Dear Reader,
Growing up in New York City, I have watched the city change before my eyes. Before I knew about gentrification or the social and economic realities that lead to mass displacements of people, I saw the change firsthand. It started in Long Island City, where I went to high school and the erection of massive multi-million dollar condos and avant-garde coffee shops. Then Brooklyn became synonymous with the hipster, the flannel-wearing, mustache-twirling socialites that were notorious for “discovering” new things that were, in fact, relatively old. And Native New Yorkers are left to wrestle with the changes left behind by the Blue Bottle and Patagonia types that also call this city home. The reality is New York is a port city. People come and go, some staying while others only visit. The issue isn’t the movement of people but how that movement affected the communities that were uprooted in their wake and the consumptive attitude many have toward the city. For many, the city is where they come to get theirs, irrespective of the damage it does to the people who have called this city home. It’s this cycle of consumption that robs neighborhoods of their culture, drives up property values, and turns the city into a homogenous mess of dominant culture.
It’s this cycle I wanted to highlight in my short story, The Lifecycle of a Hipster. A bit tongue-in-cheek and written with a small dash of bitter irony, The Lifecycle of a Hipster paints with a broad brush to make a broader point. When you come to the city to consume, you end up with nothing.
When you come to the city to consume, you end up with nothing.
The Lifecycle of a Hipster:
Their Movements & Rituals Observed
You start in Bushwick, wide-eyed and naive, fresh out of college, the big city dwarfing your small-town upbringing under its impressive weight. You swear you're going to change the world.
The studio you share with your girlfriend is quaint, that is, until you see a mouse crawling down your kitchen counter. Two months later, you're in a one-bedroom you can't afford in "East Williamsburg," overpaying to say your “Willy B adjacent."
You're juggling two jobs to support your art degree, the one your parents told you not to get, and when you eat ramen for the third night in a row, you say to yourself, "I'll show them."
Of course, you can't miss the nightlife, so you take out a line of credit to keep up with your bar tab and the espresso martinis everyone says is all the rage.
Then the hard times hit.
Your girl leaves you for a JCrew-clad yuppie masquerading as an activist, Marx tucked under his arm in a convincing attempt to "reform" the system, his Soho loft a far cry from your roach-riddled one bedroom.
You drink yourself into oblivion and hang up the canvas. You get a real job at atech conglomerate with beer on tap, and free therapy you're too busy to use, using words like "grind" and "hustle" to justify your sleepless nights, the ones you spend staring at the ceiling telling yourself that this is only temporary.
After seeing one water bug too many, you decide that it's time to move. You look west towards Williamsburg proper and find yourself a two-bedroom you can afford. Afford a code word for you won't go broke, but if they raise the rent any higher, it's right back to Bushwick or, God forbid, Astoria.
You meet a girl at work. She wears Le Labo and Birkenstocks and is wild enough to keep up with the New York nightlife but is riddled with enough Catholic guilt to justify bringing her home to your parents. After three years of casual sex and jaunts to the city, you decide that two incomes are better than one. You tie the knot back home, the secret envy of your hometown buddies.
A year in, she's pregnant, and suddenly, your two-bedroom is looking small. You hear Greenpoint is family-friendly, so you take the G train Queens-bound and find a nice three-bedroom off Milton, and as you watch her belly grow, you remember a time when you still believed that you would change the world.
Life is good for a while, you get used to lugging the stroller up your three-story walkup, and despite the price of childcare, you find a nanny to watch your kid during the day.
Life moves on, and you forget altogether why you moved to New York in the first place. When you discover your paintbrushes in an old box labeled junk, you think of painting again, but with another kid on the way, that third bedroom you wanted to use as an art studio will go to your second child and their Montessori playroom.
After baby number two, you start rethinking your future, and after some serious discussion with your father-in-law, you consider moving upstate. But in the end, you decide to move back home, and as the movers come to pick up your belongings, you look out on a city you barely know.
Another car pulls up in Bushwick to rent that studio you left behind. She's an artist like you and thinks she will change the world. But you know better. This city chews you up and spits you out. Your only consolation; you'll forever be the guy who used to live in the "city."