Obscure spirits from the Whiskey Exchange

Hey Hipster:

Maybe I’m losing my mind because I’ve been locked out of my Amazon account for a week, and have thus been deprived of all the mindless streaming video entertainment that might distract my otherwise whirling brain, but I can’t stop obsessing over this Idea, and I would like your opinion. Unless I understand less than nothing about the nature of reality itself, the way I see it, there is a finite amount of stuff in the world, and, unless you go about creating new stuff, eventually all the stuff will run out. Having written that, I realize it’s incredibly abstract, so I will try to concretize it.

Everything that has ever been done has already been done, right? So the sum-total of history has already occurred, and no new history will ever occur. Of course, the present eventually becomes the past, which then becomes a part of history, but that isn’t really the same thing because it hasn’t happened yet. I’m talking about how, looking backwards from our current perspective, it is at least theoretically possible to know everything there is to know about everything that has ever happened. If we want to know more things, we need to dream them up.

Now, here’s where you come in. I was actually thinking from this whole perspective because I have been ordering up random, obscure spirits from places like the Whiskey Exchange, and I have been drinking them in my house because I haven’t been able to go get a cocktail anywhere for months now. I’ve got bottles of poitín (a sort of Irish moonshine) and raicilla (a sort of Mexican moonshine) and plenty of obscure liqueurs from all over the world. I am struck by how each of these delicious, intoxicating beverages would have been virtually unknown to even a very cool American as little as fifteen years ago, but now, they are readily available. I chalk it up to the twin miracles of e-commerce and hipster awareness of ever-more-obscure niche products, markets, and traditions. Each thing I find out about for the first time is like a little miracle that has been known to some for a long time, but to me for mere minutes. Because of the finite nature of all the things (see above), I fear the day when all the things are known. What happens when all of human knowledge has been “discovered”? Will there be anything left to live for, or will we all have to sit around and wait on new history to occur?

— Shawn, Normal Heights

After reading years of answers regularly appearing here in “Ask a Hipster,” faithful readers might be surprised to learn that I, the eponymous Hipster, fount of all the knowledge that actually matters, have occasional questions of my own. Sadly, those questions too often go unanswered. Were blueberries named by a lazy person, or was there a good reason to name them after the color they are? Often, I lie awake and night and I wonder, Why?

Why is anything? Why am I?

I cannot answer Shawn’s question, because I am not even sure where it begins and ends. But that’s okay, because I think the answer doesn’t matter. It is good to be reminded that asking unanswerable questions, and pondering their bizarre implications, may be the entire point.