Seattle: You're Not Cool If You Don't Love It Here (to live, pine)

[BATCAT]

Originally Posted by Ruth4Truth

That's ridiculous! Lots of transplants do as they please and have no pressure to conform to anything. There are plenty of young Seattle natives who aren't hipsters. Some people on this sub-forum are obsessed with hipsters.

I love how "hipster" has come to simply mean "any urban-dwelling person under 45 who enjoys any activities I don't participate in or who has personal tastes at all different from my own."

[franklin42]

Originally Posted by BATCAT

I love how "hipster" has come to simply mean "any urban-dwelling person under 45 who enjoys any activities I don't participate in or who has personal tastes at all different from my own."

Spot on. Can't rep you though. Need to spread the reps around. It seems like it's getting harder and harder these days...

[BATCAT]

Originally Posted by skidamarink

If you're a transplant, you either have to be extremely blue collar (and make it known), a pierced up, tatted up hipster with socialist views, or you have to go live in Bellevue. The Eastside is good for quiet liberals who gave up trying to prove themselves.

This is hilarious. I've lived here for almost 20 years and met hundreds of transplants from everywhere from California to Texas to Taiwan to Spain and not a single one would be described as "extremely blue-collar" nor a "tatted-up hipster with socialist views." And only a handful lived in Bellevue.


It's positively bananas how on this forum people made up these bizarro generalizations in their minds that seem not just improbably but totally disconnected from reality, and then feel compelled to blurt them out.

[Ruth4Truth]

Originally Posted by BATCAT

This is hilarious. I've lived her for almost 20 years and met hundreds of transplants from everywhere from California to Texas to Taiwan to Spain and not a single one would be described as "extremely blue-collar" nor a "tatted-up hipster with socialist views." And only a handful lived in Bellevue.


It's positively bananas how on this forum people made up these bizarro generalizations in their minds that seem not just improbably but totally disconnected from reality, and then feel compelled to blurt them out.

Honestly, it's hard to believe some of these people actually live in Seattle. They're just spouting stereotypes that don't relate to reality. Now, "unfriendly" or "reserved", even "passive-aggressive" do relate to reality (though I never noticed the latter). But most of the rest of these descriptions read like a cartoon.

[WANative]

Originally Posted by sacite

I love the "why don't you just move?" posts LOL. Let's see:

Job.

Money.

Yep. That about covers it.

Exactly! I wanted to move since 2009 but it took until a nice job transfer was offerered (with full relocation) to me in 2014 before I was able to move. I miss the summers in Seattle and my friends but thats about it. Traffic and weather were the major drawbacks. Cost of living is on par with south Florida. I couldnt be any happier.

[NewbiePoster]

Not more anti-hipster rants! It's an epidemic all over C-D this week!

[drhr]

File this under the category of "Oh my god, Seattle isn't New York!?!?!?! I can't believe it....!!" But here goes...

It's a big enough, concentrated enough city that it feels urban, but with a large enough swath of key residential areas that it kind of saps the city of a true urban character. It's caught in between those two things. All the action happens in the hoods, so it kind of waters down any potential for that fervent, vibrant activity that you see in other cities. The city's social climate is more hospitable to small social circles than an intermingling of people. Seattle doesn't have a robust urban center, which hurts this. The waterfront downtown is shoddier than other parts, which is confusing - many cities highly capitalize on the social/architectural/scenic value of their major waterfronts but not as much in Seattle. Again, the action is in the hoods which aren't actively inviting to outsiders. People generally have disdain for downtown and Belltown. At least in SF, you can hate on SOMA but there's a lot of city left over to love. If you don't like Seattle's downtown (which many don't), that's arguably the whole damn city unless you then shift focus over to the more residential neighborhoods.

[CrazyDonkey]

Back in the late-60's, while someone might be "hip", a "hipster" was more likely a drugged-out left-over from the Bebop Jazz era. Anybody calling themselves a "hipster" these days is trying to be cooler than they really are. Those calling others "hipsters" are just trying to sound smarter than they really are.

Me, I'm Proud to Be a Fringie from Seattle...

[dubfan]

Originally Posted by CrazyDonkey

Back in the late-60's, while someone might be "hip", a "hipster" was more likely a drugged-out left-over from the Bebop Jazz era. Anybody calling themselves a "hipster" these days is trying to be cooler than they really are. Those calling others "hipsters" are just trying to sound smarter than they really are.

I've yet to find another word to accurately describe dudes with scruffy beards, that slicked-back quasi-Hitler-youth-looking haircut, giant-rimmed black glasses possibly without real lenses, facial tattoos/piercings, emanating the "I'm so much better than you" attitude that belies their constant fear of revealing their conventional suburban upbringing. Well, at least no word that I can use in polite conversation. Think these people don't exist? Walk around Pike/Pine on a weekday evening for an hour or so.

[CrazyDonkey]

Originally Posted by dubfan

I've yet to find another word to accurately describe dudes with scruffy beards, that slicked-back quasi-Hitler-youth-looking haircut, giant-rimmed black glasses possibly without real lenses, facial tattoos/piercings, emanating the "I'm so much better than you" attitude that belies their constant fear of revealing their conventional suburban upbringing. Well, at least no word that I can use in polite conversation. Think these people don't exist? Walk around Pike/Pine on a weekday evening for an hour or so.

While some surely fit that profile, and certainly are noticeable, and might be outspoken, they hardly compose a large, let alone majority, portion of any neighborhood I know of. That more might be on one side of the Lake than on the other is simply a matter of demographics. I just think you're over-generalizing in order to label something worse than it really is.

By the way, "scruffy beards" would exclude half the population (surely, there are "hipster chicks", although the latter word might be less than "hip" these days), unless you substitute "unshaven", to which, quite frankly, I have no objection (razors are a pain), although I have to admit I'm not a big fan of tattoos. Oh, and you forgot piercings. Still, if someone chooses to shave or not shave, do whatever they want with their hair, wear black-rimmed glasses, pierce, or have tattoos, that simply is part of their right of free expression.

Perhaps the uniting characteristic here is simple self-righteousness, which however could equally apply both to people called, and people calling them, "hipsters".

When I was in my 20s, I didn't trust anyone over 30, but now that I'm in my 60s, I'm more prone to not trust anyone under 30, but more from bemusement than scorn. That the young are groupish in seeking to be different is as old as the generations.