While walking through Capitol Hill (the hipster part of town) today after a movie at SIFF (Seattle Int’l Film Festival) and contemplating vegetarian Asian food versus Mexican, my boyfriend and I again attempted to answer the question: are we yuppies¹?

The hippie, yuppie, and hipster personas are still alive and well in the world today. I have passed through Hemp Fest and seen the hippies; I have had dinner with a large group of Gen-X yuppies; I have passed by hipsters on the street. I have made fun of each of those groups once they were out of earshot. But especially the Gen-X yuppies.

So maybe it’s a generational thing. Maybe the Gen-X yuppie and the Gen-Y yuppie are very different creatures. (And not just because the Gen-Xers have moved to the suburbs.) I mean, sure, both groups are young urban professionals with “a high-paying job and an affluent lifestyle” (thanks, Urban Dictionary). But while both groups might have large HD TVs, high-tech cellphones, and a DVR/TiVo, the Gen-X yuppie could easily mistake the Gen-Y yuppie for a poor college kid while passing him in the street. (Yay for jobs where the dress code is “wear some”. I wish I was a software developer so I could wear jeans to work everyday too.)

So if I only acquiesce to being called a yuppie if I’m allowed to sprinkle a bit of hippie philosophy (anti-war vegetarian environmentalist) and hipster non-conformity (this is the part where you doubt my non-conformity, right?), then what am I? Luckily someone has come up with a term for this (and trademarked it too…how very yuppie of them) — the “scuppie” (socially conscious upwardly-mobile person). I love to eat organic fair-trade Theo chocolate, then reuse the pretty wrapper as a bookmark in my book on green building. I jet off to Europe twice a year, but first I buy carbon offsets for the flight. But I think the best example of me putting my money where my mouth is is literal…I bank at a credit union and a bank with a social/environmental mission, where I watch my pretty money earn pretty interest, like a good little socially conscious yuppie.

¹Actually, my boyfriend claims I cannot be a yuppie while I continue to be unemployed, but I think this is only relevant if I were willfully unemployed.