Hipsters

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21

Gamer,

I get what you’re driving at, but to me, it seems like you’re aiming at a very large rock. I can just as easily claim that the losers are those with all the attributes that let them slide through life without ever having a question in their heads. Further, that the real winners are those who are confronted with obstacles and learn to overcome them. The assumption that a life without struggle is winning is perhaps an interesting take, but comes off as uni-dimensional. What is heaven unless there is hell? I would suggest that the real winners are those who have experienced hell and lived to tell about it.

22

Life is struggle for everyone eventually. The winners are in harmony with their world. The alpha lion who won the pride fair and square while the betas wandered off in pensive solitude. When the alpha is finally torn asunder by his male children, he doesn’t get philosophical about it, for his children being strong were the whole fucking point.

We are the betas. No shame in it unless we don’t know it. The alphas would never post these things or think these thoughts.

23

We played the main game in town and lost, so we started playing a different game in the sidelines - one we have a chance in winning - hoping it becomes the main one, or maybe taking pride in the fact that it’s in the sidelines. Not really though. The problem is we’re watching the main game as we’re playing our own, and more importantly hoping to be watched by the main game. You never stop wanting the hot cheerleader.

Well, I’d like to say it’s the hipsters who play sideline ball. The other, more specific, we on the other hand choose to get on the bench and criticize both games. And yea of course you can say we’re thereby playing our own game, but it’s not that obvious, and that’s why we feel entitled to make fun of the hipsters. Their game sucks. We’re at least not playing, but if we did, man oh man, no doubt we’d win.

You of course don’t agree with this, and I agree with you when you seem to be saying we’re on the benches because we can’t even win the side game, and that’s probably right. It’s a terrible thought though. I comfort myself by saying that there’s different ways of losing the game. You can play and lose, and resign to the bench, or you can play and head for the bench because you’re not get much joy out of winning it. (Of course that’s what everyone, including the hipster, says.) I’m different.

I put immigrants in this last category, because, well, I already told you, but I have rationalizing reasons as well. When you’re an immigrant, you never really stop playing the old game. Even if you win the new one, the old one’s still there. A kid growing up playing soccer and idolizing their stars who then grows up to be good at baseball won’t be as happy as the kid growing up with baseball. Not a perfect analogy, and I’m running out of ways of implying I fucked both the cheerleader and cute hipster chick and I’m still not happy, so I’ll just say it.

24

If life is eventually a struggle for everyone, then the difference between an alpha and a beta is merely time - we’re all betas at some point in our lives. I’m still unsure how a temporary alpha is to be considered a winner. It seems to me that the beta is just as capable of harmony. If life is struggle, and I accept that, then the ups an downs are just part of living in harmony with our strengths and weaknesses. Even if I’m a beta, I’ve never considered myself a winner or loser - I’m just here. Does that make me a temporary alpha?

25

I don’t think people ever become betas viz aging in some kind of hard and fast inevitable sense. And besides by the time we’ve aged, the part of us in question is already more or less formed, the deeds done, the self etched.

When in EARLIER LIFE we pretend that our second choice or third choice is really the better thing, all because our first choice wasn’t an option, we are set along a new kind of path, a path that haunts us into old age. And if you’re set on your “first-choice” path, you wind up who you are when you’re older. Where in this state, even if you have to relinquish some of the first-choice options to your younger stalwarts, you are still who you are in large part by having been the recipient of your first choices as a younger man.

All this is NOT to say merely boo-hoo, although there’s valid time and place for that, too. It’s to say (in agreement, firstly) that in certain realms and peaks of mind, the fact of YOU having been a dissonant chord in the song of the cosmos, a sharp edged puzzle piece with no place, is itself the father of what you are. And were you fortunate to be a perfectly formed chord in our world’s cadence, you wouldn’t reach the zenith of thought you prize today. BUT THEN, what is it we’re prizing exactly?

Having studied composition at the college level I know the beauty of dissonant chords, but you really have to stretch your ear before you see it with them earballs. Why do we stretch our ears? Why do we praise dissonance and atonality in college music? OH I’ll tell you why. Those of us who couldn’t quite sing or play straight had to devise new ways to justify our existence. Or those of us for whom perfect harmony broke our hearts (because it only reminded us of the perfect loves and vistas that evaded or confounded us) had to find a mode of expression to articulate the grotesque dissonance in our realities; and give us permission to pretend that anything perfect and simple and pure was also banal and trite and lifeless.

But it’s all an illusion, too. Because we are all beautiful, and we can all do simple, we can all do harmony. But nobody is going to let you think that until it’s too late. That’s why I’m writing any of this. To finally say to some young person reading this: you are beautiful and you don’t have to turn your mind into something ugly…even though there will be ample justifications for thinking it holy to do so.

26

I need some help here. It seems to me that no small part of our experiences (history over time) are not made by choice, but by circumstance. A rag picker on the dumps of Buenos Aires is way too busy trying to survive one more day. He doesn’t have the time to consider meta abstractions of mind. His life is utter simplicity. Gather whatever he can to keep from starving just one more day. Aesthetically, there is a certain beauty in such simplicity, but that isn’t what you’re talking about. I realize that this is an extreme example, but I am having trouble seeing the distinction you are making between those who glide effortlessly and those who struggle. Too much depends on your beginning circumstances. Got any more ways of splaining this? :-k

27

You’re right, what I’m saying may be abstruse, contradictory & vacuous, but at least it’s fallacious.

Yah, I’m writing from an Americanish point of view. News story yesterday pointed out that 96% of us who are technically “poverty stricken” also have air-conditioning, TV and Internet. So we’re talking about a fairly big target here when even the impoverished can sit around and yearn for an identity.

But let’s look at ragpicker for a sec. Chances are he, too, is part of something, a larger faction, a family of rag-a-muffins and street survivors. They might even break out in Bersteinian song and dance from time to time, twirling their rags rakishly.

And but so hipsters are doing this same thing, only their swagger and sense of self is more caught up in having the gall to dress a certain way, and this idea of dress is pretty universal. Whether you’re a mod, hells angel, orthodox jew or USMC or Abercrombie jock, dress is sort of an existential express flight to identity. Any symbol that says: “I know who I am, and there are many of us.”

Maybe all that really matters, for the signal to work, is for the person to merely THINK they know who they are. To have the swagger, regardless of whether it’s justified. And what COULD justify it? Is there really a way to know WHO WE ARE or is it always collective, and intertwined and dependent on thinking we know who we are?

I wish it could be simple as saying I’m a humanoid/caucasian earth male, and be done with it, but it’s not so easy. So I forgive and respect and sort of fear the hipster, let’s be clear about that.

My only hope, or game, or challenge, to him, is for certain hipsters to consider for a sec that while his jar is full of identity juice, it might be a second choice identity juice. What is permanent is the jar, and you fill it from whatever choices are available to you. Some hipsters might be rockin first choice identity. But for those who are not, what happens to them when they acknowledge the truth that their zealotry is in the end more important than what they are zealous about? What happens when they have the humility to acknowledge that in the beginning, they weren’t picked for kickball, and they turned that sadness into skinny jeans and face piercings and swagger as part of a different team. What happens to that part of him that longed for the beauty and simplicity of kickball? Maybe something beautiful can then happen to him. I don’t know. Maybe something awful.

JT I always like what you say and exactly how you say it. Your responses are right on as our your confusions. It’s all part of the plan so keep it coming.

28

Gamer,

I know you’re just fucking around, but you always manage a kernel of truth in what you say. That’s irritating as hell because it demands an honest response instead of the toss-off smartass comment for which I am well known. Maybe a little switch here, but… even those who appear to glide through life effortlessly are governed by the choices they make. Axiom: Being one place is the same as not being somewhere else. Or, doing one thing is the same as not doing something else. Unless circumstances force certain behaviors, there is nothing but choice. One could go further and say that even physical survival is a choice, but that is a little extreme. But getting past the side trips, even the blessed must make decisions. Dinner at the best restaurant in town or a pleasant afternoon sipping white wine at the polo match? Every choice opens one door and closes another. Every choice influences and/or controls our actions and these actions are part of experiental learning. For some, this appears to be effortless while others appear to struggle. So for me, what is winner or loser is on a learning curve continuum with little or no explanation why. Why is the resource-abundant child, given every conceivable opportunity, a complete failure? He has been nurtured past anything reasonable, nothing but the best schools (he failed all of them), all the power connections he could ever want, and destined to be at the top of the top, and still fails miserably at life? Then there is the child born into abject poverty with no resources, who climbs out of their circumstances and becomes the model citizen praised by all? Obviously, one made bad choices and another made good choices and circumstances be damned. I’ve never been able to find the why of that. All of this forces me to the conclusion that we are all “losers” even as appearances make it seem counter-intuitive. But you are right. There are those irritating SOB’s that fall into a bucket of shit and come out smelling like roses. How do they do that? I have an old high school buddy that fits that pattern. The bastard can make more money by accident than any ten people can make on purpose and it looks like it falls into his lap. No discernable effort, he is just a money magnet. So you are right, but I can’t find any plausible explanation for it. One of life’s mysteries…

29

I tried to be a hipster,
But fell flat on my face,
For I was always out of time
And always out of place.

30

I tried to be a sore, late outsider,
But fell flat on my face,
For I was always out of time
And always out of place.

31

the fucking around is precisely how i manage the kernel. there’s nothing “just” about fucking around in my case or I would have abandoned it long ago.

I think they manage it because they are so empty inside that they need to pathologically erect a statue of themselves designed to impress, and they spend a lifetime maintaining this appearance, and they are just very good at it. We are not different from them in regard to the emptiness part, we are only different in how relatively poorly we are at maintaining first-level appearances, and this last bit may as well be my thesis of this thread.

But it’s not all bleak as that, for we are, in the end, sane men of courage. We can love. We can choose. And we can be more than just appearance-driven. And not just because we are BAD at appearances, but because we KNOW that there’s something more than that. A kernel of truth, as it were, amid the endless fucking around.

It’s always about finding that kernel, and if not finding, at least looking…

32

Gamer,

Perhaps I chose the wrong wording. Maybe it isn’t fucking around, but playing around? We’re onions, and under layer after layer, of abstractions, distractions, games, playing the devil’s advocate, there is finally pointing at the moon. The THE. I don’t know if it is cynicism, senility, or just plain being worn out, but I don’t play very often any more. My handful of friends forgive my cut-to-the-chase bluntness or join me on those rare “playing” episodes. Why do so many miss seeing the kernel? Are they so busy maintaining the facades that they can no longer be the questioning child? Or have we finally created complexity so deep that we’ve approached the incomprehensible? There are times when I push the edges but in the main, it’s just easier to not make people uncomfortable. But I do wonder, where has curiosity gone?

33

I like that expression “in the main.”

We get to do that here, reuse expressions that Bertie Russel would use, and do it without a hint of irony.

Anyhoozle, I respect that cut to the chase attitude that comes to older guys. You just get tired of all the nonsense, or maybe you finally realize just how valuable the ground is, and you don’t want to waste even a second not standing on it. I get that. I want to be like that, I’m heading toward that.

I think the pain and emptiness just gets so bad for some people, the self-loathing, the lack of a center, the inability to live for your own experience and instead living for someone else’s experience of you, to feed a black hole of need for approval or admiration, and this black is put there by evolution itself, etc.

I feel compelled to say of any group of uniformed conformists “same bullshit, different costume” even though the act of saying that is itself bullshit and a costume. And when you get tired of the infinite onion, the impossibility of not stepping into your own bullshit, you freeze, paralyzed. You can die or you can admit it, with true humility, to yourself, and start anew, with a new appreciation of just how hard it is for not just you but everyone. You can smile from the root of your heart and play for the good guys. You can stop thinking so damn much and distract yourself with doing. Setting your heart toward compassion, and proceeding with courage, and striving for connection, and not deconstructing those terms philosophically, like some devlish child taking apart his TV set for the sheer curiosity, only to be left with nothing to watch.

34

Aloneness as emptiness is such horseshit. We’re taught that, if we’re alone, something is wrong with us. OH MY GOD! (note that I didn’t use OMG) I’m alone! Yeah? So fucking what? Accept alone. Embrace it. Revel in it. Hug it and never let go. Instead of illusory pretending you aren’t alone you can now be busy just being. Enjoy other people whe they come around. Accomodate them the best you can, but you are too busy with your own curiosity to seek them out.

Oh, I haven’t called or stopped by lately? I won’t apologize, I’ve just been busy, and I’ll always be busy. Drop by when you can and we’ll have a beer catch-up session. I’m not here to impress anyone but myself. You wanna play? Sure, we can do that for a little while, but not too long. I’m busy.

35

I’m not sure what prompted the diatribe about people who whine about being alone, but that’s fine. I agree that aloneness doth not equal sadness as an axiom. You do seem a little over-compensatey about it, tho. Just saying.

I think it’s the preoccupation with how we’re perceived that does us in – that’s what I meant in my last post. I wasn’t talking at all about “aloneness.”

Strangely, though, and for better or worse, this sorta goes back to the original post: I maintain that if we could push a button we’d all be lean and tall and handsome. We’d all be funny and charismatic and graceful and heroic and rich and healthy. Probably not one of us would choose the skins we currently live in. Nerds would be jocks. Those who type amateur philosophy between porn surf would be jet skiing and fucking soul mates who happen, randomly of course, to be tens.

And certainly not ONE of us would CHOOSE “aloneness.”

There is a tendency, though, for hipsters, nerds, outcasts, bums, poor people, mediocre slobs, and yes, LONERS, (and that list includes all of us at one point or another) to go to great pains to defend their “choices,” embrace it!, revel in it!, et al. I think this is dishonest.

Acceptance is good. Making the best of something. But pretending it’s your choice or that it holds superiority is just sour grapes. Sad thing is that pretty much all of us do this.

What we are in fact TAUGHT, JT, is that we are special. Each of us. Unique, special, perfect. We are taught that our spouses are our destiny and that life is a fairy tale, and that we are the ones that matter, and that everyone else is just a supporting cast of flat characters. That’s what we’re taught. And that’s what we hold onto at all costs, our pride. Fat and proud.

Poor and proud.

Alone and proud.

My point is that we all do have something to be proud of. It’s just not what we think.

36

I don’t know , Gamer. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t an outlier. I was born into a poor family, my mother was divorced when it was deep shame to be divorced and the children were expected to pay for that “sin”. I spent my formative years watching those with privileges that I never had and somehow knew intuitively that they were the “under-privileged” because everything came easy to them. They knew little or no struggle, they just assumed their privileged lives. This doesn’t make me or others like me special, just different. I learned at a very early age what a dollar was and the work necessary to obtain one. Life isn’t about privilege, Gamer. It is about earning whatever you have, whatever you become. Is that over-compensation for not having been raised in privilege? I don’t think or feel that way. Never have. I am one of those what-you-see-is-what-you-get people. I’ve never wanted to be more than what I happened to be at the time and I appreciate every experience both positive and negative that formed who I am. Is that special? Nah, just different. What is that difference? Perhaps a bit more mindfulness. With little resources I had to think instead of assume, but that is all.

Aloneness isn’t about choosing, it just is. The only “choice” is to give up the illusions of togetherness or be consumed by those illusions. Then, perhaps one can be real, with strengths and weaknesses and no fear to have them all on display.

37

I think it’s special, assuming it’s true. I don’t think you were born poor in the grand scheme. You had food on the table. Just think of Rwanda’s lost boys and then talk about privilege. What I think is instead at play here is that you tend to accept and defend precisely what you are and what you have, and that you are doing so for sound and respectable reasons. This goes exactly against my premise, which is that people who accept and defend exactly what they are, are like dogs that will love just about anyone who gives them a bone. Indiscriminate sluts, most dogs.

What you’re saying is poised on the edge of a knife. Because yes, we need to accept, even love, precisely what we are. Of course I agree with all that. But doing that in what I’d consider a cool way is not so easy. I would almost argue that we have to first loathe ourselves, to have it all out with it, indict ourselves and curse the fates, etc., before we can truly earn the right to see the light and love ourselves.

  1. We can’t control what happens TO us.
  2. We can only control what we DO in light of what happens.
  3. In that DOING, we find out who we are.
  4. So it doesn’t matter what happens to us, we can always find out who we are. That’s the real goal anyway.
  5. If good things always happen to us, it’s harder to find out who we are.
  6. Therefore, we should want bad things to happen to us.
  7. They are really in fact good things because they lead to self-awareness
  8. Unless we do the WRONG thing when bad things happen
  9. Like wear hipster glasses, etc.

Help me out here.

38

Sure, self-awareness. And what is that? You’ve already mentioned the salient points, but just to reinforce or maybe add a couple of wrinkles…
First and foremost: give up any notion tht you are special. This means that you have examined every conceivable character flaw, all the physical imperfections, every possible negative thing about you. Get under that bright hot spotlight and winnow through all your devils. Remarkably, if done in cold brutal honesty, the devils go away and the tattered remains can see what you aren’t. Oddly, you are now “special”. How so? Self awareness is more than understanding what we aren’t. We also have a few (not enough) strengths. Most people play up their strengths and do their damndest to hide their frailties. That is considered normal… but we aren’t normal. Having sensitized ourselves to our weaknesses and strengths, we approach living the opposite of normal. Fuck all our strengths. They are just there and easily accomplished. They are what other people call our “talents”. Instead, we focus on all our shortcomings and our life work, no matter the content, is aimed at turning as many weaknesses to strengths as possible. That is “special”. Unfortunately, we would need at least another life time to address all our shortcomings (I’d need at least two more). That we are ever to find a balance of strengths and weaknesses is the illusion that is stripped away, and we stand there buck naked with terrible, beautiful, truth.

An ugly part of sentience is that it attempts to run away from itself. As soon as one senses responsibility, the dodge games begin. Self awareness is finding the courage to face up to one’s self and in that, become more than a cardboard cutout among all the other cardboard cutouts.

Did that help or hurt?

39

I forgot the most important part of self awareness… To be truly self aware, one must learn to forgive themselves their inadequacies and foibles. If you can’t forgive yourself, you will never forgive others, and no matter what you do, there will never be that connection, that momentary intimacy you seek. Forgiveness is the lynch pin of the freedom to love and be loved, to respect and be respected.