For a large portion of my life I’ve been trying to ironically dress like a hipster. It’s the reason I wore oversized (as is everything on me) pale colored business suits for a week straight in high school. It’s the reason I wore a sideways trucker hat, sunglasses, and a chain that said “NG” all complimenting my tight bright white shirt that accentuated my 124 lb. body/waist. It’s the reason I am now wearing a wilderness jacket, a Gilligan hat, a vest and a tie that says “A father’s place is in the boat.” I’m trying to out hipsterize the hipster.

The original concept of hipster-wear comes from over-confidence melded with self-denial. Hipsters’ goals are to take the most “unfashionable” and make it fashionable. Take what poor people would wear – people who couldn’t afford to care about how they look  and then look good in it. I’m beyond that. It’s not just fisherman, lumberjacks, and gas shop attendants who deserve to be called ingrates of the fashion world (to be ingratiated is to be dressed like in irony), there are groups of people who dress nice and care about what they wear that still deserve to be determined ingratable. Those people: Hipsters. (This co-opting of another culture is the self-denial aspect of hipsterism: they don’t have a personal style because they refuse to analyze themselves so they adapt someone else’s culture)

I also have supreme confidence in myself. Maybe not in my looks, but definitely in my lack of caring what I look like. I also like to deny my true opinions, feelings, and thoughts for lack of thinking them worthwhile to share with others. So, I should be a hipster. But I am more confident and better at denying myself an existence than hipsters, therefore I can’t just become poor ironically, I have to become ironic ironically. This is where the mix of Miami Vice, Jamie Kennedy, or Midwest father who enjoys lake fishing with classic hipster accents like untamed hair, skinny shirt/torso, or thrift store vests comes to play.

This isn’t an original concept. Many people have attempted to out-ironize each other, but the claim I will make is that I only like people who land on the even spectrum of irony. People who are ironic are boring, people who are earnest, or ironically ironic are interesting. People who are ironically ironically ironic are douche-bags, throw in another irony, and you got a person I’ll chill with.

Why?

We always land in one of these categories – we are each on some level of irony. If we are earnest then ironic people are making fun of us., where 2nd levelers are making fun of them. So we have to like 2nd levelers because they are standing up for us, and 4th levelers are standing up for 2nd levelers from the 3rd levelers so we hate 3rd levelers and look up to 4th levelers. This continues til infinity.

The other noteworthy note (and redundant redundancy) about this caste system of irony is that the further you go up the irony ladder the more people look up to you for psychological protection, also less people are looking out for you. Especially because there are less people the higher the level of irony. The graph is skew right, not uniform – in fact I have determined that the probability curve for people on levels of irony is f(x)=1/(x+1)^2 where x= irony-level and goes from 0 to infinity. This graph shows that more people are less ironic and less people are more ironic.

Since I lie between x=1.5 and 2.5 (we’re assuming that this is a continuous function in that you could be at x=1.53 as if you are mostly doubly ironic but sometimes slip to regular irony), 60% of people are less ironic than me and 28.57% are more ironic.

This also means that more people are closer to being in an even group (about 57.52%) than an odd group (about 42.48%).

This also means that 33% of people look up to me,  I look up to 12.76% of people, 11.43% of people are similar to me, 26.67% of people envy me, and I envy 15.81% of people. In real words: I’m pretty cool within the dumb, popular, un-hip group. Shit.

I just mathematically proved that I’m everything I profess to hate: Boring.