Social insecurity

Dear Hipster:

As the hipster population ages, with older hipsters beginning to receive benefits such as social security, has hipster gentrification been creeping in; whereby the older, now more affluent hipsters upgrade their digs, further displacing younger hipsters, all the while leading to increases in rental/room prices? If this is occurring, would some of the younger hipsters who become trustafarians with extra disposable income counteract this, essentially canceling it all out, all the while also contributing to hipster gentrification?

—Progressive Guru

Maybe you didn’t mean it this way, but I would note that you make a pretty big jump at the outset here, going straight to the social security-collecting hipsters. Isn’t the age for receiving social security benefits something like 65? There’s lots of hipster life in between spending your twenties trying to sneak into the Casbah and convince attractive potential hipster mates that you totally have it going on. How about the thirty-something hipster activity of looking down on the twenty-something hipsters and their fake problems? Or what about the staid forty-something hipster tradition of realizing you’ve forgotten about more trends than most younger hipsters have even lived through? And say nothing of the fifty-something hipster activity of doing whatever the hell you want because people automatically assume you know what you’re doing.

If you want a really perfect answer, you will need to go to a hipster economist. I don’t have the necessary mathematical skills to control for things like how volatility in the skinny jeans market correlates to panicked traders crashing the mustache wax futures indices. Accounting for the derivative effects of craft beer brewery openings and closures on real estate prices in urban and suburban neighborhoods? Forget it!

I can, however, offer some amateur sociological observations. I don’t know if it counts as “gentrification” per se, but I can say hipster quality of living tends to improve steadily with age before either improving or declining dramatically based on certain anticipated life events. As hipsters achieve affluence (at least, affluence for them), their digs evolve from “shared crash pad with numerous cigarette burns in the carpet” to, well, basically anything that’s better than the kind of apartment where the stains lead rich, inner lives all their own. Generally, by the time hipsters reach the age at which social security becomes a viable income option, they are more likely to be downsizing to life on a houseboat, or to some sort of mountain town where young people visit only on the weekends. In the intervening years, most hipsters pass through the “moving away from the city for a while” phase, and then head into the inevitable, “triumphant return to the old neighborhood” phase, which usually doesn’t last very long before the “this neighborhood isn’t what it used to be” phase. Very few people, hipster or otherwise, go through a “maybe it’s just me who’s out of touch after all” phase.

Regardless of the eventual destination, every hipster who levels up in the game of life leaves behind a dingy starter apartment or crummy part-time job for the next enterprising young hipster who comes along. Rather than the inevitable displacement of the next generation, I think of this more as an endless parade of younger hipsters following in the path of their predecessors.