Rebirth of the Yuppie: Closing Decade to Shed some Light?
I was born pretty much immediately after the collapse of yuppie-dom in a sort of aftermath of the suburbanite cookie-cutter culture of the mid-20th century, so unfortunately I don’t have much to say about that… delicate period in American history. Driven by an obsessive desire for self-improvement spawned from the prosperous comfort of the 50’s and 60’s, the rise of the original yuppies was fueled by the consumption of the baby-boomer generation in an effort to escape the confines of Madison Avenue. But the crash in the late 80’s and the recession in the early 90’s triggered a contingency of doom and gloom for the yuppies of old, and the electing of George H. W. Bush into the White House appeared to be the final blow, landing Old Money as the clear and tested winner.
Well, that was then; this is now. The financial collapses of the late-20th century created a confusion that left the American identity struggling to figure out how to reconcile its modernist life quest with the value system of old, previously consummated by materialism and hedonistic consumerism. But after the dust had settled, a new void had appeared, replacing the old quest for Middle America with a free-floating search for a post-modernist value system.
It was clear that the suburbanite lifestyle once yearned for was not going to carry us into the 21st century, and as a result, a new era of consumerist, capitalist America was born. The internet eruption throughout the 90’s set the stage for a new form of value system set in cyberspace. The migration, or rather infiltration, of businesses into the internet world triggered a massive shift in American consumerist ideology, spawning waves of change in the traditional consumerist lifestyle. This change was what filled the void left by Middle America. The elite urban societies, what once traded comments about Italian suits and Chardonnay became hubs for the latest Blackberry and BMW. Cities transformed seemingly overnight into technological lightning rods. College graduates were not seeking the Plain Jane lifestyles of their parents, but instead were longing for duplexes in San Diego or an apartment in New York City, equipped with steel walls and metal floors and shiny appliances that saved the environment as they cooked and cleaned their organic foods and organic fabrics.
The new decade, though it is still a year and one day away, will bring to light the rebirth of the yuppie. Whether this time, yuppie-dom and its ensuing post-post-modern materialism and consumerism will thrive and survive credit-driving businesses and somehow subvert a financial meltdown, that is hard to say. Despite this uncertainty, it is clear that until the traditional American value system is reconciled with the values of the post-baby-boomer generation, the yuppie will never truly be dead.
