Senior English major
For much of my life, people have tended to define me in three ways: My voice is a monotone laughfest and I am an old soul. (I’ll get to the third one later.)
While the first characterization sounds vaguely like an insult, I have no problem denying the second because of what an “old soul” truly means. An old soul is typically wise beyond his years, emotionally stable, mature and, at the very least, interesting. But mostly, having an old soul relates to your unhappiness with your generation and wanting to see it change for the better.
I’ve written at length about cynicism, so I won’t do it here; still, it’s hard to be an old soul and not believe everyone could do things a little differently. Even shallow things such as Facebook or tastes in music bug me.
Facebook took off while I was in high school, and I think the constant flood of information from those same high school people has blurred the boundaries between high school and college. In other words, as an old soul, I think most of our generation still has the mindset of a high school freshman, with popularity, looks and drama at the forefront of our minds.
Back to music — I’m the guy who, if he plays his music at the party, makes people stop drunk dancing and singing and instead demand to hear a Taylor Swift song for the fourth time. So when I go out to the bars, and I see these people jamming to the same songs every week, I go a little crazy.
No, I don’t expect R. J. Bentley’s to play music I want to listen to because I don’t think 19- and 20-year-olds would want to listen to Talking Heads or any decent bluegrass band.
You’re probably wondering about the third thing people say to me: I am a hipster. This I cannot abide — not only because I don’t think I am a hipster, but because I think our generation’s idea of a hipster is grossly misinformed.
According to our generation, hipsters are basically just contrarians. Though purposefully going against the grain is a big part of hipsterdom, this definition does not explain everything. A hipster is someone who spites himself to keep his or her public perception of obscurity intact. Just because I like to think that Swift wrote “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” about the relationship between her music and my ears, that does not make me a hipster.
Our generation’s submission to Facebook, oversimplification of hipsters and love of popular music are inherently related because they are all easy. It is easy to post a picture of myself so that people from my past and present can “like” it and validate me. It is easy to take a complex idea such as another person with similarities and differences to me and simply brand him a hipster because he might wear different shoes than me. It is just as easy to listen to the music with the coolest beats and simplest lyrics all day long because that’s what everyone else does.
Being a true old soul has made it easy for me to realize our generation’s social nature is coming apart at the seams because it thrives on the “us-versus-them” mentality we learned in high school. Though I feel like a 30-year-old trapped in a 22-year-old’s body, I don’t feel better than anyone else — just different.
Drew Farrell is a senior English major. He can be reached at dfarrell@terpmail.umd.edu.
