I bet you don't think this post is about you

Carly Simon's 1972 You're so Vain has that beautiful little Catch-22 that I've always loved. After all, it is about you, you vain vain man (whomever you actually are).
That same Catch-22 has arisen in contemporary society. I'm talking about "hipsters." Much like any other overly dramatized "sub"culture I hate hipsters, and love them. I love to hate them and I hate to love them.

The fact is that the existence of hipsters is a depressing sign of the disconnect between everyday life and any actual concrete life-sustaining force. But on the other side, since that disconnect does indeed exist, hipsters provide a great deal of entertainment during all of my down-time.

The hipster sect of today is not very dissimilar to the fluorescent punks of the late nineties, the flannel-clad grunge kids of the early nineties, the downright scary eighties fads, and every other youth identity since youth labor laws made them necessary. The thing I love about hipsters is their distillation of purpose; their aim is simple. Unclouded by the feeling of the grungies and the political significance of the punks, the hipsters only care about being hip, and since that's all any of those other kids were doing I think the hipster's honesty is a healthy new realism.

Now to tie in the title, the most hipster thing one can do is to talk about hipsters, and also to claim that you yourself are not one (thus the 22nd Catch). An interesting phenomenon which sets hipsters apart from other past cultures is their inclusion tendencies. While still encapsulating all the same rites of elitism they include rather than exclude by default. Whereas with punks one would have to exert a significant amount of effort in dress, lifestyle, even diet to develop credibility; hipsters do all this so as not to be a hipster. Seemingly the concept is to be so hip and on the cutting edge of hip things as to surpass hipness and achieve individuality.

This of course brings the hipster's disconnect value exponentially higher than those who came before. Mathematically identical to the idea of starving so much you become well-fed, spending money until you are rich, or brushing your hair until it looks unbrushed. Hmmm, perhaps that last one was... well... Interesting.