Back in 2008, I wrote an article titled “Yuppies are probably better off dead”.
I completely forgot this article even existed until I stumbled across it during our cleanup project. Rereading it for the first time in over 10 years felt like discovering a time capsule filled with spoiled lunch meat (and as a former deli manager I’d know a thing or two about that).
The article itself wasn’t really about yuppies, they just happened to be the unlucky target my booze-addled brain selected while I was pissed off at basically everything else going on in my life at the time.
I guess I should give you guys (and girls, we don’t discriminate here at AJnet) a little context.
Back when this article was written, I was voluntarily homeless and living in campgrounds with a married woman and her daughter. We were trying to find a place to live, but nobody wanted to rent to us because we didn’t have jobs. Looking back, this was a completely reasonable decision on the landlords’ part. At the time though, I took it personally. One landlord in particular chose a clean-cut yuppie couple over us, and apparently that decision annoyed me so much that I sat down and, in between cups of fruit punch and Vladimir vodka, wrote an entire manifesto about how people who bought overpriced camping supplies deserved extermination.
Less than a month later, we ended up renting a 25-foot trailer parked in somebody’s yard up in the Poconos. So despite the melodramatic tone of the article, things actually worked out pretty quickly.
The article opens with me rambling about suicide by slitting your own throat. Why? I honestly have no idea. It has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the piece. Even by 2008 AJ standards, it was bizarre and forced. Maybe I thought random violence automatically equaled comedy back then, or maybe I was trying to outdo other “edgy” internet writers from that era. Most likely though, I was just mentally exhausted and venting in stupid ways. Whatever the reason, it was cringe.
The Hitler bit actually had a very specific inspiration behind it.
The year before, actor Will Smith made comments about Hitler where he basically said that even horrible people usually justify their actions to themselves as “good” through twisted logic. The media acted like Will was defending Hitler, and the guy practically had to go on an apology tour clarifying that yes, in fact, Hitler was bad. I remember thinking the backlash was stupid because it was painfully obvious what point Will was trying to make. Apparently that irritation lingered in my brain long enough that I decided to awkwardly jam a reference to it into a rant about yuppies and camping soap.
Speaking of camping soap, that’s probably the most grounded part of the entire article.
At the time, we were living dollar to dollar buying the cheapest stuff possible. I ate enough dollar store microwave cheeseburgers during that stretch of my life to probably qualify for medical compensation. So when I walked through Walmart and saw people spending ridiculous amounts of money on things labeled “camp soap” or “camp fork rests”, it genuinely pissed me off. To me, it felt like people were paying extra money just to cosplay being outdoorsy while I was actually living out of campgrounds and trying to scrape together enough money to survive.
To this day, I still kind of feel that way.
Even though I’m financially well-off, I’m still extremely thrifty when it comes to most stuff. I’m not a tightwad, but you’ll usually see me buying generic products over the name brand most of the time. If I can save a few dollars on something, I’ll do it. When I was a kid, our “camp fork rest” was a Y-shaped stick, if we even bothered to use one.
A lot of these “lifestyle” products are overpriced nonsense marketed towards people who want to feel rugged or authentic without actually doing anything rugged or authentic. I’m not buying a tactical titanium camp spork for $19.99. I’ll use the same cheap fork I’ve had for ten years and survive just fine.
The cheesesteak story in the article was real too.
The place was called Joey’s, and was located in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. We went there once, and it was exactly the kind of fake Philly-themed place I described. There was memorabilia everywhere, the employees answered the phone with “Yo, Joey’s”, and the place felt like somebody built an artificial Philadelphia exhibit for people who think South Philly is all of Philly. The food wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t anything special either.
What really sticks out to me now though is how much that section accidentally revealed something else entirely: I actually missed Philadelphia. Like, a lot.
At the time, I was up in the mountains surrounded by tiny podunk towns where nobody could make a proper cheesesteak or pizza. I didn’t realize how spoiled I was growing up around actual pizza shops until I left the city. The further north you go from Philly, the rougher it gets. By the time I reached the Poconos, my best pizza option was literally a gas station run by Indian dudes. To their credit, they were actually cool as hell and the pizza was pretty good, but still. It’s hard going from real Philly food to gas station pizza and fake “official South Philly cheesesteaks.”
Also, I just want to clarify that the part where I grabbed the owner by his fat fold and slammed his face into the counter totally happened. That part was completely real and absolutely not made up by a 20-something internet ranter trying to sound tough for comedic effect. You guys believe me, right?
The funniest thing about this article now is how little I actually think about yuppies anymore. I don’t even know if “yuppie” is still a commonly used insult in 2026. I certainly haven’t heard anyone use it in the last two decades.
Looking back though, the article wasn’t really about yuppies at all. It was about frustration. Frustration with being broke, frustration with instability, frustration with feeling like I was getting filtered out of normal adult life while watching other people seemingly glide through it effortlessly. The “yuppies” just became a convenient symbol for people who looked comfortable while I wasn’t. Haters always gonna hate, and this time I was the hater.
That doesn’t make the article good, obviously. It’s complete trash. But buried underneath all the trash is a real moment from my life, and I think that’s why I’m still willing to archive pieces like this instead of just deleting them outright.
Also, for the record, I would like to formally rescind my 2008 statement that yuppies are probably better off dead. You guys really didn’t do anything to me.
My bad.
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