Morgan Freeman as an extraterrestrial diplomat

Dear Hipster:

If aliens invaded the Earth tomorrow bent on our destruction, who would be the best person to act as a diplomat on behalf of the entire world?

— Tycho, Hillcrest

I’m weirdly flattered you think I might know the answer to this; I’m also pleased to report that I do, in point of fact, know the exact human for the job. I know you’re thinking, “He’s going to say ‘himself,’” but I promise I’m not.

When you’re greeting a hostile, extraterrestrial lifeform, you want to put humanity’s best foot forward by sending out a person of great sophistication and culture to speak on behalf of the human species. At the same time, you need someone humble, so the invaders do not perceive an exaggerated threat that inspires them to vaporize the planet with their space weapons. At the same time, you need to find somebody who will communicate a simple message of peace, yet who also seems capable of understanding the interstellar mysteries that might ignite the imaginations of a warlike race from beyond the solar system. The only natural choice is, of course, Morgan Freeman. And, I mean, if they have any idea about earth culture whatsoever, you know the aliens have seen The Shawshank Redemption.

Dear Hipster:

Some things in life are inherently disappointing. Obviously, anytime something is hyped up and it doesn’t live up to expectations, you get disappointed like a little kid who has been waiting for Christmas morning since the day after Halloween. I guess the adult version of that is probably when you finally tune into that new Netflix original series all your friends love, and it turns out to be only meh. What are the biggest hipster disappointments going around right now?

— Dave

Well, there are the whopping great disappointments of life, like how, at least for most people, the single greatest disappointment in life is when they realize they have reached the age where, if they were ever going to be famous, it would have happened already. Similarly, the moment you realize clouds are not in fact soft and fluffy is pretty much the moment you know you’ll never truly be happy again, at least not in any meaningful sense. These disappointments affect hipsters because, contrary to popular belief, hipsters form a subset of ordinary humanity.

But then there are the peculiar disappointments of hipster life. Take, for example, the kind of disappointment I recently felt when an acquaintance falsely informed me The Adventures of Pete & Pete was streaming on Amazon Prime. This pernicious falsehood raised my hopes of returning, if ever so briefly, to the 1990s at their spiritual best; and then those same hopes were dashed upon the rocks of grim reality. I, alongside the other hipsters inexplicably drawn to revisit retro children’s programming, must resign ourselves to the fact that Nickelodeon executives have hidden the channel’s single greatest achievement somewhere deep beneath a mountain where they mutter in the darkness and keep their precious safe from prying eyes.

If you want to spot a hipster disappointment, look for any situation where somebody like me is completely bent out of shape about something, and you can’t help but ask, “Who cares about this trivial little thing?” Well, I care, Nickelodeon, and don’t you forget it. And while you’re at it, maybe you can remind your friends at General Mills how unfair it was to bring back Fruit Brute cereal for exactly one year in 2014, and then take it away again for the foreseeable future.