Why should you have to bribe your way onto the list?

Dear Hipster: Is it possible to hold down a 9-to-5 professional career, say, as an accountant with a major international financial services firm, but still be a hipster? — Andy

Of course. Nothing’s impossible in this world. But, it’s hard. And, you know what Abraham Lincoln said about things being hard, when somebody asked him whether leading the country through war is hard: “Of course it’s difficult. If it weren’t difficult, everybody would do it. The difficulty is what makes it great.”

Keeping up on the latest and greatest in hipster culture is practically a full-time job, best attempted by part-time baristas with plenty of time to split between staying on the scene and writing ballads for that normcore funk/folk trio project. Imagine the stress of putting in 50 hours a week at the office and still staying current on the latest instaworthy food trends. The struggle is real, bruh.

Yet, that may make your fight all the more worth fighting, because who wants to live in a world where the velvet rope of collecting a steady paycheck bars your entry into the nightclub of coolness? Why should you, or anyone else, have to bribe your way onto the list?

But then, sometimes you find out it wasn’t Abraham Lincoln who said that thing about difficult tasks being worth doing — it was Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own, and I just changed “hard” to “difficult” and “wasn’t” to “weren’t” to make it sound more appropriately 19th Century. So you can never be too sure.