On this season, we'll explore our most ingrained beliefs, delusions, and archetypes, the ways that cognitive dissonance shapes our culture and how our reality is created by the stories we tell.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith, and this is American hysteria.

Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection.

Like appropriated from lumberjacks, like woodsy living.

Woodsy-folksy-lsy living you know what i hate stupid

posers you're not cool you're really really starting to aggravate me i stay cool and dig all job

that's the reason I stay alive.

When I was in my late teens and early 20s, I lived two very opposite lives.

I entered college as an English major and began a prolific hitchhiking career. For nine months out of the year, I was writing academic essays about obscure poets and writing poems of my own. But during those

summer months, I made it to almost every state, took hundreds of rides, hopped a train, camped every night, and trudged back into school

each September with my personal brand of a slightly unmanageable manic shimmering.

I'd write for hours and hours about all the things I had learned, all the people I had met,

my love, a gold cut across my chest, a welcome wound from this

real world I had finally touched. This was my rebellion after a whirlwind dual suburban high

school life, good grades in the favor of teachers, and the secret trouble I love to get into. Like beat writer Jack

Karowack, whose book On the Road was published during the 1950s as this new generation was

coined the hipsters. I thought the road had lessons to teach me. I thought the real world was

somewhere out there. And I thought that I had the right to enter it.

In truth, I did learn the most important lessons of my life, and I brought them back to the circle of writers at my college, safe and sound, with plenty of space and time to live out my art, to tell stories that perhaps

have never been mine to tell. Okay, we should start by defining what a hipster means in this episode.

Though it isn't a hard and fast rule, I guess anyone can be a hipster. Today we're talking specifically about the white, middle, and upper class hipsters. This character, in essence, is a seeker of cool, one whose personal brand of individuality is actually anything but. We'll be talking about trendsetters, consider geniuses

of their time, who were also posers, taking almost all their cues from the black, queer, and

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