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"Yuppie" is short for "Young Urban Professional". It is used to describe a demographic profile: people, usually between their late twenties and early thirties, generally with graduate degrees. Yuppies tend to hold jobs in the professional sector, with incomes that place them in the upper-middle economic class. The term "Yuppie" emerged in the 1980s as an echo of the earlier "hippies" and "yippies" who had rejected the materialistically-oriented values of the business community.
The term is often used pejoratively, with an emphasis on the connotations of "yuppies" as selfish and superficial.
The yuppie stereotype
The term "yuppies" has come to refers to more than just a demographic profile: it is also a psychographic profile. It describes a set of behavioural and psychographic attributes that have come to constitute a commonly believed stereotype.
According to this stereotype, yuppies are more conservative than the preceding hippie generation. Dispensing of the social causes of their more passionate parents (who themselves shed traditional values), yuppies tend to be 9-5 professional workers. Yuppies tend to value material goods (especially trendy new things). In particular this can apply to their stocks, imported automobiles (e.g. BMW, Lexus, Mercedes-Benz), sport utilities, development houses, and technological gadgets, particularly cell phones.
Unfortunately, the fast-paced pursuit of these material goods has unintended consequences. Usually in a hurry, they seek convenience goods and services. Being "time poor", their family relations can become difficult to sustain. Maintaining their way of life is mentally exhausting. Sometimes, they will move every few years to where their job goes, straining their family. The fast-paced lifestyle has been termed a rat race.
Heavily influenced by a competitive corporate environment, they often value those behaviours that they have found useful in gaining upward mobility and hence income and status. They often take their corporate values home to their spouses and children.
According to the stereotype, there is a certain air of informality about them, yet an entire code of unwritten etiquette can govern their activities from golf and tennis to luncheons at cocktail and sushi bars.
What becomes of the "yuppies"
An interesting question is "What happens to these ambitious young professionals as they get older?"
Some of the professionals become established and settled in their careers and need not be as ambitious as they were previously. Others find that they are prosperous enough to retire early.
Some re-consider their lifestyle. Some go through a mid-life crisis. Yuppies may feel that their lifestyle has failed to provide meaning to their lives, after devoting a disproportionate amount of time to their career.
Related terms
A yumpie is a "Young Upwardly-Mobile Person". While this term is far less common, many confuse the derivation for Yuppie with that of Yumpie, and the two express broadly the same connotations anyway.
A buppie is sometimes used to refer to an African-American yuppie.
A guppie is a gay yuppie.
Yuppify and Yuppification are a slang terms used in place of the words gentrify and gentrification but in a connotation of becoming like or catering to the Yuppie.
A Yuppie Slum refers to any neighborhood that is largely populated by a young well-off crowd, but often has other connotations of gentrification and rising rental and dining costs in a previously low-rent neighborhood.
"Dinks" are well-off couples who often have much in common with "yuppies." The label is an acronym--Dual Income, No Kids.
See also
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