The Adnostic

Remember the Yuppie? Remember how Michael J. Fox made us laugh at his uptight Type-A character, Alex P. Keaton? The ego. The one-upsmanship. The conformity. The hyperactive drive for materialistic wealth. Lest we forget American Psycho, with a lot of same qualities taken to much darker and bizarre extremes. Is that a titanium business card I see?

Remember your classmates in the 80's with dreams of becoming stockbrokers, doctors, or lawyers? They had no ambition of changing the world or making a difference. They just wanted the German sports car that came with the hefty paycheck. They were the perfect products of insatiable affluence.

Of course you remember. Just like you remember hot pink legwarmers and Flock of Seagulls hair, all of which died out with the decade that spawned them only to be resurected for the sake of nostalgia. Right? Maybe not.

From Details Magazine:

Of course, that term, yuppie, has fallen so out of favor that we’re not even supposed to use it anymore. We’re expected to come up with a neologism—a clever 21st-century inversion of the word. But we’re not going to do that, because we don’t need to: The yuppie of 1986 and the yuppie of 2006 are so similar as to be indistinguishable. A used copy of The Yuppie Handbook recently fell into my hands. The book was published in 1984 as a jokey piece of social anthropology, and it made a slew of observations about this new American species. The yuppie’s bizarre lifestyle preferences were intended to elicit populist guffaws. Here are some of the things, according to The Yuppie Handbook, that the budding yupster could not live without: gourmet coffee, a Burberry trench coat, expensive running shoes, a Cuisinart, a renovated kitchen with a double sink, smoked mozzarella from Dean & DeLuca, a housekeeper, a mortgage, a Coach bag, a Gucci briefcase, and a Rolex. Oh, har har har, that crazy yup!

The yuppie could be found working off stress with a shiatsu massage and a facial, learning as much as possible about fine wine, traveling around the world on vacation, exercising at a fancy health club, listening to Bessie Smith and Bob Marley and the Police on a tiny device attached to headphones, drinking bottled spring water, freshening up in a five-star-hotel-quality bathroom, typing away at a computer while sitting in an ergonomic chair, racking up gobs of debt on his credit card, and—the clincher—eating tuna sashimi for lunch! The mere mention of tuna sashimi for lunch was apparently seen as the height of hilarity back in 1984. “A yuppie most nearly approaches sainthood,” the book noted, “when he or she is able to accomplish more things in a single day than is humanly possible.” (This was long before BlackBerries.)

Okay, maybe I don't do all of those things, but I would say that almost everyone I know is guilty of at least one of these things. We have essentially become our own worst nightmares in a hipster package.

“When people were denouncing yuppies, they had considerably lower incomes than yuppies, so the things yuppies spent their money on seemed frivolous and unnecessary from their vantage point,” says Cornell University economist Robert H. Frank, author of Luxury Fever. “What most people fail to anticipate is that your sense of what you need and want is very elastic. When your income rises, your consumption standard gradually adapts.”

We may have hated them then, but we can practically identify with them now, with two exceptions - we are far more self aware and globally conscious. It is no longer fashionable to simply consume for the sake of it. We don't just shop at Ralph's Fresh Fare, we spend the extra money and buy our groceries at Whole Foods because the meat is humanely raised without hormones and the produce is (mostly) organic. To show off one's wealth with a Porsche or a finely tailored suit for daily life is gauche. Instead we fill our closets with limited edition sweatshop free t-shirts and designer jeans. Its like a secret code for those with the appropriate level of affluence. If you can recognize it, then you must be in the club. The Yuppie Club.

Am I ashamed of being a Yuppie Club member? A little. But I also know that this level of affluence can do a lot of good. I can give to charity. I can buy better designed, more sustainable, and less disposable products. I can be a yuppie with a heart.

[via PSFK]