Re the OP: Actually, it's not much of a surprise to me. It's really a rollback to the norm of history, before super-intensive urbanization. When my father, and his father, and his father before him, pioneers on the land, put on their pants in the morning, they put on their "EDC" -- pocket knife, matches, pliers, and a short length of twine. These were the tools they used constantly in the business of making a living off the land.

Despite all the eye-rolling pretense of hipster look-at-me-ism, there's a basic undercurrent that rings true for me: young people looking at a fragmented economy and an uncertain world are uneasy at their utter dependence on systems they have no control over. A lot of them, with beards or without, are trying to assert some small, tangible, hands-on control over the basics of staying alive. Even if it is substantially symbolic, in the broad picture, this is a good, healthy thing IMHO. Fearful, helpless people are much more at risk of doing fearful, desperate things. This is, to some degree, the antidote.