I have a love-hate relationship with hipsters. While I dislike how their culture degrades the appearance of women and encourages them to mutilate their bodies with tattoos and piercings, I do like how hipster girls seem to want to have sex with me. Either way, I couldn’t help but smile when a French-influenced writer took down the whole sub-culture…

To live ironically is to hide in public. It is flagrantly indirect, a form of subterfuge, which means etymologically to “secretly flee” (subter + fuge). Somehow, directness has become unbearable to us.

How did this happen? It stems in part from the belief that this generation has little to offer in terms of culture, that everything has already been done, or that serious commitment to any belief will eventually be subsumed by an opposing belief, rendering the first laughable at best and contemptible at worst. This kind of defensive living works as a pre-emptive surrender and takes the form of reaction rather than action.

She argues that hipsters became ironic because they have nothing to live for and no big dreams to accomplish. Their only goal is that of a nihilistic aesthetic where they ask themselves if they appear interesting to the mirror mirror on the wall.

…ironic living bespeaks cultural numbness, resignation and defeat. If life has become merely a clutter of kitsch objects, an endless series of sarcastic jokes and pop references, a competition to see who can care the least (or, at minimum, a performance of such a competition), it seems we’ve made a collective misstep.

The men I’ve met through my blog and forum have displayed a surprising lack of irony. I believe communication with men should consist of an efficient exchange of value in the form of stories, information, and wingmanship, something that the hipster culture seems diametrically opposed to. Sadly, hipsters seem content foraging through the past instead of living in the present.