“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.” (The
Yuppie Handbook)
"All of which means that the archetypal yuppie of the eighties sounds precisely like, um, everyone you know."
"By
now, in fact, an argument could be made that the yuppie phenomenon is
the most enduring and influential social movement of the past 50 years.
The boomer media love to get all swoony over the Woodstock era, but how
many real hippies do you know? The only remaining trace of hippie
ideology can be found in supermarket aisles full of organic, farm-raised
food—but don’t kid yourself: Those people creating a boom market for
Whole Foods and organic baby food are yups, not hippies. Dead rebel
artists like Burroughs and Kerouac were long ago turned into useful
“bohemian” brands, tailor-made for Gap ads, but nobody actually aspires
to be a beatnik anymore. (At this point, beret might as well be French
for dickhead.)"
"Even back in 1991, novelist Douglas
Coupland, the man who introduced the term Generation X into the
mainstream, was picking up on a generation’s natural vulnerability to
comfort. “When you’re 27 or 28, your body starts emitting the Sheraton
enzyme,” he told People. “You can no longer sleep on people’s floors.”
By 37, the Sheraton enzyme mutates into the Four Seasons endorphin.
People, like neighborhoods, have a tendency to gentrify. On my recent
trip to the West Coast, I went back to the section of Pasadena that used
to be my beloved slacker drag strip in the eighties—a scrungy
wonderland of pawn shops, Bukowski-approved dives, vintage clothing
shops, used bookstores, greasy taco trucks. As I poked around in this,"
"it came as a shock to see that every last drop of that suburban
boho-scape was now gone, replaced by upscale trattorias and tapas bars,
boutiques and Pottery Barn and Tiffany’s.
A shock, but
only a minor one. While the yuppies were colonizing my favorite
neighborhood, apparently they were doing the exact same thing to my
brain."
Jeff Gardinier (The Return of the Yuppie)
Do not go where the path may lead,
go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
