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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

To increasingly find hippies more annoying

203 replies

lankylisa · 29/04/2018 20:03

I grew up with hippy parents and have always ended up befriending slightly hippy alternative people. Now I'm older, I'm finding hippies to be:
-good at bad science
-judgemental of people who dare to want to be materially comfortable
-pious
-immoral when it comes to relationships / using spiritual bs to justify treating people badly
-smug
-dull
-closed
-middle class but scruffy

Does anyone else know what I mean?

Reading this back am horrified that I sound so conservative!

OP posts:
50shadesofgreyismylaundry · 29/04/2018 21:27

I know exactly what you mean. I grew up with lots of alternative types. My main issue is that it seems very much lifestyle by numbers. They think they're alternative but they're all the bloody same. The bad science/alternative medicine bit I find particularly jarring.

glueandstick · 29/04/2018 21:30

Yes to your list. Add amber teething necklaces. Gets me irrationally angry.

FormerlyPickingOakum · 29/04/2018 21:35

Ah yes.

The weird thing is that I'm rather more crunchy and alternate than my hippy mates, yet I'm seen as being more conventional just because I don't look the part.

The one thing that infuriates me to hell and back is the obsession with fair trade and ethical living, but the rather laissez faire attitude to the origin and production of various illegal substances. So it's the worst thing in the world to eat a Nestlé chocolate bar, but somehow smoking an entire bag of weed grown by a trafficked Vietnamese bloke chained to a radiator in a semi in Leeds is perfectly okay.

somanybloodysticks · 29/04/2018 21:44

Omg yes to that FormelyPicking. This thread is giving me the rage with all the hippies I know (vm including my own DF!)

lankylisa · 29/04/2018 21:44

Yes to the bullshit beads!
Where's the evidence!?!?!?!?!
Where is the evidence??????

OP posts:
somanybloodysticks · 29/04/2018 21:50

Oh and also (sorry I cant stop now) considering mainstream media to be "toxic" but believing any old shit on you tube so long as it backs up what they believe. I am of the opinion that you should question / research everything so I don't just believe what I'm fed, but this drives me particularly up the wall because you just can't argue with stupid.

Whatalovelymug · 29/04/2018 21:52

I know someone who refers to herself as a ‘hippy’.(she’s basically vegetarian and doesn’t vaccinate her children) She lives in a 1.4 million pound house and flies all over.

DontCallMeCharlotte · 29/04/2018 21:57

My sister in her sixties has followed hippy "fashion" since the sixties. All it means is that I always want to whisk her off to Harvey Nicks for a makeover and a good haircut.

lankylisa · 29/04/2018 21:57

@somanybloodysticks Yes I couldn't agree more.

I know someone who justified destroying 20 years of marriage because a psychic at a school fete had told him he was meant to be with someone who was on his mind so he ran off with her leaving a trail of destruction, but justifying it with the fact that it was 'deep spiritual connection.' Also based on some mumbo jumbo from online.
'Peer read review or you're not coming in' is my policy. Laziness I think.

OP posts:
Runawaycat · 29/04/2018 21:58

Oh God yes.

I was also raised in close proximity to hippies, and while I'm fond of many of them, and still subscribe to certain ideas, I have got to the stage where I watch most of their antics with a wry smile.

I realised early on that there is nobody who likes money more than a certain type of middle class, scruffy, communal, we're all Mother Nature's creatures, hippy. They just like it in a different way from a middle class besuited stockbroker. Both are excellent at thinking up ways to relieve others of their cash.

And when they pop out a few "free spirited wildlings".... Aka children who are allowed to wreck everyone's house but their own, and who would sell their granny for half an hour of telly and a bag of Haribo.

And their amazing, creative business of knitting cuddly vaginas out of nettle fibres or whatever, is almost always funded by their long suffering conservative parents who made a few quid in the usual boring ways, and are now retired, members of the Rotary Club, and totally baffled by their hemp wearing offspring.

All of this, yet I am very crunchy/AP as a parent myself, plus I'm an organic gardener with an interest in self sufficiency, etc etc. I've even been known to wear hemp. The difference is, I put my faith in actual science, not healing crystals, and I have to pay my own bills.

Oysterbabe · 29/04/2018 22:02

There's loads of the fuckers in Bristol. I know exactly what you mean.

Fengshui · 29/04/2018 22:03

I get slightly annoyed by those who are into fairtrade and also into angsting about food miles and the carbon footprint with no sense of irony whatsoever.

DH is proper posh from a hunting shooting fishing background. He is also a very quiet, very committed vegan. Which he hides from his posh mates because it does not really 'fit' apparently. I find that a bit sad tbh. We all put ourselves into boxes.

reetgood · 29/04/2018 22:08

Haha! I grew up around a lot of hippy types. My parents share some of the values but couldn’t be doing with the self righteous wafty element. I also find myself internally eye rolling but I tend to just take the pluses and tune out the minuses. I have a young baby and my interests do intersect with those who are a bit more woo. So I just smile politely when they start getting onto more righteous topics/tone. And respectfully disagree when it comes to the vaccination stuff.

People always said about the original hippies that it was sexual liberation for men, whilst women still fulfilled traditional roles. I’d say there’s still an element of social conservatism under the liberal exteriors.

Efrig · 29/04/2018 22:10

Are these hippies proper scruffy (smelly and dirty) or just shabby chic type scruffy (clean, but messy looking)?

Unescorted · 29/04/2018 22:10

Hahaha! I had a 70s hippy upbringing then rebelled - did a degree in Environmental Science and am now a civil servant. On a daily basis I deal with placenta weavers.... Trying to tell me how amazing they are and groundbreaking their projects are.

Having said that sometimes there is something genuinely different.....but being a hippy is not a pre-qualification for good ideas.

Efrig · 29/04/2018 22:14

We don’t have hippies where I come from so I’m fascinated. Are they usually vegan? How do they earn money to live on? I always imagine them living in yurts and sitting on brightly coloured rugs Grin

FloraPostIt · 29/04/2018 22:16

Yes to the horror at Starbucks/Macdonalds but quite happy to chuff away smugly on a spliff - possibly the least fairtrade product there is. Makes me reach for the local micro-distilled gin, it does.

Runawaycat · 29/04/2018 22:18

I've told this story before, but when I was a young single mum, I had a hippy friend and her free spirited indigo children over for a visit. They bounced on my sofa until it snapped in the middle. I had tried to to tell them not to, but they informed me that "they could make their own choices". Their mum tittered, and made much of my "shock" as I clearly wasn't used to such "untamed, unconventional little wild children" etc etc. She wasn't going to make them subscribe to our dull cookie cutter society and one size fits all education system, blah blah. She was almost gleeful as she told me this. I was young, sleep deprived and hadn't yet developed my "off you fuck" reaction, so I just sat in despair. It was my first house and I used to spend hours scrubbing it and keeping it nice, so afraid was I of doing something that would cost me my deposit or my tenancy.

The thing was, that wasn't my sofa, it was my landlord's, and it was broken, and if I lost my deposit, I simply wouldn't have the money for another one. So she wasn't actually sticking it to the man via her parenting choices, she was sticking it to a single mum who could potentially be made homeless as a result.

Luckily I had just stated seeing now DH, and FIL is a joiner and fixed the sofa. But a lightbulb went on that day

ThisIsTheFirstStep · 29/04/2018 22:20

The best thing about living i. East Asia is no hippies. Everyone is obsessed with money, status and appearance. The men have short sensible haircuts and everyone showers constantly. No one wants to be alternative or different or ‘crunchy’ (eugh).

It also has its drawbacks but it is really nice to not have to deal with hippy shite.

ElephantsBird · 29/04/2018 22:25

Rude placemarking from a hippy Grin

Efferlunt · 29/04/2018 22:27

My parents are hippies, I grew up partly in a commune so I get this. I still hang out with some of these people we’ve got so much shared history we are like family and I love them all (and their bloody unvaccinated kids) but they drive me crazy. My mum cried when the kids had their MMR as she thought they’d get autism, she also is susceptible to any passing snake oil salesmen and at one point was dosing herself with heavy metals suspended in water until I begged her to stop

I had a convo with one ofthem recently. We’d had an argument because I said I wasn’t bringing my new baby to visit them until he’d had his jabs. He said I we were just different people I was ‘logical’ he was ‘instinctive’ and that neither was better than the other just different.

I have to bite my tongue really really hard.

PitilessYank · 29/04/2018 22:37

I must know a different type of hippy, because I love hippies, and generally don't feel judged by them at all. I just got back from a trip to San Francisco where I met a bunch of hippies (and hipsters, for that matter), and I found them all rather charming. I am a sort of ordinary-lefty 50 year old.

OwlinaTree · 29/04/2018 22:40

I have a few with this mindset in my family. I get annoyed because it's so selfish an attitude. 'you lot can all work and pay taxes, but I'm rising above that because there's more to life.... But I'll take the benefits of living in a western society.'

DioneTheDiabolist · 29/04/2018 22:48

yetAnotherNewName1000 are your hippies called the Simpsons?

ArchchancellorsHat · 29/04/2018 23:04

That's horrible Runawaycat - I hope that was the last time you saw the nasty cow!