At the half-way mark of 2007 I wanted to circle back around to the inaugural message of the year. I hope you will pardon the transcription of part of the first sermon of the year, but I think it is an important reminder about what the Lord is doing in our community. As you will see in the message the source for the facts and concepts related to Yuppie 2.0 come from the December 2006 edition of Details magazine. I looked for the copy I bought at the news stand to give better quotes and credits to the authors and their particular articles. I couldn’t find it, so I wanted to apologize before hand to the original authors for not keeping better notes on their work. I take no credit for it. I simply juggled several different articles to make a coherent story for a sermon illustration that I never intended to post. If you want to read the original you have to get a back issue. While I’m not a fan of these types of magazines at all, these articles were really insightful.
On May 13, 1981 an article appeared in the Chicago Tribune coined a phrase that would come to describe a powerful cultural movement. The term was “young urban professionals”, or yuppies. A yuppie was a young upwardly mobile professional noted for their devotion to certain elements of style and their conspicuous consumption of high end products.
In the Yuppie Handbook published in 1986 it was humorously noted that the budding yupster could not live without: gourmet coffee, a Burberry trench coat, a Sony Walkman, expensive running shoes, a Cuisinart, a renovated kitchen with a double sink, smoked mozzarella from Dean & De Luca, a housekeeper, a mortgage, a Coach bag, a Gucci briefcase, and a Rolex. But more than just their accoutrements was their work-ethic. The Handbook states, “A yuppie most nearly approaches sainthood when he or she is able to accomplish more things in a single day than is humanly possible.”
The yuppie officially died on October 19, 1987, the day the stock market crashed and the country went into recession. Partly in response to the economic woes the country entered into the indie/slacker/die-yuppie-scum sensibility.
On March 15, 1991 Douglas Coupland publishes Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture in which he borrows the term from a book called Class that characterizes the group born in the mid-late sixties as “uninterested in status, money, or social standing.” Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, Seattle grunge, and MTV’s the Real World come on the scene. There is a backlash against the driven, workaholic consumerism; and a quest for authentic, original, meaningful living.
However, as the Gen X slackers and hipsters age and mature they find themselves in positions of power and influence and prosperity. As one writer put it they now have “an establishment paycheck to make anti-establishment statements.” What are they doing with this establishment paycheck? Buying and consuming. This has led to the re-branding of “Generation X” into “Yuppie 2.0”.
Cornell economist Robert H. Frank, author of Luxury Fever says, “What most people fail to anticipate is that your sense of what you need and want is very elastic. When your income rises, your consumption standard gradually adapts.”
What is really amazing about this is how it came about. Daniel Fierman writing to Yuppie 2.0 says, “With a powerful one-two punch of psychographic targeting and clever brand masking, marketers have hypnotized you with an idealized lo-fi image.” Jeff Gordinier writes, “Dead rebel artists like Burroughs and Kerouac were long ago turned into useful “bohemian” brands, tailor-made for Gap ads…” One ad exec states, “We definitely take advantage of Gen X’s desire to seem indie… our whole strategy is geared toward people who want luxury but still want to hold on to the self-image they had in the grunge years.” Fierman goes on to say, “The creation of identity via consumption is all an elaborate – and utterly effective – form of self-hypnosis.” This leads to the conclusion that, “Compared to us, the eighties greedhead standard was practically restrained.”
The most amazing thing for me is that the facts and the articles I am quoting from are found in the December 2006 edition of the magazine Details. A magazine committed to high end consumption, style, and urban living.
One of the morals of the story is that we shouldn’t mistake changes in style with real transformation. The issue isn’t simply what people value and spend their money on, but the very human tendency to think that you are above the cultural, economic, and social forces that shape the world we live in. To ignore this is to set ourselves up to be sifted and manipulated.
What is important for us as a community of faith in 2007 is to examine ourselves, our way of life, our goals and aspirations to see if we are staying true to God’s calling for us. Even the most defining of values and passionate convictions can be undermined or completely co-opted if we don’t critically examine ourselves. Like the former Gen X now Yuppie 2.0, we can mistake style and rhetoric for lasting, transformative conviction and true authenticity.
What starts out right can be twisted.
We can hypnotize ourselves with the bright baubles of ease, style, and other people’s success. We can sanctify our fear and compromise under the banners of “responsibility” and “stewardship.” We can go part way and fool ourselves that we have gone all the way. We can willingly have our attention re-directed away from God’s radical, wonderful call on our lives.
We have to constantly be talking to the Lord and one another to encourage one another in our calling to serve the Lord and those around us. We need to examine our hearts and lives and motivations. We must actively ask others into our lives to examine them with us for toxic fear, self-deception, and compromise. In our culture we need to be looking for the effects of the idols COMFORT and EASE that come subtly wrapped in the guise of choice, freedom, and preference. We need total immersion in Scripture and a Kingdom Worldview if we are going to be able to distinguish the counterfeit from the real thing.
One of the ways the ways our church can move from irrelevancy 1.0 – the place we were in for many years and out of which the Lord called us 2 years ago by having us sell a building, relocate, and reform our vision for ministry – to irrelevancy 2.0 is by not giving ourselves, heart and soul, to the vision that the Lord has given to us. I don’t want us to mistake style for substance, or to go part way and fool ourselves that we have gone all the way in our obedience – in our love.
I don’t think we’re approaching Irrelevancy 2.0 right now. But the message is a reminder to my own soul to stay connected to the Lord and godly people; to not walk away from hard, inconvenient truths; to walk the way of the cross; to be involved at the Lord’s direction; to be stretched, broken, healed, resurrected.
If not a lot has changed in the past six months it might be a good idea to talk with the Lord and someone you trust about what is going on. It’s not that things HAVE to change, but if you’re locked into an unhealthy status quo it might be good to know.
Peace
