Who are the yakkas and why will they destroy the hipsters?

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

David Infant, author of the American edition of Mashable, wrote an article about the subculture that has replaced hipsters. Lifehacker publishes an adapted translation of the material. Are all hipsters? Yakkas are in fashion!

What will you call me? I'm a 26-year-old writer who grew up near Brooklyn. I'm an ordinary guy with a bike and a mustache. Studied liberal arts in college and know the subject, you get the idea.

Am I from the millennials? Hipster? Yuppie? All at once or none of this? We do not have a precise term to designate this pathetic group of intelligentsia in the 2000s. And only a few of them - the so-called creative class - have become hipsters, but this inaccuracy haunts me. You have to be a monster to deal with these definitions.

Let's come up with something new - yakki (from English yuccies - young urban creatives). In a nutshell, these are young people born in commonplace comfort, who believe in the extraordinary power of education, infected with the conviction that it is necessary not only to follow the dream, but also to benefit from it.

I'm yakki. Yes, that almost sounds lucky.

Earning a lot is good, but earning creatively is even better

Yakkis are hardly fantastic creatures. If you live in a large metropolitan area like New York or San Francisco, chances are you have met many of these people. They are community experts promoting brands on Instagram; they are programmers developing an analogue of Uber for ordering weed or Tinder for dating dogs; they are aspiring entrepreneurs offering durable and sustainable bamboo sunglasses.

After graduating from college - if they haven't already settled in the startup accelerator - many of them don't try to start traditional careers. They rush headlong into the tumultuous chaos of entrepreneurship with its victories and defeats, even if it brings low income.

Get rich quick? I would like to, of course. But getting rich quick and remaining creatively independent? This is the dream of the yakka.

According to the survey, six out of ten young people cite the pursuit of the goal of their company as one of the reasons why they chose this particular job. In a similar study, only 12% of those surveyed cited personal gain as a top management priority.

It is close to me too. I came to New York five years ago and gave up my pharmaceutical marketing job in favor of an unpaid editorial internship. Since then, I've been cutting my way through the thickets of city newsrooms. The salary went from “very bad” to “sometimes good,” but the sense of self-worth is much cooler. I'm yakki.

From conference room to tablet: hidden yakkas

Not all yakkas follow a straight path. There are dozens of twenty-something-year-olds who have taken several steps up the traditional career ladder before there is a growing doubt that their bright mind deserves more professional fulfillment.

Another Deloitte study found that approximately 28% of young people feel that their talents have not been noticed in their current job. And from you can find out that 66% of students would like to start their own business. But there is no absolutely objective data: who knows how many of them quit their jobs at a bank, law firm, or elsewhere for a job that brings satisfaction in the long term.

From personal experience: I know a former financial worker who went off to work on music festival projects, an MBA graduate who carved a small niche in menswear, and a lawyer who owns his own craft beer factory.

From defeats to victories. From traditional to creative. Oh yes, it's about yakki.

And these are just those yakkas that I have met. From strangers (or their PR people), I learned about 200 stories about yakki.“The former accountant quit his job at the corporation to pursue his real dream - making colorful socks! Accessories for typewriters! A social network for gamers! Organic vodka!"

And there is nothing wrong with these people or their typewriters. These are expressions of entrepreneurial spirit and business savvy. Yakkis, by my definition, decide to do something not only because of money (but they also don’t give it up), but because of the ratio of income and self-realization.

In other words, they want to make money on their own ideas instead of doing something else.

Yakkas remain hidden only up to the critical threshold. They can go to work every day to become a yakki entrepreneur one day. This is a whole new freedom.

Internet playground yakki

The enormous potential of the Internet inspires yakkis with opportunities and hinders their traditional professional growth. Booming growth of Internet companies; the development of Napster and then social media; a famous myth about a blogger who is becoming more popular than what he is talking about; the terrible end of a potentially long-lived or fast-growing startup. It sounds like a yakka song.

You deserve to live your life the way you want. Your ideas are valuable. Follow your dream.

Living in a constant race for a satisfying cause is a hackneyed fantasy in American culture, but the yakka's capabilities stand out more than ever. As you grow up watching the stars of the internet become the new elite, it's impossible not to try to take off on your own.

So yuppies and hipsters go to the bar …

Ten years ago, yakkis could have been hipsters. Remember the hipsters? In hipster, you can see the signs of yakka emerge: DIY entrepreneurship, niche marketing, the possibility of introducing new technologies, and so on.

But these days the hipster - the real hipster, not the publicized shitty spoof - is dead. He rents a room for yoga classes; she is a corporate marketing tool for luring into compact fast food machines. The ostentatious consumption that once divided hipsters - iPhones instead of clamshells, pork belly instead of bacon - went mainstream. The hipster doesn't stand out anymore.

Therefore, hipsters had to die being killed by a conflicting identity. When everyone rejects the mainstream, it turns out that nobody does it. When everyone is a hipster, nobody is a hipster.

In any case, the hipster was not what the yakki is now. I'll use my example again. I have no tattoos. I have a good credit history. Hell, I even have dental insurance. My mustache, like the rest of me, was not appreciated in the heyday of hipsterism. The hipsters must have despised me as a yuppie. But I'm not a yuppie either. The yuppies are associated with Sharper Image catalogs, a clean apartment, and bundles of new money snatched up before the crisis. But this does not fit with the right to free creativity inherent in the yakka.

Yakkis are cultural descendants of yuppies and hipsters.

We strive to be successful as a yuppie and as creative as a hipster. This can be seen in the example of shopping. It is not the price or the taste that is important to us. We're looking at both: $ 80 pants, a $ 16 craft beer package, trips to Charleston, Austin, and Portland. How much (or how little) it costs is irrelevant as long as the purchase seems reasonable.

We are one of the reasons that 43% of every thousand dollars spent on food is spent in restaurants and not on homemade food. After all, what else is more money-filled like politics and creativity like dinner? It must be Instagramed!

Combine yuppie passion for yachting and anti-ambition with hipster individualism, add a little millennial confidence and get yakkis.

We are what we hate

Young, urban, creative. Yakki. It is not known how long this name will take root, but it characterizes another side of this phenomenon: the yakkas are disgusting.

Let's look at my example again. The yakki has certain advantages. My profession - from the field of creative (journalism) - is in itself an implicit confirmation of this. To be a yakki is to be a self-centered cynic who can only exist in the absence of problems. It is convenient to be not burdened with worries. It is a great pleasure to be able to choose your occupation. In this context, cynicism is one of the main traits that characterize yakkis.

Namely, of all the privileges I enjoy as a writer, approval is the only driving force. I write for approval: by my colleagues, my parents, my followers, those who retweet me, even commentators who say cruel things about me under every post.

Cynicism is the main feature of the yakka. The only driving force for them is approval.

Don't get me wrong, I need money as much as any of my colleagues. If I hadn’t studied English, couldn’t write professionally and express myself in this way, I would have chosen something more profitable. But I need to speak out, repeatedly and thoroughly, because I have valuable ideas. This is my only talent. So I chose a burrow whose size and location are less important than the fact that I like it.

This is the advantage of cynicism. This is the whole yakkism. Personally, I'm not ashamed of that, and you shouldn't either, if this is about you too. But I'm not proud of what I am. As I like to say, it's a little bit yakky.