“I ♥ Huckabees” is the hippest movie out there, and a matinee screening in the East Village last week was teeming with diligent connoisseurs of culture. The film was frisky and disjointed, depicting a world of skinny ties, “existential detectives,” and characters who walk around saying things like “You can’t deal with my infinite nature, can you?”

As soon as the closing credits started to scroll down the screen, an upset-looking young woman raced out. When asked what her impressions were, she thought about it for a moment. “I guess it was cool,” she said unsurely. “Not that I understood any of it.”

She deserves credit for trying. In this day and age, no lazy shut-in or flaneur stands a chance. Being cool has become an exhausting vocation that demands constant upkeep, like a pet with a tiny bladder.

Seems like a generation ago, if you wanted to be hip, all you needed was a shaggy haircut and a hand-rolled cigarette. You could be a go-getter. You could be a slug. It really didn’t matter so long as you could say “right on” with the best of them.

It’s a different picture now, with aspiring scenesters left with no choice but to pack their precious free time with gallery openings and readings and secret concerts and drinks at new bars that don’t even have signs out front.

Adding to the confusion: With everything from Brown University to Neiman Marcus being touted as “hip,” it’s harder to tell what’s actually worth checking out.

Hip isn’t something easy to define. You just wait for it to hit you, and hope to know it when it hits. It’s like beauty, only far more slippery. Beauty can have lasting power, at least outside the precincts of reality television. Hip is more slithery. Once something is called hip – or worse, once it’s called hip by many people – its hipness slinks off and the search starts all over again.

In his meticulously researched, and very entertaining, new book, “Hip: the history,” a New York Times reporter, John Leland, takes an academic approach to the subject, following the birth and evolution of hip from the 17th century to the modern day, drawing on anthropology, literary criticism, and economics. Here we have it again: Hip is a nerdy pursuit.

Mr. Leland traces the word “hip” back to the African Wolof verb “hipi” (to see) or “hepi” (to open one’s eyes). The book contains no fewer than 30 pages of notes, a 16-page index, and a chapter devoted to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville, all of whom the author calls the “O.G.’s” (original gangstas) of hip.

“I didn’t want to fall back on hipster tautology that something is hip because it’s hip,” Mr. Leland said in a telephone interview from his apartment in the East Village. “I wanted to scrutinize everything very carefully.”

The book’s verdict is that hipness is not an obnoxious ideal we’re all chasing after, but rather a picnic basket packed with enlightenment, progressiveness, and fresh ideas. He posits hip as “an undercurrent of enlightenment, organized around contradictions and anxieties,” and he declares: “Hip is not simply the sum of What’s Hot Now.”

His book focuses more on the icons who actually were hip, like Dashiell Hammett, Charlie Parker, and Patti Smith, than on the hopeless followers trailing behind them with tongues hanging out.

Thing is, Mr. Leland’s book is chiefly about all the marvelous things that happened in America between the antebellum era and the dot-com revolution, and it glosses over today’s hip generation, which has yet to produce any icons who stay around longer than a couple of magazine covers.

“Few things are as unhip as what was hip five minutes ago,” Mr. Leland writes, explaining why he chooses to skirt the question of what defines hip Right Now.

The hipsters you’ll see today riding the L train wear vintage clothes, cheekily dance to classic rock groups like Foreigner and Air Supply, and chat about their favorite action figures from the 1980s.They share a sense of retro irony, but underneath it is more than a thread of seriousness. Absent much evidence that they believe in anything as a collective, it can be said that what they share is a case of cultural tapeworm, loading up on more readings and screenings and concerts than can possibly be conducive to getting anything else done.

“Everyone’s tossing out stale references,” the editor of the hipster ‘zine RBS (short for Rubber Band Variety Gazette), Christian Lorentzen, said. “You make sure you’re everywhere so you don’t miss a single reference.”

For the past two years, a fellow named Brian – he won’t give out his last name for fear of being recognized by his bosses at the news network where he works by day – has been running the Web sitewww.hipstersareannoying.com. When he moved from Denver to Williamsburg two years ago, he had dreams of settling down in Bohemian indie-rock utopia. Instead he found himself surrounded by people whose “personalities didn’t have much distinction,” and who were fiercely competitive with each other about checking out the hot new thing – before, of course, too many other people had checked it out. “Everything was so tightly regimented,” Brian said.

That officially designated 2004 vintage of hip will, soon enough, be little more than an embarrassing blip from the past, yet a treasure or two will have survived the passage of time.

Which hip contemporary rock acts have the most staying power? So far there are no obvious candidates. Today’s most successful bands, like the White Stripes and the Strokes, are derivative of a bygone era and will probably fade as soon as they’re stashed on the shelf.

But that’s not to say it’s hopeless. It probably took some time for people who saw little Bob Dylan’s first concerts to realize what they had on their hands. Brian cautioned against writing off today’s entire community – even though he packed up and moved to the less obviously hip pastures of Washington Heights. “I imagine in the ’60s scene there were probably a lot of extremely annoying people that looked the same, too,” he said.

Indeed, it’s entirely possible that a few immortal geniuses will emerge from the fray of recycled ’80s lunchboxes and taffeta prom dresses. Here’s hoping everybody won’t be too busy to notice.