It seems like everywhere you look, you’ll find someone who has facial hair, wears oversized glasses, idolizes Bob Dylan while simultaneously hating his music, and wears their grandpa’s clothes. If you interact with them, they’ll start judging your “mainstream mentality” and how you’re selling yourself to society’s beliefs. They call themselves “hipsters.” We emphasize on “call themselves.”

Let’s start with a little history lesson. The hipster movement has been going on since the 40s. Its origins are debatable, but the most common theory is that it came from the “hip” jazz lovers, who at the time were considered rule breakers and were some of the first subcultures diverting from the media’s mainstream culture. The subculture was started by African Americans, then after WW2 became adapted by white people, who wanted to be a part of the black culture. Yes, the hipster movement that’s now full of privileged white people actually started with black individuals trying to express themselves. White people just jumped on the “trend.” One of the first real acknowledgments of the hipster trend was by American writer Norman Mailer’s 9000 word essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.” The essay was about the young white men who were adopting the black culture as their own.

One of the main things that the original hipsters wanted to be involved in is art and politics. Why you ask? Because that’s how they could be heard. With the whites jumping on the trend, they got involved in their arts and politics too, and that’s the only thing that has remained constant until now.

Now jumping to the modern Hipster movement. The black culture is long forgotten, and the jazz music isn’t even credited to the hipsters. So what are the modern hipsters? It went from a subculture to a basic trend, and even a few sub-trends with it, like the indie and scenester trends. From hipster fashion, to the hipster life style, and even hipster mentality, they’re all trends.

The fashion transition went from old cheap clothes, because the original hipsters couldn’t afford the new and modern clothes, to expensive vintage clothes. Their lifestyle went from them being outside the mainstream, because they weren’t even represented in the main media, to people doing the effort to be different. They went from being unique, to wanting to be unique. They went from actual minority, to majority wanting to be a minority for the sake of attention.

So far the modern hipster movement might sound like a terrible thing, but it actually isn’t. Here’s the irony, the actual hipsters, and the ones who keep the original hipster culture alive and respect it don’t want to be called hipsters. It’s all because in the late 90s and early 2000s, the mainstream media reintroduced the term to what it’s being described with now. The overly used term became a marketing scheme from the fashion scene to resell new vintage inspired clothing items.

The mentality of being “cooler” than the mainstream, and better than everyone else is also a marketing scheme that happened from the indie culture. The indie culture is mostly people who are into independent art work, from movies and music and all types of arts. The independent art is usually self-paid from the makers and throughout the years, artists have lost money from their art. The only way they could sell without losing their touch and style was to make it seem like it’s better than the mainstream art. While it usually is, they still used the idea of uniqueness as a marketing tool, making the rest of the marketing schemes seem natural.

Now if you come to think about it, modern hipsters are following the herd more than the regular folks in the mainstream they judge so much. People think by dressing in a certain way, listening to certain music, and acting in a certain way will make them unique, which makes no sense in any way! Yes, many people actually do enjoy indie music, want to dress in a vintage way, want to be politically correct, and do everything that’s hipster but just because they actually want to. An actual “hipster” won’t call themselves hipster, or even believe in the term. The fact that people are wanting to be hipsters is the irony of our time!

We’re getting controlled by the media and the market to the point of them making us believe that claiming we don’t want to be controlled by them is a good thing. They made us follow a trend that’s about not following trends. They managed to manipulate history and remove a whole culture to make the white privileged people feel unique.

Let’s go back to the actual hipster movement, where we could be proud of who we are, enjoy what we actually like, look the way we want, and be our actual selves. That’s what really makes everyone unique.