What Is A Hippie? A Complete Guide
There’s no mistaking that magnetic draw to your calm vibe, your peaceful ways, or your outpouring of love for all creation. You’re constantly seeking a higher guidance, perpetually focusing on gathering information. You insist upon peace, love, and a wide community. You glow like the bright candle you are.
You and everyone around you can clearly see it: you are a hippie.
What Is A Hippie?
Defined most clearly in the 1960’s (but existing well before and certainly since), every generation has that one group of people who open their eyes to the ability to see love in every corner. They insist on a thoughtful, peaceful existence. As small children, these people were connecters: people who bring together young and old, and link various circles of friends to one another. These bright ones are passionate about even the smallest creatures and outspoken against all violence or large-scale injustice. They grow up to travel on the outer edge of consumption and eschew the rat race, preferring a calmer, less commercial life.
Pop culture, and no small amount of backlash from “the establishment,” has presented a Hollywood-hyped image of a hippie as chronically underemployed and loaded with drugs. While some hippies do alter their minds with a variety of plants and mushrooms, many others do not. Many hippies view their bodies as temples that deserve only high quality nutritional input, so using mind-altering substances isn’t a standard of measurement to determine one’s hippie status.
Primarily, the love of peace (and firm refusal to accept war as an option) is the mark of a true hippie.
Wherever there is love to be found and a connection to be made, wherever calm pacifism meets violence eye-to-eye, there resides a hippie. Beyond merely slotting daisies into the rifles of soldiers standing at the ready, hippies have also worked to provide mutual aid and supplies to people in war-torn cities. Sit-ins, learn-ins, and peaceful displays of non-aggression are the earmarks of a counterrevolutionary.
A socially-forward philosophy of peace is constantly present. Tuning out and avoiding social issues are not something hippies do. Typically, these are the voices raised when underprivileged and overworked people are trying to be heard.
Hippie Legacy
Did hippies throw off the establishment? Or did the establishment throw off hippies?
In the mid-1800’s, European artists gradually found themselves without the income from patronage of an upper class that was no longer stable. Suddenly thrown into poverty, these musicians, artists, and writers blended and lived with Romani, and an aesthetic emerged.
What was formerly looked down upon was now heavily desired and sought after. Long hair, long, pulled-together clothing, dabbling in various cultural attachments, and wandering through the world, bohemians experienced a decidedly American revamp when the youngest returning soldiers and children of World War II veterans hit puberty.
These young people were primed to toss off an establishment that was threatening war, threatening nuclear warfare, and lagging behind social culture. In the 1960s, a counterculture emerged, initially infiltrating college campuses. It became popular to question everything previously held by society as standards of living.
Hippie Culture
True to their counterculture style, most hippies, both past and present, have traveled throughout the states and the world as low cost and communally as possible. They often pool resources for buses or hitchhike along major routes. Similarly, hippies tend to reject housing that focuses on trendy or commercial interests, and some live in multi-family communal arrangements.
The love of learning and expanding knowledge about various lifestyles and cultures inspired hippies of the 1960s to travel from place to place. In the same way, modern hippies similarly find themselves comfortable among all peace-loving people, regardless of lifestyle or culture.
Music, particularly reactionary music to the era of the post-World War II and Vietnam War era, is a hallmark of all hippies, and this music spans a wide variety. From folk to rock, from psychedelic to bluegrass-turned-country, hippies of the past and present find that music speaks to their souls and lets them show their love for the connection that music brings.
Hippie Lifestyle
How granola are you, exactly? Sprouts, hand-milled grains, yogurt… Frequently, hippies have a public image of sinking into a more natural lifestyle.
Whether it’s eschewing makeup and popular fashion trends in favor of laid-back clothing, or pouring energy into growing food, this is a well-earned stereotype! The counterculture movement of the 1960s showed that people needed to slow down and love one another. This same movement also placed a long-lasting emphasis on mindful, intentional nutrition.
Not every hippie is a “back to the land” type, but their love of peace and anti-violent nature often extends to Mother Earth as well. Even bugs and weeds have a place in this peaceful worldview, and pesticides, herbicides, and industrial agricultural practices are frequently seen as acts of violence against a peaceful world.
Who Belongs In The Hippie Registration Community?
Sunshine on your face, warm ground beneath your feet, flowers in your hair? Kombucha in a mason jar, organic strawberries in a bowl, sprouted grain bread? Music that surrounds you in love, the wide open road, finding companionship in like-minded, peaceful people from all over the world- whatever your vibe, as long as you are striving for a non-violent existence, and as long as you constantly work towards a better way of living, you belong here.