Hip[ster] enough?

Though there is not one centralized, universally accepted definition of what a ‘hipster’ truly is, you know one when you see one.  A few tests to tell if you, or someone you, is hipster:  Do you ride your fixed gear bike to a fair-trade coffee shop where they only serve shade-grown coffee in glass jars?  Does said coffee house have pendant style incandescent vintage bulbs?  Are you wearing thrift store clothes, or at least, if your clothes were imported were they hand-woven, funded by microfinance and shipped on dolphin-safe routes?  Are said clothes somewhere between lumberjack and smooth? Is your beard somewhere between lumberjack and epic?  Is your political persuasion somewhere between pacifist and Marxian?  Do you prefer a banjo being recorded on an eight-track to an iTunes top 50 song?    Are you vegan, vegetarian, fruititarian or at least pescatarian?  Do you have wood-framed glasses and detest products like Google glasses (even though you own an Apple everything)?  If you have answered ‘yes’ to a majority of these questions, you may just be hipster…but not for too long.  That is the trouble with hipster culture.  While it prides itself in retro style and ideology, it is hardly retroactive.  That is, if you are hipster today and you stay just the way you are, you likely will not be hipster tomorrow – you must constantly evolve with the times.  O sure, you may be a trend setter and ahead of the cultural curve, but that just means you are changing more and more rapidly than the rest.  You must, if you want to stay hip.  Again, some may object here and say something to the effect of “but hipsters today are trying to regress to and adopt the cultural forte of the hippies of the 1960s”.  This is partly true; but I have found that half-truths are whole lies.  Hipsters do not want to adopt the 1960s hippie culture, they want their own.  Unfortunately, when they try to do something new, fresh, exciting, and against the grain they find themselves rehashing the tired old schemes of a generation gone by.  And again, how do you know if you are hipster enough for sub-cultural acceptance?  How will you know when you’ve earned the password to the speak-easy of the subculture gatekeepers?  The answer:  we’ll see if you’re hipster enough tomorrow.  You’re never hipster enough, and if you think you are, you may just find yourself waking up in a crack house!  There’s a better way than constantly striving to prove you are culturally savvy enough.  That is finding your identity in something bigger and better than yourself; something unchanging.