This question is for people who were young in the era when hippies were not a lifestyle but a movement.
People who weren’t there tend, I’ve noticed, to lump all hippies into one undifferentiated lump, but at the time there were many permutations, with of course a lot of overlap.
I was a back-to-the-lander zennie type. Not a lot of drugs and rock concerts, lots of reading Steward Brand, Wendell Berry, Robert Rodale et al, learning how to milk goats, grow cover crops, make compost. We ate miso soup and brown rice. My type congregated in American zen centers, and communal farms. Although I never changed my philosophy, I did tire of collective decision-making, and cultish leaders, and being gullible. I became quasi-respectable after awhile, because of husband and children and mortgage. But I still live on an organic farm (more of a farmette) and still believe and practice many basic ideas from those days.
If you were a hippie and you aren’t now, what kind of hippie were you, and what did you change into?
I became a hippie in grade school. I was going to say of course there were no drugs and sex involved but a few of my friends were smoking weed and having sex, at 11.
Me, it was somewhat more political, but cultural too.
I did not change. Its why I still, as a senior, have long hair.
I never stopped, I’ve been waiting for the point when I was supposed to grow up and become more conservative but it never happened. I’ve also been waiting for those acid flashbacks I was promised.
If I can chime in about my parents: they were some of the founders of The Farm, drove cross-country in the caravan and everything. They left because my dad had just about had it with the guru stylings of Stephen Gaskin and wanted to do something else with his life. I’m not sure, but I think he issued an ultimatum to my mom: she could stay or go, but he was going. I’m really glad they left.
I was born in 1967, so I only remember the hippie “hanger-ons” in the 1970s.
But from what I remember, and from what I’ve read, there weren’t many “true” hippies. Not sure what the formal definition would be, but my definition of a hippie is someone who eschews responsibility, doesn’t want a normal job, has few possessions, and values leisure time and personal pleasure more than anything else. Such an existence doesn’t pay well, and usually requires handouts from others, hence the reason their numbers were so few. “Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski. Condolences. The bums lost. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir.” - Jeffrey “The Big” Lebowski
Most self-identified “hippies” back then weren’t real hippies, but were simply fans of the associated fashion & music. Frank Zappa even wrote a song about fake hippies in 1967.
There’s no such thing as a ‘true’ hippie, and there’s no single definition. There’s just various characterizations. I was a true hippie, I feel confident, but I was one of the serious ones – I worked very hard indeed, I valued things like satori, and agrarian revolution. Things you don’t get by mooching from others. I lived out of a backpack for years, but in those days all kinds of people did that. There were always layabouts and druggies. Those are a permanent part of the human population, it appears.
I was in my late teens and early twenties at that time. There were astonishing (to me anyway) new ideas becoming widespread, new ways of looking at the world, new literature, it was an amazing time to be young.
I visited it once or twice as an adult. I found it…boring. Which is to say, much like visiting any other neighborhood or community where you don’t know people.
My parents went on to do other things with their lives. I don’t know that either of them regrets that chapter, and it certainly influenced later choices, but they aren’t in their seventies holding Grateful Dead singalongs or anything.
Very true. I think your definition has more to do with a world-view philosophy, and opinions & beliefs when it comes to the environment & economics. Which is perfectly valid. For better or worse, I associate the term with lazy, idealistic people who want to sit around, smoke pot, and play the bongos all day.
I confess this is weird to me. You got this term that lots of people used to self-identify. Rather than paying attention to why people used the term to self-identify and what they meant by it, you adopted a highly negative stereotype to attach to the term–and then you’re gatekeeping the term, saying that there weren’t actually many people who matched the term.
Wouldn’t it make way more sense to abandon the stereotype and instead pay attention to why people used the term for self-identification?
I was too young (7 in the summer of love) but I always wanted to be a hippie. I was too young for free love, and I hated pot, but I listened to the Beatles and wished I could afford incense and wanted a bead door. I dressed as close to hippie as I could, and I had as long hair as I could.
I like peace love and understanding. I still listen to the Beatles, I still hate pot and still have long hair, and still support everyone doing what they want as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone.
Sometime around ~1968 a group of “hippies” set up camp down by the river near our farm, and stayed for a few days. I always wonder where they were going, if they ever got there, and where they are now.
I’m convinced that the 1960s hippie movement was in part inspired by the kids of the 1950s growing up under the existential threat of The Bomb (duck and cover drills, etc.), leading to a generation of nihilists who decided to live like “flower children”: a brief, beautiful day in the sun before we all died. Certainly not all 60s youth were that passively despairing, many sought to change the world– but some of that was there.
I didn’t get that at all. More like, we are the vanguard of the Better Way that will solve all those pesky problems like war and environmental destruction. Follow us! Remember that there was a huge antiwar movement, and a Black Power movement, and though the draft was over before I came on the scene, the graduates of those demonstrations were not nihilists, they were activists.
Each in our own way, we believed we were making a revolution. The nihilism came later, when we failed to.
My first and only cult. I only knew them when they were ‘The Caravan’ though, and by the time they were setting up The Farm, I had gotten myself out. Want to know why? I was told that men were creative and women were receptive. Yeesh!
(I don’t look back on all that with much affection.)
Ko,
hippie in the day, still with the psychedelic folk music & the floaty dresses
'68 here; I wore flower power hand-me-downs from my older siblings. Eldest bro, the Army vet, was a full-on longhaired rebel and moved out shortly after I was born. Dad essentially told him, “Get a haircut or move!” Funny thing is, he enlisted the next year.
Years later, I rented a room from a couple of old hippies for a few months. Long hair, pot smoking, beer drinking, the whole lot.
