if you really want to break it down, thoreau was the first hipster. he said (in a less eloquent way) "f*** this. i'm going to get away from our society and live in the wilderness". He broke away from the bullshit, from the socially established constructs, "to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Okay, Bright Eyes.
I mean, look at the name of hipster bands lately: Fleet Foxes, Caribou, Wolfmother- if that's not an attempt to harken back to native roots then what else is it (perhaps the members really just enjoy nature)?
Whatever, back to the main subject of this post. Now I've read number upon number of articles bemoaning that our increasingly virtual lifestyle causes depression because of the lack of real human contact. I grew up in the time where AIM was prominent and numerous soap operas of the teenage era unfolded in the minutes of those exchanges therefore I can understand the assertion of these articles and the logic. Despite the fact that what we write on Facebook posts/blogs/comments etc is essentially like tattooing yourself with the inanity that you post on the web, we do it because its easy, instantaneous and seemingly harmless. Also the problem with this shift in living also causes ourselves to critically and fully construct our identity via likes, dislikes, music taste, and quotes. Everything we post, every sentence we write continues to label our identity in this vast space.
But the vastness is appealing. The remoteness is freeing. The fact that we can say what we really, truly, in the deepest and darkest recesses of our mind think without fear of immediate societal repercussion- I mean is that nothing but truly freedom. Although Thoreau's journey was much more of the kind of a confrontation of natural forces and the human fallibility in face of those, I think that what we are dealing with now is the struggle to force oneself to be heard in the face of the abyss of empty space. And although people may respond favorably, you know the emptiness of their validation. It's all a lie.
