MANY SEE Yuppies as young professionals who are restless in pursuing upward mobility, pursuit of excellence and material comfort. There’s something more behind the Yuppie phenomenon. The term yuppie may not sound serious but the “reality it describes is one of the more significant recent developments in Western culture.” The mentality of a yuppie that creates a sub-culture in our society speaks about a conscious drive of many people today for success and wealth, for having a beautiful body and moving up the ladder of career, for being well-dressed and having prestige, for luxuriating in material comfort and achieving optimally everything that is potentially attainable within our limits. This conscious drive that moves people brings with it “unashamed ambition and the expressed desire, in a manner of speaking, to leave the pack behind.” What is important for a yuppie is to set oneself, through excellence above others.
Not all of this is bad, or new. People have always wanted to become better off in life as shown by the ‘rags-toriches- stories’ and the ‘work-hard-and-get-ahead mentality.’ What needs to be challenged in the yuppie mentality is the equation of the pursuit of excellence, mobility and comfort with unbridled individualism, selfishness, and idiosyncratic development, which are unabashedly held up as virtues. For a yuppie, the unconscious philosophy of life is that salvation is self-development. In other words, “everything—marriage, family, community, justice, church, morality, service to others, sacrifice—makes sense, takes its place, and has value only in so far as it enhances selfdevelopment. What the yuppie espouses and nurtures, both inside self and within society at large, is precisely movement towards self. Self-development is pursued with a sense of duty and asceticism that were formerly reserved for religion, because for the yuppie, self-development is salvation, it is the religious project.”
The book Shattered Lantern says that the influence of a yuppie mentality in our contemporary culture could be seen in a variety of ways. In fact, “when we survey the best-seller lists for non-fiction books in recent years, we see that virtually every one of these books has to do with achievement, the rewards of success, the quality of lifestyle, and the pursuit of excellence. We also see this in the proclivity for the rich and the famous.”
When many young people today who have recently graduated from schools are still hoping to find a good job and later establish a career or even start up a business that will bring them wealth and comfort, it is important not to deify success as the meaning of life. It is always a joy to find young men and women who are successful in their lives but they are constantly grateful to God who is behind their achievements and accomplishments. Pope Benedict XVI says that the problem with men and women today is forgetfulness of God. Success without God reinforces the loss of a sense of God in our society and the emptiness of life becomes even more acute because it cannot be filled up by money, good job, and comfortable living. Nobody can claim anything as entirely the result of sheer talent and effort. Ultimately, after all that have been said and done, only God makes life successful that is truly meaningful and fruitful.