"Tell-Tale Signs of the Modern-Day Yuppie"

"The yuppie has shifted from standing on the prow of his yacht in an attitude of rapaciously aspirational entitlement to a defensive crouch of financial and existential insecurity. This instability has fragmented the yuppie’s previously coherent identity into a number of personae, each of which can trace its lineage to its ’80s paterfamilias.

Collectively, these microyuppies are just as strong in their ranks as their progenitors, if not more so. Three decades ago, the yuppie was viewed as a self-interested alien invader in an America that had experienced a solid 20 years of radical activism and meaningful progress in civil rights and women’s liberation. A generation and a half later, we have so deeply internalized the values of the yuppie that we have ceased to notice when one is in our midst — or when we have become one ourselves...

If slicked-back, bespoke, Reaganite Wall Street was regarded as the economy’s savior after the ’70s, the correlation now, after George W. Bush, the financial crisis and years of the global war on terrorism, would be Barack Obama’s Silicon Valley, whose digital gold rush beckons creative young minds with bedhead under hoodies...

let’s call it what it is. No matter how fervently techies and entrepreneurs claim they want to “change the world” (see any episode of “Shark Tank”), far fewer of them would be in the disruption game if the potential profits weren’t world-changing as well."
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/fashion/tell-tale-signs-of-the-modern-day-yuppie.html

And there is so much more that I didn't excerpt. I am loving this analysis, I realize that I didn't have a full understanding of what the yuppie was until now. And it just feels like a really useful lens to understand our culture (like, among the socially and economically privileged people who are young professionals).