Writing about adults and adulthood, I’ve been especially interested in the general archetypes of young people that keep coming up. While every person is a unique snowflake and all that, I mostly find that as our generation comes of age, there are only a few different categories that people fit into. That’s probably how it is for most eras, and there’s no reason for millennials to think that they’re special (except for the fact that everyone has told us that we’re special our entire lives). For a generation supposedly marked by self-reliance and individualism (if you read the papers), pretty much everyone I meet can be placed into a small handful of categories. And, since I’m assuming you’re as judgmental as I am, I thought it would be helpful if I broke down the various types of people you know (if you live in a major city), so that when you meet a new person, you can quickly and easily put them into a category, and befriend or dismiss them appropriately.
The “Bobo”
This is a new term for me, but it’s very well-established (according to my mom and @aziziz). It’s short for “bourgeois bohemian” and translates perfectly to North America. How it hasn’t caught on in with people our age, I have no idea, because it describes like, half the young people in most cities. They wear bespoke artisan chambray shirts and vintage sunglasses, craft aftershave, read Monocle; when they travel, they have a retro-style duffel bag that was handmade by some guy they met at a party for a startup; when they go out drinking, it’s mixology bars that serve artisan cocktails, using small batch alcohols, where they’ll pronounce to their friends salvos like, “Bulleit has a great name, but it’s really just a pedestrian whiskey.”
You probably know a lot of people like this, and for lack of a better term, you might have referred to them as some qualified kind of hipsters, like, “I mean, he dresses like a hipster, but he’s not the grungy kind, crashing on the couch of some warehouse. He has, like, a really nice loft.” I’m talking about the guy who works in advertising with a fedora. He’s a bobo. Same with the girl taking Instagrams for her Tumblr about pop-up restaurants. She’s a bobo. And that dude with 50$ Benny Gold sweatshirt, the $200 Huf Limited sneakers, the sleeve tattoo and and the throwback Jansport backpack? He’s a bobo. Can we all start using this term, please? Derisively, like the way people used to use the term “yuppie” in the 80s? Because even if these bobos are your friends, or you’re actually one or I’m actually one (I mean, I know I probably am), we can all agree that they’re worth our surface level scorn, right?… KEEP READING!
