fascination means there’s some part of me I’m not quite comfortable with.
It might be about identifying with a subculture I don’t entirely support, about not being analytical or conscious enough about my lifestyle. I’m on a real radical-awakenings kick this month, which I know has been simmering unnamed for a long time. A big part of my cringing about hipsters might be that I find the consumerism, nostalgia and vanity really disappointing, but I don’t really know what to do about it or how to be Out and Loud about that stuff, which I suspect is an important thing to do.
Oh, settling into my identity! Forgetting to do it for awhile and then catching up! (That’s a song.)