The Traveling Trust Fund Hippie

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We all know one. You know the kind that’s completely loaded on their family’s wealth, a lost soul trying to find their way in this crazy world. But they don’t want you to know them as just the traveling trust fund hippie. Their story always goes much deeper. In their mind, they’re just a hippie.

The traveling trust fund hippie is making their way around the world. You’ll usually find them in the grungiest of hostels. They’re trying to trick you, mask their wealth, make you feel empathetic for them. Make sure you really dig they’re natural vibe, feel their energies and their chakras.

They always want to be your Facebook friend right away, because they’ll always have an international roaming plan on their smart phones that they can’t seem to keep their eyes off of (while no one else is looking).

That’s when you get a real peek into their lives.

You come across all their Instagram photos. There’s the one of them meditating and doing sunrise yoga atop some magical cliff (Hefe filter) in Costa Rica. Another riding a camel around the deserts of Dubai (naturally accessorized with a Michael Kors scarf and pair of Chanel sunglasses). Best yet the ‘I’m on a yacht with my flower headpiece and chipped nail polish in Zanzibar’ shot (#nofilter).

So you look into doing that same sunrise yoga yourself and you find out it’s $15/day. What kind of regular backpacker can opt for $15 a day for yoga? That’s the budget for 3 days worth of food! And you try to make yourself a crafty floral headpiece but you realise it falls apart about 10 minutes later. You very well can’t get a fresh one from the florist each morning the way your trust fund hippie friend does. You find a yoga instructor, you pay a buck a day to have a beachside yoga session. You think you’ve finally found a steal of a deal, someone that gets you, someone who can chant ommms on the beach at 6am only to find out your yoga instructor isn’t much of a yoga instructor at all! It’s just another traveling trust fund hippie!

They’ll claim to have done their training in the hidden hillsides of India but you can tell they’ve never trained at all. You’re actually quite a bit more skilled and flexible than they are. But it’s all part of their plan. Pretend to be a yoga instructor, pretend to be poor and just squeaking by while daddy deposits the weekly $1000 into their international bank account.

The token trust fund hippie you keep running into is the type of person who has tons of beautiful scarves, all of which were bought at Topshop, Urban Outfitters or Nordstroms, while all of yours have come from street vendors in Kenya and Tanzania for around a buck.

They’re always burning incense and doing arts and crafts (#friendshipbraceletsforsale #checkmyetsy!) They’ll even stand as competition in against locals in the markets trying to sell their ‘original designs’. Nothing pisses you off more.

Naturally they all have a slew of stories of this festival where they did that drug and a friend of a friend who’s in rehab, then you start to think maybe they’re the one that was in rehab? They’ve attended a reggae festival in Spain where they smoked their lungs silly, an electro-fest in Prague where their nose ran for days after because of all the coke they took. And naturally they made it to both Bonnaroo and Coachella where they were poppin’ Mollies like it were a sport.

At the end of the day you don’t know whether to love or hate the traveling trust fund hippie. You can’t decide if you should befriend them or talk shit about them. You find you get irritated with them but in reality you’re likely just really jealous of them.