The Sad Science of Hipsterism

/via @andrlik

Interesting article from Psychology Today on how the essence of being a hipster seems to depend on not only the common trappings of hipster culture, but also on the conscious desire to pretend not to be one.

From the article:

Their problem is that their purchases tend to place them within a category whose mythology they despise. That’s right: Nobody likes hipsters, not even hipsters.

As Arsel and Thompson put it, the beats of the ‘50s and hippies of the ‘60s and ‘70s, both of which had an admirable authenticity about them even if you didn’t care for the particulars, eventually gave rise to “the millennial hipster,” which “came to be represented as an uberconsumer of trends and as a new, and rather gullible, target market that consumes cool rather than creating it.”

It’s an interesting article that highlights the ironic aspects of hipster culture, including the way in which categorically defined “hipsters” will tend to refuse to self-identify as such. If you have hipsters in your life, it’s worth a read.