Sarah Blugis, a senior majoring in political communication, is The Hatchet’s opinions editor.
I am a yuccie.
In case you haven’t heard, “yuccie” is short for “young urban creative” – a cross between a hipster and a yuppie. A writer on Mashable coined this term just this week and includes himself in the classification. Hipsters are different, he explains, because they reject the mainstream while yuccies embody parts of popular culture.
My roommates and I came across a Buzzfeed list: “99 Things All Yuccies Love.” A startling number – 72 – apply to me. Some of my personal favorites are that I constantly ask people if they’ve watched “The Wire,” I love succulents, I’ve developed an affinity for Drake and I say “I’m dead” at least once each day.
It might seem like a silly list of meaningless things, but as I went through it, I was excited. It’s not often that I read something and identify with it so completely. Honestly, I’m not ashamed of it because it’s harmless and pretty true. And if you’re a yuccie, I don’t think you should be ashamed either.
Critics have already torn this idea apart, calling it a “euphemism for straight-up privilege.” While it’s true that we don’t necessarily need another way to refer to middle class white kids, I think it’s fine to embrace the idea of yuccies if we acknowledge that it’s an inherently elite classification. It definitely doesn’t define everyone our age.
But nobody is talking why yuccies love some of the things and activities on these lists. Yuccies are college students or recent graduates – just like all of us at GW. And what’s one thing many of us have in common? We’re often strapped for cash.
On Buzzfeed’s list of classifications for yuccies, many were tied to money, like not paying for HBO Go, not owning a printer and shopping at affordable stores like Uniqlo.
We can’t afford to waste our money. We’re saving where we can, and use the rest to have fun and try to make our run-down apartments look OK. Our college loans are too massive and our jobs don’t pay us enough to do anything else.
Especially at a school as expensive as GW, being a yuccie is less about being trendy and more about trying to look like you have it together when you really don’t. It’s about trying to be cultured even though you don’t have the time or money to commit to it.
Aside from the inherent privilege of being called a yuccie, I don’t think other criticisms I’ve heard are valid. Trying to be both successful and creative shouldn’t be brushed aside as selfish. It’s ambitious, and it’s a sign that young people are doing the best they can.
Labels like these are important because they can provide us with a community within our generation. I never fit in with hipsters, the young professionals or “millennials,” which include people in their thirties. But now, I know there are others out there experiencing the same cultural moment as I am.
In the 1950’s, young men embraced being called greasers. In the 1960’s, people our age took ownership over “hippie” and turned it into a movement. The original yuppies appeared in the 1980’s. We aren’t the first generation to be labeled and then criticized for those labels.
I’m a young urban creative, and I think there are worse things I could be.
