Hippies get a bad name, man. In order to understand why this group is so reviled, you don’t have to look at history. You only need to go to your local farmer’s market and not be suffering from Covid. The nose knows. These people don’t care what you think at all. But are they really hippies, or are they stinky fakes?
That’s like seeing someone in line at the liquor store wearing a wetsuit and then thinking that all surfers are idiots. That’s not a surfer; it’s a kook! Kooks are notorious for glomming onto the limelight, since they are interested in surfing not for how it makes them feel or how it challenges them to grow, but because they want to be cool. It’s the same with hippies, brah. The funk is real, but the character is not.
Now we all know wanting to be cool immediately makes you uncool. Some clever marketers, clever but not wise, have seen how widespread this tendency to be unreal is and have started marketing to kooks, blatantly. Instead of taking surfing seriously, they fully embrace the flail and celebrate this ineptitude with puns and ironic hairstyles. For some people, surfing is a religion. For others, a way to try and get laid.
Surfing attracts people from all walks of life, but most of the surfers I have known who really deserve respect are nothing like the stereotype. Surfing is a magical activity, but one that is full of ironies. When a human synchronizes their movements with the natural energy of a breaking wave, it is truly something astounding. To be good at surfing requires a lot of time studying the water and taking it seriously, like any other art form. But you can get a wetsuit and a soft-top and someone somewhere will mistake you for a surfer.
It’s the same with hippies. There are fake hippies galore, and they are the ones replicating the negative stereotypes. There are real hippies, too. There are sincerely optimistic folks out there working to make another way of living a reality. They are too busy doing the hard work of regenerative farming to be clowning around downtown.
Every lifestyle has its serious practitioners and its superficial fakes. Since these lifestyles are not mainstream, the public is easily misled about them. They see the fakes and don’t know better. How would you? It takes time to understand the authentic article hiding among the counterfeit.
Who gets to say who is real and who is fake in any particular lifestyle? We don’t have the hippy Olympics. Maybe we should, though. Professional surfing puts any doubts to rest about the levels that people can take that activity. If you could watch the dude who wears his wetsuit to buy his craft beer you would see his inexperience within about two minutes of being in the water. Meanwhile, any of the pros or even just competitive surfers in this region are able to milk the last drop of potential out of every swell that rolls through town. The difference between their performances is unmistakable.
Same goes with hippies. We aren’t really seeing the awesome ones. They are cross breeding landrace heritage cannabis cultivars with regional genetics that have been tried and true somewhere rad up in the mountains. They are planning psychedelic voyages and growing their own food. They are making advances in sustainable development. We don’t hate hippies; we don’t know them. We only see their imitators.
Who are these people who invade a lifestyle and make it so lame? Let’s be honest. They are techies who have enough fuck-you money to not care that they are being absolute douche canoes in the water or at a health food store. Horrible insecurities that are buttressed by financial success is a recipe for the fake hippy, the kook or the wannabe artist. How many people buy a dream for a couple of years, but never put the work in to make it a reality?
The truth to life is that anything you want to do well is going to take a lot of hard work for most people. But the people who are doing the hard work are not usually looking for attention. They may want to do business, but they are fulfilled by the life they lead and aren’t hungry souls siphoning attention from curious tourists eager to see a real Santa Cruz hippy. They will be tending to their work, helping their families, being valued members of their community.
We are only seeing the surface of things and in this state of oversimplification we are not only seeing a caricature of reality, but we are seeing a fake caricature. The connection between the stereotype and the reality is ingenuous. It is only when we begin to realize what a horrible version of subcultures we have received that we will start to see the world for what it really is. The good parts are oftentimes not going to be the most obvious.
We shouldn’t hate hippies for their followers.