A Few Thoughts on the "Yuppie"

The term "yuppie" is apparently a derivation from some acronym for "young urban professional." However, that hardly seems to sum up what the term means to those who have used it these past few decades.

It seems to me more helpful to think of the "yuppie" as a bourgeois minus the Puritanism conventionally associated with them--the pieties, the constraints, that went along with the self-seeking defining the bourgeois' view of the individual's relation to society. The bourgeois broadly may fall (far) short of their often life-denying ideals of conduct (economic accumulation without personal enjoyment of the gains, etc.), and indeed the hypocrisy of the bourgeois is a byword among critics of that social stratum. However, in this case the view of hypocrisy as the tribute that vice pays to virtue has some importance--for the yuppie is the bourgeois who does not pay that tribute.

One sees this in numerous details of how they live. Thus where the classic bourgeois looks to make their money by delivering a good or service, the yuppie, perhaps in their ultimate form on Wall Street, readily and unashamedly looks to make money from money without such annoying intermediaries as delivering a good or service--happily devoting themselves to selling "toxic" financial instruments. The good bourgeois is a "family man" who believes in "family values," but the yuppie enjoys the single life, and if they do marry may frequently elect to remain childless to spare themselves the obligations of child-rearing, and so hold on to their freedoms and pleasures--many of which a family values-propounding bourgeois might not approve. And so on and so forth, the conformism, the sharp-elbowed selfishness, the self-satisfaction and other traits many find so unattractive in the bourgeois on full display in as brazen a form as can be imagined here.

The result was that even a bourgeois could look askance at this particular variation on the theme, such that it was not only those who saw the world from a socially concerned "liberal" standpoint, or a countercultural standpoint, who criticized the yuppie and his value, but the plain old cultural traditionalist too, with American society being what it was this the source of criticism that has been most loudly heard--or at least, so did it go once upon a time.