To increasingly find hippies more annoying

[lankylisa]

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!

Im not really a hippy as such lol I just probably look like one sometimes.

The world isn't just hippies and non hippies

A lot of you seem to have grown up with hippie parents. I can't imagine what that must have been like.

I was a bit of a part time hippie when younger but never went full throttle like my friend, who went through a phase of living on a bus and introduced me to some er...different sorts of people. I found it fascinating because my mum and dad couldn't have been more straight.

I also lived with a few once down south. Nice enough people but all they wanted to do was smoke bongs and listen to Wishbone Ash. All day long.
It would have been different if kids were involved. But we were all student types hanging out.

And yes. The trustafarian who lived in a converted ambulance and the girl whose dad was a dentist in St John's Wood. Very irritating and lazy. But to be fair they probably still are now , whatever they are doing.

We have the joys of the Hipster these days. Now that is pretentious.

I don't like following the crowd.

So you follow a different one instead 😂

I remember reading a couple being interviewed who lived with their toddler in a yurt. They were very judgemental about anyone earning decent money, and extolled the virtues of not having much stuff. Then the article revealed the yurt was in on of their parents large private estate.

Oh I quite like the hipsters @bringbacksideburns (How can you dis hipsters with a user name like that? )
I like how creative they are with their decorative milk foam beetroot rose lattes and their vast, waxed beards with christmas baubles sewn into them, and their intricate street art. They are very clean and they work hard, even if their work is utterly pointless Perfect Curve niche marketing. I have a secret soft spot for hipsters.

I think they are generally teenagers in their heads and middle aged in body and years.

Quite an embarrassing combination really.

Definitely an embarrassing infuriating combo.

The point someone made earlier on about the hippy culture working great for men but sucking for women is so true.

I think attachment parenting (when taken to the extreme) is definitely in the category, the mother's sanity is not balanced against the child's needs at all and the ownus is all on the mother to be this responsive love and light filled black hole of giving 24/7 regardless of how much she is nourishing her own soul. It's hippy parenting dressed up as gentle but really modern sexism from supposed sensitive new age guys.

OP, I remember meeting a woman who seemed like a properly hippie weaver / textile artist. Really ticks a lot of these boxes. Old enough to be my mum, probably around 70. She told me she let the children cry at night after three months as 'a mother needs her sleep' and I thought how you would NEVER hear that from someone who looked like her and was my age. Well, not very likely anyway. Really interesting.

We used to call one of the types described here "rainbow fascists"

Define 'hippy', do you mean someone who lives an alternative lifestyle to yours?

What a ridiculous judgemental thread!

Bahahaa it's so true that the energy healing folk are just circling money around between themselves.

TBH my mum never seemed like a proper hippy type when I was growing up, neither did my dad, but maybe I was just oblivious? I remember my dad taking us hunting for magic mushrooms when I was about 8 He didn't tell us what they did, just said not to eat them. My mum didn't get properly into the crystals and culty angel stuff until I was in my older teens but defo instilled in me this whole thing about positive thinking to the point that I developed anxiety over not being able to control my thoughts, and she found it so unbearable to be taken out of her comfort zone that she literally never pushed me or DSis once, it's taken me a really really long time to learn to be even slightly open to doing things which are hard or scary, and the main way I did this was MN (thank you!!) and also friends who were outside the "bubble", especially DH. Actually I found DH upsettingly intolerant to it at first but I've changed how I think a lot and it doesn't bother me any more. DSis is getting there but it's taking her forever as well.

For anyone else who grew up with hippy parents this really resonated with me:

velamag.com/superbabies-dont-cry/

My mum's latest thing is that she's decided the "energy is bad" between her and DH (DH finds her energy spiel exasperating but doesn't dislike her) and so she can't have any relationship with him and when he deals with his issues with his mother, she'll be able to then I tried to explain he is simply just slow to warm up to everyone and she is very welcome, but I understand if she finds the journey too much (we live abroad) but she has made up her mind this is the way that it is. I actually suspect that it's more that she had a picture of how the relationship was going to be between her and me when I grew up and it's not like that at all, and she really struggles with that. She thinks we should be best friends - and I would LOVE to be her friend, I see friends who have friendship-like relationships with their mums and I would really like for that to be a thing - unfortunately her idea of "best friends" is a much more stifling codependent thing where it's just the three of us huddled up against the world (I'm not sure how she wants DH to fit into this, either) and it's not how I want to live my life and a quality I find quite stifling in a friend. She also doesn't cope very well with DS and hasn't since he was about a year old because she can't cope with the high intensity of children (but this is his "male energy" and not him being a child) which makes it difficult too.

Oh well. It could be worse, at least she does care even though it's on a very strange level.

Our dad took us magic mushroom picking too- my sister wrote about it in her weekly news at school and the teacher wrote some wry comment at the bottom.
Sorry to hear what you've been through. It's so incredibly dangerous when people start saying they can read energies because they can really harm peoples views of others e.g. My dad said someone we know has 'dark energy' I immediately stamped it out saying that this person had been extremely kind to my mum as she was dying.
It's really a type of violence dressed up as peace and love.
And my sister and I are still working all this shit out.

Oh she doesn't think there's anything wrong with DH, she's totally happy that he's right for me, and she doesn't believe in dark energy/evil. She's just utterly terrified of men which I can't actually blame her for, because 90% (maybe more) of men she's ever interacted with in any significant way right from childhood have been utter and total shits to her, and I completely understand that she is actually traumatised from that - she did a bit of looking into this a few years back and realises that she probably has some form of PTSD but she is just not ready to deal with it in any way other than retreating into this comfort blanket of energy stuff. Which is fine, though I do wish she'd give the counselling another go, because I think it would help, but it's her choice. It helps her and I don't really believe that it's hurting anybody (she's certainly not getting rich at anyone's expense) and while there is stuff that DSis and I need to work out/unpick, it's not the worst thing by any means.

I had a boyfriend who called himself "Da Hippy" 😳.

His hippy credentials mainly consisted of having bad hair and not being over fond of hard work.

He also used to drink and drive. And smoke weed whilst driving.

'Rainbow fascists' made me lol. There was a particular group of women my friends and I dubbed the mooncup-ers because not only did they bang on about moon cups, they said the blood was excellent feed for tomato plants.

Yeah that's sticking it to babylon, using your period blood instead of some baby bio. Boak.

This thread is dumb

Thanks for that scintillating observation, lethaldrizzle

Dolly I have a lot of sympathy for ideas like sustainable living etc and I did some crunchy parenting like cloth nappies but I just can't commit to hippy life because my bullshit ometer won't stop clanging.

Ha! So true.

Thing is, I quite like thinking about things in terms of "fate" or slightly as if life is a complex, weaving storyline, or "having a feeling" about something. The sort of tendencies that led humans to invent religion, I guess. But I can only talk like this with others who know it's mainly comforting or fun, not those who take it very seriously and earnestly. And I'd be at anyone who used it to justify doing something shit.

Surprised at all the middle class hippies though. In my neck of the woods it's mainly working class - and actually working, even if it is hippy type jobs (organic cafe, woodland management etc). Intriguingly in late 20s/early 30s the more middle class/educated hippies separated out to some extent, by then working in professional roles - albeit stuff like teaching, nursing, social work. But stick to trying to be eco-friendly and things.

A few drug casualties and Trustafarians along the way too...

As a teen I always wanted to be a hippy - it was the more communal living, interdependent society, type stuff, and looking after nature, and lying looking at the stars and feeling alive and stuff. I still feel like this! But real-life hippies are not like this. The judgement and exclusivity can be astounding!

Making sweeping generalisations about any group of people is inherently dumb

My BiL ex girlfriend was like that. Smoked a lot of weed. Was ‘a photographer’ which meant she took occasional black and white photos which she thought were incredible art. Quit loads of jobs and was on benefits a lot but stayed in our flat nearly every single (we shared with BiL, two horrible years because of her although he is lovely) and didn’t seem to grasp that she could say things like “I just don’t see why money is so important to people” because she wasn’t paying fucking rent and bills between our flat and her mums house. She Thought she was a genuinely lovely and spiritual person when she was actually the most astonishingly vapid and self centred person I’d ever met. She was a dirty scruff who smoked in bed and littered their bedside table with fag ends. Thankfully they broke up, she cheated and latched onto some other bloke who she lived off for a few years. I still see her drifting around town seemingly stoned. She just used ‘being alternative’ as an excuse to be lazy and take from other people.

Man that’s really heavy. Chill and find some real hippie friends.

"Middle class but scruffy"
Odfod. Middle class to you may be about desperately signalling your position with some run of the mill outfit from Boden/ Joules/ Hobbs but not everyone has to dress to make it clear to you whether you can go ahead and judge them as more or less wealthy/ classy than you.

*lethal sounds dumb. These people are making often a horrid lifestyle choice that affects other people. These arent the sweet oldschool hippies who love the environment and preach peace and love. These are horrible entitled narcissts who weirdly believe they are very far removed from evil society.

Turstafarian lol 😂

My bil is like this shops at charity shops is at all the demos eats vegan 🌱

Is Corbyn till I die has a art degree never worked he is 30 parents are now paying for a masters at oxford as we have all come to the conclusion he will be an academic due to being unable to work due to never having been required to do so

He sleeps in a —lock up— art studio despite having a flat brought for him in Chelsea

He has an allowance and also went to grammar school or course