That’s the reason for most people who used to be hippies. Nothing like having a baby or other major responsabilty you can’t ignore, to bring out the inner bourgeois in a person. Suddenly crashing in some communal house or living in a teepee isn’t as groovy.
The hippies I’ve read about seemed mostly to be from middle class families and were rejecting their upbringing.
I came from a working class poor family and my goal in life was to be middle-class, which seemed like a utopia from where I stood. Looking back, a lot of antagonism against hippies from people their age came from working-class kids who couldn’t understand why they were throwing away all the stuff that they never had and couldn’t get. That was true foreshadowing to the split in American society today.
Yeah, check out the lyrics for the song “The Free Electric Band” for a perfect distillation of disdain for the Establishment life and the joys of living as a troubadour.
This was true in my experience. For middle class youth, there was a lot of loose money floating about, easy to live on hardly anything when rents were cheap, jobs were plentiful, and government programs were flush. I remember there was a California state initiative that paid people to start and run community gardens. Two of my organic gardener friends split one of those positions and both lived perfectly well for some time. My rent for a room with kitchen privileges was typically about $100.
For working class kids, it was a different ballgame.
Though when you make it to 92 you’re glad if you just look like Willie Nelson.
I grew up in Berkeley in the 50’s, 60s, and 70s, enmeshed in hippie culture. It was shocking to me when I encountered this simplistic, negative attitude towards hippies. It started to make more sense to me when I realized it was often the children of hippies reacting to their parents - or just generational separation, but it still makes me sad that folks who rejected corporate greed and military aggression are ridiculed.