Across the United States, thousands, if not millions, of people suffer from a sociopathic behavioral pattern know as the Hipster Complex. Said complex persuades the believer into thinking they are not a hipster when in reality they are. The Hipster Complex is self-perpetuating. One denies one’s hipster-ness, which forces the hipster further down through the rabbit hole into a wonderland complete with Myspace profiles and re-released vinyl versions of Animal Collective albums.
A May 2011 Buzzfeed.com article names Minnesota as the most hipster state in The Hipster States of America. Minnesota received the ironic title because it leads the nation on the interweb search results for “hipster,” seconded by New York. Thanks, Google. The article goes on to say that the hipsters in Williamsburg, NY and Portland, Ore. emulate Minnesota chic. We wear flannel and Doc Martens because they’re functional in subzero weather, and our hipster cousins to the Northeast and West wear them ironically.
So, here we are in Minnesota, at a private liberal arts college, the epitome of hipster breeding grounds, yet why do we fail to recognize our own innate hipster-ness? Why has hipster become a dirty word? Isn’t hipster synonymous with the cutting edge, the underground of the underground, so hip that it doesn’t even have a name yet?
The truth is that Gustavus Adolphus College is infested with a more malevolent breed of hipsters: hipsters that give hipsters a bad name. These hipsters, the ones that appear in our daily lives, are the hipsters that people love to hate. They are arrogant, careless, self-absorbed and genuinely cruel.
Over my first five months at GAC, I have encountered the exclusivity that accompanies a private school and an atmosphere of people who legitimately believe they know next to everything. Some of these people are fellow first-years with overinflated egos (“You’ve read Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov and F. Scott Fitzgerald, right?”) Now, these people are not only better read than a large percentage of the student body (and probably the faculty as well), but they also have more musical knowledge than you ever thought was possible (”I’m really digging on Gorilla Outrage right now.”)
A haughty sense of superiority and a feeling of entitlement is what leads hipsters to commit random acts of cruelty, i.e. feeling no fellowship with fellow students, playing on other’s insecurities and refusing to do simple things like return phone calls.
If we don’t lose this mask of “Minnesota nice,” which hipsters hide behind to justify the difference of what they say versus what they do (being nice and civil to people at the Caf then talking about how rude they are in chem class.), our morality will sink even further into the ground. We young adult Minnesotans are at the hub of a nationwide hipster network. The rest of the hipster community looks to us for fashion, intellectual and artistic guidance. Unless we start admitting that we don’t know everything and start caring about our fellow students and human beings, how can we expect to make the world a better place? The moral of the story is this: realize you’re a douchey hipster and do something about it, or else we are all screwed.