Being careful to contextualize the "yupster."

by Alex Steed

Published October 19, 2008 @ 11:49AM PT

In an op-ed posted on the Tufts Daily, Cory Siskind, an "expatriate Tuftsonian" stationed in Washington, DC, bemoans "yupsters," yuppie-like members of the Millennial generation. I surely know the type that she is referring to, and they annoy a piece of me as equally as they appear to annoy her, but her differentiation between this particular selection of Millennial and the generation as a whole appears dangerously subtle, and thus open to misinterpretation as being applicable to all of Gen Y.

Siskind's perception of the Millennial-as-yuppie, an annoying, know-it-all, hypocritical sort, is obviously related to that fact that she interns in the Beltway, attends an affluent private university, and works at a frozen yogurt shop by night where she is suffocated by this type day and night.

Having attended the University of Southern Maine, a school with a commuter-heavy population, I had an entirely different experience with the sampling of Millennials I studied and worked with — one that appears to serve as the comparative backdrop to Siskind's yupster. My peers were, for the most part, hard working and humble young people who just-so-happened to be raised during an information boom, a terrorist attack on US soil, and unpopular Presidency. I've worked at hipster coffee scenes and worked around folks with yuppie tendencies while working on political campaigns too. Those  experiences turned me off from those communities and the behaviors demonstrated by them, but more shocking, they aroused an internal conflict as I hesitantly recognized some of the tendencies in myself (this reflexive reaction also lies at the root of hipster self-denial, does it not?). That cross-section, however, is not representative of even a small fraction of the people my age I've been in regular contact with.

Further, Siskind's highlights a contention with the affluent-post-grad-slums-it-for-the-sake-of-authenticity:

Housing location is crucial to a Yupster. After finishing their expensive private-college education, Yupsters tend to promptly move into lower-income areas. This is not only because the Yupsters’ parents have stopped funding them, but also because they derive great pleasure in referring to themselves as "gentrification pioneers."

Her criticism is actually one that is much older than this generation (rent The Landlord, Hal Ashby's much more entertaining, 37-year-old criticism of this pattern).

Hipsters will be hipsters, and yuppies will be yuppies, but based on my experiences growing up with and talking with Millennials from across the country, the author's somewhat privileged experience surely invokes a reaction that isn't representative of the 80 million Millennials that live in this country. To be fair, of course, Siskind does not claim that this is, in fact, a generation-wide criticism. No. Not everyone in Washington is an inauthentic, hypocritical elitist — save that rhetoric for another Vice Presidential debate. It's Just the ones that Siskind has positioned herself around that are detestable. Her criticism, however, made without placing the "yupster" int he context of the generation-at-large, might be otherwise misinterpreted and be used to support the ever-popular, emerging-generation-phonic rhetoric that is so often used to discourage youth engagement, civic participation, and movement.