There have always been hipsters

Dear Hipster:

Will there always be hipsters? If so, why? If not, why, and what will come after?

— Daisy

In one sense, hipsters have been around in one form or another since just about ever, so why assume that will ever change? So long as human civilization endures the apocalypse(s) cased in the warnings of every alarmist naysayer who secretly can’t wait to smugly glare across the smoldering wreckage of the world as we know it and say, “I told you we shouldn’t have invaded Syria,” or whatever event catalyzes the globally obliterative war and subsequent zombie hellscape; there will always be some form of hipster to witheringly disregard the mainstream with a languorous meh.

And yet, a changing world may render the hipster irrelevant. If we somehow evolve into a society where everybody lives in his own little culture bubble — not actually an insane postulate — then there would effectively be no mainstream, and no space outside of it for the hipster. In that case, I suppose the contemporary hipster would evolve into a self-congratulatory autodidact, no longer dependent on proving he is cooler than everyone else and thus no longer providing the vital social function of dictating the pace of coolness for better or worse. That sounds like a pretty sad existence to me, so I will keep my fingers crossed that the world will always need somebody to be super into the next big thing, at least till everybody else gets into it.