A reason to break from the corporate state

Dear Hipster: Why does the Valentine’s Day stuff come out the day after Christmas? — S.

Commerce, bruh!

Sometimes, I actually think we are headed toward a future straight out of a George Saunders story, where it’s always some holiday, celebrated endlessly till the next holiday, which smoothly emerges from the remains of the former like a soft-shelled crab scuttling from its too-small carapace.

This future would not be very hipster at all, as we hipsters disdain commercialism run amok. Be it posers latching onto (and subsequently diluting) the newest trend, multinational conglomerates disguising poison detergent as snacks, or big-box retailers cashing in on holiday spending; consumer culture in all its forms is, somewhat ironically, one of the main reasons we have hipsters in the first place. Without a mainstream from which the hipster could diverge, there would never have been a reason to engage in at least trying to be a more socially relevant human, one who breaks away from the corporate state. Being essentially countercultural figures, hipsters, and the many people who embrace hipster values in whole or in part, are, in an odd way, inspired by the mainstream in the way that the bombing of Guernica inspired Picasso.