Have you had it with hipsters? Well, good, because hipsters have had it—or so they say.

“I think people are exhausted by trends that have the half-life of a millisecond,” says John Leland, author of “Hip: The History.” “You live in a state of perpetual whiplash, in which the minute you’re up on one trend it’s gone and you should be on to another.”

And so the LA Times gives us a grouping of post-scenesters who have abandoned the loft-party life of pop-cultural exhibitionism to embrace the forgotten wonder of true life and actual conversation.

The take-away: Authenticity isn’t just for losers anymore.

Hipsters are resented, especially by themselves, for always going about as if nothing can touch them. The word evokes a particular brand of icily detached individualism—that knowing aloofness practiced by those who will never say just what they mean, who would in fact deny meaning (all is in flux!), yet are above being bothered to actually do so. They hide behind barriers, all the while parading before us, simultaneously protecting and projecting themselves.

But if the cool now seek the real…I do not believe it will be their first time.

The hip are our cultural seekers—self-identified outsiders who somehow will the self to push beyond its own alienation to go in search of the new, the hidden, the unlikely yet possible. Exalting the rare and deriding the common, they began their quest with the implicit belief that by rejecting the need to belong and by seeking more nuanced forms of engagement they would ultimately arrive at a purer kind of belonging.

Of course, nothing remains new, and once the arbiters of cool have spoken, the rare is less so; and soon the formerly exalted must also be derided. After each repetition of the cycle you are left with even less to hold onto, and even derision runs up against the law of diminishing returns.

So, is hip…over?

What a question. Of course the hip will always be with us. While the hipsters of our most recent yesterdays may abandon the militant pose, I suspect they cannot make a clean break. Their sensibility is too ingrained. (Besides: They’re addicts.) What’s more, every day brings new creation. As the splintering of culture accelerates, our long struggle to arrive at some kind of accommodation with modernity can only mutate into ever more arcane forms. (If you fear tomorrow, just think of the cartoons.) Hip can never be over.

And the carping? That’s surely not going away.

Being real is fine. We just wish people wouldn’t talk about it.