On Secretly Being a Yuppie

“Yuppie stands for "young upwardly mobile professional". Nightclub flunkie is not a professional category. I wish we were yuppies. Young, upwardly mobile, professional. Those are good things, not bad things.” ~ Des McGrath from Walt Whitman’s The Last Days of Disco

It’s interesting, isn’t it, how social monikers have become anathema? There were days when people would proudly declare themselves hippies, when feminists didn’t politely preface any opinion with “I definitely wouldn’t call myself a feminist,” and when people didn’t shrink from announcing themselves as Republicans for fear of being taken for a gun-toting anti-abortionist happily strafe-bombing Middle Eastern daycare centers. In simpler times, identifying with a group was reassuring; it served as a guidebook of how to dress, act, think, and whether or not one should ever buy a Volvo; and also to neatly distinguish neighbors in the daunting sameness of suburban life. ("Darling, of course we should have the Smiths over for dinner, but I heard they have their children home-schooled, are we quite sure they're not Communists?")

The neologism “yuppie” was coined, according to those sources that define such inane things as these, during Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign. The term was used to describe his strongest supporters: socially liberal yet fiscally conservative young professionals. When Newsweek proudly proclaimed 1984 “The Year of the Yuppie,” the delight once taken in simple social categorization came under sudden and vicious attack by the emerging Generation X. Caught up in the orgy of apathy towards conformity, the title quickly tumbled from grace, absorbing all the negative connotations we can quickly recall by leafing through an issue of The Sharper Image, and its use today has dwindled to the point of near-extinction.

But have the yuppies themselves? I say no.

One defining quality of yuppiedom that has clearly not died with the label was single-minded devotion to career. According to The Yuppie Handbook (1984), “career had to be personally meaningful, emotionally satisfying, and a vehicle for self-expression;” in other words, people took their jobs far too seriously. Take a look through the titles in the corporate section at your local bookstore or at the ridiculously aggrandized vision and mission statements of any company’s website, and you’ll see that little has really changed.

(“Our guiding mission is to deliver superior quality products and services for our customers and communities through leadership, innovation and partnerships. Our vision is to be the quality leader in everything we do.” Name the organization? Tim Horton’s. Yes, folks, that lofty statement is the aim of a company that makes donut holes.)

Even job titles are morphing to keep pace with the need for us to imagine ourselves as deeply and emotionally fulfilled by our nine-to-fives; call me cynical, but it doesn’t make bothering people at home any more fun by calling myself a Outbound Customer Advocate rather than a telemarketer, and Ken Blanchard must be completely unfazed by his co-worker’s snickers to call himself the 'Chief Spiritual Officer' of his unimaginatively named Ken Blanchard Companies.

Yuppies were also highly discriminating (or at least highly self-conscious) about their social markers. No Danish minimalist glass coffee table would have dared be unadorned by a copy of The New Yorker, high-end food brands became the rage, and beer was snubbed in favor of wine, even by men (somewhat understandably – this was before the age of the microbrewery.)

Sound familiar? I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t be thrilled to find something other than Maxim in their potential date’s apartment. Capers and other high-priced “whole life” markets are popping up all over the place like the scrappy little organic veggies they sell, and “wine bar” has now entered our common lexicon just as “pub” goes on the wane. Those who pointed at the yuppie smugly and laughed at their slavish dedication to brands such as LL Bean and Mercedes should be cautioned; those who live in Apple or Lululemon houses best not throw stones.

What else did a yuppie make? An obsession with health and fitness, designer vodka, stainless steel appliances, cocaine, exposed brick, cocktails with silly names, and pasta. A quick spin through the trendy district of any urban center – and I point squarely at thee, Yaletown – shows that while carbohydrates have gone out of style, little else has. Politically speaking, I can't recall a single conversation I've had in the last few years where the person I was speaking to didn't say that they were "in the middle." "How so?" "Well, I mean, I'm socially liberal, but I don't believe in how overrun the government is by special interest groups." Right. In other words, be a whale-saving feminist minority rights supporter all you want, just don't ask me for any money for it. Socially liberal but fiscally conservative.

And now we're back to Gary Hart.

So, I am sad to say, we may in fact still be yuppies; it’s just that a label tends to fade very quickly until the group it defines eventually expropriates it. (I suppose that’s why honky never really caught on.) The yuppies may have shed their label in shame because the hippies and hipsters made fun of them, but they quietly went about consuming anyway. Now after a twenty year hiatus whereby we were scolded by Greenpeace, enlightened by the Body Shop and cautioned by Enron, the yuppie is back. And we are he.

Look on the bright side; a yuppie, at least, would have never been caught dead shopping at Walmart.

For my friend C, who is the only other person besides me who would admit to being a yuppie.