“Stanford is all yuppie scum,” I was warned by my well-meaning friends at MIT when I told them I would be coming here for grad school. Surely this is an overstatement, but I can see why they would be suspicious. Compared to you beautiful, fashionable, disturbingly athletic people, the population of my alma mater might charitably be described as “scrappy.” (In fact, “Scrappy” is the nickname of one of my aforementioned friends.)

This is partly due to the characteristic disregard for social and hygienic conventions typical of any tech school campus. However, much of MIT’s grittiness should be attributed to its location in Boston, a city originally famous for a pack of eighteenth century hooligans who got drunk, dressed up like Native Americans, and dumped 45 tons of tea into the harbor.

These days, Boston is best known for its not-quite-pleasant weather and its not-quite-classy sports fans. You might think it’s all J. Crew WASPs; check out www.masshole.com to see why you would be grievously mistaken (or, in other words, wicked retahded).

Anyway, while I completely adore MIT, Boston and grit in general, I must admit that I was excited to relocate to a campus with minimal precipitation and a palm-tree-to-people ratio rivaling a Club Med. And the supposed yuppieness of Palo Alto didn’t worry me either, because I have a dirty little not-so-secret secret: I have a decent bit of yuppie in me myself.

No, I’m not rich, and no, I don’t use a Mac, but I do embody many other traits of the progressive yuppie typology: my newspaper is The New York Times, my grocery store is Whole Foods, and my knowledge of Western European geography is extensive. (Or at least I think it is because I studied abroad for a few months.)

And like most of you, I’m one of those crazies who wants to give driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, make everyone else get gay married, and fiendishly tarnish the sanctity of whatever other comforting traditions we have left (the death penalty?). It’s the modern way, baby!

So yes, after years of being mocked for my yuppie-scum ways in Boston, it certainly is refreshing to finally be amongst my own out here in the Bay Area. But alas, as this article’s title suggests, all is not quite well. Living in the self-affirming land of the Prius has forced me to confront my progressive yuppiehood’s unpleasant underbelly: hypocrisy.

Yes, we yuppie scum are hypocrites. This is old and obvious news, but I wanted to look at the inconsistencies of yuppiehood as yet another example of the conflicted nature of modernity. You see, progressives are like the political version of modernists, and we are just as susceptible to the perplexing contradictions of modern life. The especially troubling problem with us yuppies, however, is that we generally don’t acknowledge any contradiction at all.

Looking the other way feels good, of course, and I do my darndest to do just that when I fork over way too much money for my orange-infused organic fair trade dark chocolate. But my sense of irony is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore, and I have to wonder if my ideology is as rational as I pretend it is. (Let me ruin the suspense: it’s not.)

For example, my inner environmentalist recently confronted my inner multi-culturalist about her penchant for rare, imported foods from faraway lands, a habit which guzzles an alarming amount of fuel for transport and which can potentially devastate a local ecosystem. How can I be smug about both patronizing local farmer’s markets and being a world-citizen consumer when their interests are directly at odds?

I’ve also witnessed battles between my inner socialist and my inner populist: I want to buy products made by companies that pay their employees fairly, but I also want to avoid elitism by purchasing things that the masses (and impoverished grad students) can afford. Buying artisanal cheese may support the artisan, but it also makes me a snob.

The original modernists faced these sorts of dilemmas as well. Mass production, one of the trademark innovations of the modern era, was hailed as a breakthrough that broke down classism by increasing product accessibility. However, it was also deplored as a dangerous capitalist intrusion that promoted consumerist greed. While the first-wave modernists explored these issues, we tend to smother them in self-indulgent hype.

So what are today’s modernist-progressive-yuppies to do? Let me first sincerely confirm that we really do mean well — we’re not just elitist snobs. But the fact that we often seem that way undermines much of the good that we endeavor to do. Our holier-than-thou mindset is alienating, and also just wrong. We aren’t holier than anyone else. Our ideology is just as rife with inconsistency as the next.

Of course, I’m not suggesting we abandon our yuppie ways and become Bud-light-chugging Pats fans. No, we will inevitably continue drinking our obscure Belgian ales and domestic microbrews. But we should nevertheless recognize the absurdity of our situation: we are just as entangled in the mess of modernity as those Pats fans are, and accepting this is a prerequisite for making any real progress.