Are Yuccies the New Hipsters?

Yuccies = Young Urban Creatives. And according to Mashable, they’re the new iteration of hipsters. The author describes his self-created and self-describing class as “a slice of Generation Y, borne of suburban comfort, indoctrinated with the transcendent power of education, and infected by the conviction that not only do we deserve to pursue our dreams; we should profit from them.”

Just think of your friends moving to Brooklyn these days. They probably work for a startup rather than as a furniture maker and they likely do Flywheel instead of hot yoga. It’s a new type of free spiritedness, the love child of yuppie and hipster that is rooted in personal fulfillment while still maintaining a successful lifestyle (and Instagraming it along the way).

The idea of the disappearance of the hipster is not a new one: subsets of the class like Mipsterz (Muslim hipsters) are popping up; cities like Detroit are trying to grab what may be the last of a dying breed looking to reinvent itself; and place like Hoboken and Bushwick are now more popular hipster hubs than the movement’s birthplace of Williamsburg.

Yuccie or hipster?

The yuccie label does make sense in the generation of freelancers, liberal art grads, and tech aficionados. And this is the exact group who wants nothing to do with the word hipster. But what sets yuccies apart from the yuppies of the ’90s and early 2000s is that they don’t work in finance and make six figures a year. Mashable points to a 2014 Deloitte survey that showed “6 out of 10 millennials cited their company’s sense of purpose as part of the reason they chose their job. In the same study, just 12% identified ‘own personal gain’ as a primary leadership priority.” Similarly, a 2014 Bentley University study said that 66 percent of millennials hoped to start their own business (hello artisanal ketchup company). But the author feels this attitude is rife with cynicism. “My professional drift towards a creative field (writing) is an implicit statement of privilege. Being a yuccie is synonymous with the sort of self-centered cynicism that can only exist in the absence of hardship,” he says.

So, think you might be a yuccie? See if you answer yes to any of Mashable’s yuccie traits.

• Owns multiple copies of Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
• Doesn’t like gentrification in theory; loves artisanal donuts in practice
• Really wants to go to Austin soon because hears it’s incredible
• Takes boozy painting classes
• Used to be “in banking” and occasionally still pronounces finance “fuh-nontz”
• Avoids visible tattoos (not a prudent career move)
• Loves Seinfeld even though it went off the air when they were 16
• Gets the NYT Weekend Edition but doesn’t read the news
• Has thousands of Instagram followers, but almost no Twitter followers

[Via Mashable]

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