Gruphood. It's where we're all headed.

What’s with the Grups and passion? It’s all anyone wants to talk about. Passionate parents, passionate workers, passionate listeners to the new album by Wolf Parade. [...] I start to realize: Under the skin of the iPods and the $400 ripped jeans, this is the spine of the Grup ethos: passion, and the fear of losing it.

Which brings me back to my father: the one who wore suits, not jeans; the one who, when he was my age, already had four kids; the one who logged a lifetime at exactly the kind of middle-management jobs that no one wakes up excited about going to in the morning, and who then found himself sandbagged by the late-eighties recession, laid off in what must have felt like the worst kind of double whammy. All the adult trade-offs he’d made turned out to be a brutal bait-and-switch. Is it any wonder that the Grups have looked at that brand of adulthood and said, “No thanks, you can keep your carrot and your stick.” Especially once we saw just how easily that stick can be turned around to whap your ass as you’re ushered out the door, suit and all. [...]

Being a Grup isn’t, as it turns out, all about holding on to some misguided, well-marketed idea of youth—or, at least, isn’t just about that. It’s also about rejecting a hand-me-down model of adulthood that asks, or even necessitates, that you let go of everything you ever felt passionate about. It’s about reimagining adulthood as a period defined by promise, rather than compromise. And who can’t relate to that?

It makes me wonder where this rarified trend will take us. This sounds stodgy, but really: what will the economy look like in 10 years if gruphood continues?

A new class will slowly emerge. We work from home, selling each other handcrafted goods over the internet. We'll try to replicate a proletarian aesthetic -- after all, we're all about producing things ourselves, cutting out the middlemen and big business, and giving back to the community -- but we're in the end, we're just a subset of the bourgeoisie. We're selling each other distressed jeans, jewelry, and journals, items through which we express our intensely concentrated individualities. The facelessness of the proletariat secretly horrifies us. We learn the names of the girls who work at our favorite cafes.

Postmodernism was never meant to become a monument. The Denkmal that was raised began to fissure immediately.