There are no hipsters in insurance.

I’m sitting in the Borders on East Camelback Road in Scottsdale, AZ at about 4:30pm in the afternoon. Calin and I are killing time here until our flight out of Phoenix International Airport at about 11:00pm tonight. Arizona is such an interesting place: the climate, the infrastructure -- I've definitely got to check out more of the Southwest. This morning’s (roughly) five-hour workshop concluded a two-day “beginners school” for “young insurance professionals”; take young to mean age or experience, though the majority of the folks in this class were certainly in their early-to-mid-to-late twenties. About seventy five people attended, which honestly surprised me. In particular because a lot of the kids seemed stamped from a similar cloth -- a cloth I remember thinking I wouldn’t be a part of after I had left college. Not that I’m all that removed, nor am I a “hipster”, really. I got the impression, for example, that if I had broken out my laptop and started playing some, oh, I dunno, New Order or maybe Mount Eerie or The Go! Team, I’m not sure I would have struck a chord of familiarity with anyone. Overall, I’d say the event was a nice supplement to some of the work I’ve been doing so far. I had already gone over a lot of the subject matter while I was studying for the exam that got me a fancy schmancy insurance license, but it was nice to think of everything in terms of the bigger picture. It seemed, however, that some of the people attending the conference were mostly thinking of insurance as a lucrative venture as opposed to really considering the significance of exchanging peace of mind for a monetary supplement. A presenter joked that insurance was basically “peace of mind subject to certain terms and conditions”. I’m thinking a lot about the other side of the biz that I don’t know much of anything about: what the underwriters and claims folks are doing on the company side, but also about how insurance agents are relating to their clients. It really is pretty interesting when you think of all the real-life cases, it’s just so muddled by and buried under legal jargon that even my eyes glaze over when I hear the word “insurance”.