Of hipsters, exams, and millenials

If you’re somehow reading this, you’re probably taking that small break in the library café before coming back upstairs for your revision. Here we are! It’s the final term! You’re probably, like me, starting to feel the library is not your second, but your first home. It is where all your life, aspirations, and social interactions will exist until you’re done, and you’re totally cool with becoming a completely dysfunctional piece of pseudo-zombie, trying to overstimulate your caffeine-addict brain for the next four weeks.

As you’re sucked into the exam period lifestyle, you might believe this is fairly normal behaviour. But it is not. Not even for classic top university standards. This student generation is probably the most serious, diligent and hardworking in the history of modern mainstream university. If you’re unsure about this, ask your parents. The three to four years of state-sponsored hedonism has become a £9,000 a year product you buy in order to survive in the overcrowded graduate job market. Never-ending bar nights are outnumbered by library all-nighters. Student activism and fights with the police are replaced by petitions to our unions to keep libraries open all night. And the idealist, politically engaged student is replaced by the networking-obsessed, internship seeking student.

All of this is part of a greater cultural shift.

Think about what defined people’s aspirations before our times. There was always some glue that made everyone, especially young people, connect, and gave them a sense of collective purpose. I can throw in some examples. Centuries ago we can talk about religion, or defending your country, as something that moulded this collective sense of purpose.

At the start of the last century, we can think of socialists, anarchists and fascists around Europe. However you might feel about them, you can see that they had their own mutual purpose, and an ethos to look forward to (a world without government, a world without bourgeois oppression, a life solved by your charismatic, overlord dictator).

Here we are! It’s the final term!

In the 40s in Britain, the defining issue of their time was to win the war against totalitarianism. In the 60s, the hippies dreamt of a more peaceful, less restrictive and more loving society.

All of these examples have something in common. There was always a sense of direction. Whether it was fighting for your country, fighting for the workers, fighting for peace and love, young people had some ideal to look up to. A world to look forward to.

There is nothing like that today. No higher ideal to look up to. The defining issue of our time is a lack of sense of direction. This sense of collective purpose is gone, absent, dead. It’s been fully replaced by the individual. Society, as a whole, doesn’t know where it is going since the Berlin wall fell and the whole notion of “good ones” and “bad ones” disappeared.

The end of collective ambition culturally leads to the postmodern (or post-postmodern) world we live in today. Art and creative expression is shown as a skeptical and playful response to any established concept. It is defined by confident uncertainty about the world, a self-conscious, self-referential, skeptical judgement of today’s culture. And the perfect embodiment of this death of purpose is the figure of the hipster.

Yes, hipsters. The 60s gets hippies, the 70s gets punks. And we get hipsters. By all means, I don’t mean to complain about their existence, as so many people do. I’m not some kind of subculture racist. I just tend to think of the hipster “movement” as the perfect personification of our postmodern struggle to find purpose. The hippies wanted a peaceful world, punks wanted to liquidate the government. What do hipsters want?

Nothing. Or maybe something. Who knows? They don’t know. They are inherently contradictory. They, like postmodern artists, revolve around avoiding mainstream dogma, which ends up becoming a dogma in itself. They enjoy things ironically instead of effusively.

Any attempt to define how they usually dress will, as any attempt to define, look for common traits between hipsters, which will then become too mainstream for them, and will immediately make them depart from those traits. And this lack of purpose is also a lack of collective purpose, because the hipster is much more about the individual than about the collective. It is an empty, ironic, self-conscious “movement”.

The loss of collective purpose, of that glue that would hold a generation together, is lost within our generation (or millennials, as big companies like to call us). We are strangely individualistic. Maybe the only dream we can think of for millennials is building your own startup and getting rich quickly. And for the rest of us, securing that pre-internship, internship and graduate job we need to keep ourselves up to social expectations.

I am not saying this situation is inherently bad. God, I sure prefer an individualistic, aimless and lost generation than a collective, purposeful Hitler Youth movement. But there is something about the loss of any collective aspiration that is inherently sad in our apathetic, online-petition-activist students. We have become obsessed about the individual.

There is some good news, though. According to Deloitte’s Millennial survey 2016, millennials want a job that gives them purpose, not just a big salary. Companies are attempting to adapt to this whole new workforce that values crazy things like “work-life balance” and “job satisfaction” more than money. Maybe this is a good consequence of this lack of collective purpose among our generation. We attempt to find purpose individually, within our jobs. And hell, who am I to judge.

In the end, we are all here, at the edge of modern culture, trying to find meaning, to make our own meaning, or just to accept there is none and desperately attempt to feel something as we fuck our way towards the end of days.