Being in the underground is hard. We pull the general population along. We are “fringe” and “weird” until they co-opt our culture and make it trendy, forgetting where it came from. There is an unspoken game of constantly searching for new ways to set ourselves apart. We spend our lives waiting for the general population to colonize our culture, forcing us to find a new way to be different.

There’s a tension of longing for legitimacy and recognition from the world, but feeling protective of what belongs to us. Too often do the second-to-market get recognition for “discovering” what was already ours. There’s a pride that comes with knowing you were early to a now popular idea, but a sorrow in losing the intimate connection you once had with it.

This cycle is what keeps us ever-new and ever-changing. We generate ideas and invent new ways to be. They can’t take our culture from us, because we are the culture.