I've ruminated on this and come around. I say bougie to signal that I'm not an out of touch douche, because obvi any spending over the bare minimum is inherently unjustifiable. (That sort of signalling is also behind my making fun of white people. To signal that I'm aware of and empathetic to the plight of non-whites, wokeness, etc. even though I love a lot of "shit white people like". I guess signalling is at play a lot of the time.) Bougie's a term meant to shame others. The point of this post was to ask if anyone goes, You know what--fuck that shame.
I get it. I wanted to provoke the rumination because I hit a point about a year and a half back where I went "you know what - fuck that shame" about everything and it was goddamn liberating. I think it's that switch you flip when you decide that nobody is going to give you shit about wearing birkenstocks with socks anymore. It was when I picked up my daughter in a Porsche convertible wearing vintage '90s Gargoyles sunglasses, cargo shorts and a Front 242 t-shirt and felt every goddamn eye at the school judging me. I realized I was clearly full "weekend dad" and probably a divorcee going through a midlife crisis and that I was being called to account for fucking enjoying myself rather than working 90 hours a week for The Man so I could make payments on the Prius. Because, after all, my kid's on scholarship and oughtn't I have some decorum? Fuck to the no. No decorum. Cargo shorts & convertibles. Happiness is sitting in First Class wearing a Killing Joke hoodie.