Selling Out

It was a relatively mundane day when I realized that I had spent the greater part of my life fighting myself. In fact, I think it went something like this: Urban Outfitters has some really cool things this month! Ooh, look at that! (Quick inventory of the other in-store shoppers.) S--t. I can’t shop here. This is a store for poseurs. I hereby promise myself that I will never be as lame as these trend-obsessed fascists. I bet they watch “Gossip Girl.” Leave. Now.

Ten minutes later, I exited the store.

Holding two pairs of pantyhose.

And some “10% Off!” stickers given to me by the ­smiling yet carefully ironic saleslady.

I don’t think there’s any good way to put this, so I might as well just come out with it: The advertising got me. The Man’s rip-off of things found in vintage stores sucked me in, used me, and then awarded me a coupon for 10 percent off my next unforgivable sin, as a consolation prize for being unoriginal.

I am a sham. A facsimile of authenticity. My urge to be unique can be too easily bought through an unremarkable marketing ploy. Namely, stickers.

It’s really difficult to stick it to The Man when your family is in ­advertising. As a child, I made up product jingles for entertainment. Yet now, it is nothing less than street-cred suicide to be associated with anything corporate, even if you’re only doing the CD cover ­layout for Miley Cyrus’ new album (while maintaining a distaste for her music).

Is there any middle ground? It’s the very definition of a catch-22: creative people need creative jobs, such as those at advertising agencies. Yet these same people would rather be forced to listen to the aforementioned CD every day until they die than “sell out.”

In an age where “teenage rebellion” is sold in every Hot Topic in every mall in America without a detectable ounce of irony, what are we supposed to do? Suck it up and sell out for a freelance job writing taglines for Skittles? Or cut sugar out of our diet entirely and rent a cabin in the woods in hopes of attaining a simpler, rebellious (dare we say) “self-reliant” Emersonian existence? How do you even go about doing that?

We’re growing up in an age where looking like a “rebel” means conforming, and even Pumas are beginning to look alternative. Maybe there’s no hope for our generation’s nonconformists. Maybe in the end, resistance really is useless (I hate to think what the members of The Clash would say if they read those words).

Or maybe we just need to up the ante. Maybe we need to get off our butts and find the next frontier – the frontier that will make our forefathers of uprising proud, instead of angry at our all-the-anarchy-symbols, none-of-the-anarchy, no-flavor knockoff of a braver generation. Maybe the next important revolution is just waiting to be discovered, the next great counterculture just around the corner. And while Urban Outfitters pays its art department a lot to convince you that they are the next great counterculture, they’re not.

So, anybody got a cabin at Walden they’re not using?