On slackers, quiet quitters, and selling out

From the start, Gen X was tagged with the slur that they were "slackers". But what that misses is the essential fear at the core of the Gen X psyche.

For Christmas in what must have been 1994, my younger sister gave me a copy of The Official Slacker Handbook by Sarah Dunn. It was an attempt to be for the nineties what the Preppy Handbook had been for the late eighties — a semi-serious look at a social type that was taken as representative of the era’s youth culture.

From its the opening sentence — “It is the inalienable right of every man, woman, and child to work as little as humanly possible” — the Handbook made clear that its agenda was to mine the deep vein of what the media had settled on as the defining characteristic of Gen Xers, namely, that they were slackers.

By the time it was published, the slacker jibe had been in the air for a while. It got its name thanks largely to Richard Linklater’s meandering 1990 film “Slacker”, which was about the Austin, Texas, subculture of the late eighties, but the ur-definition came from Douglas Coupland’s 1991 book Generation X. Coupland modelled the group he called the “X generation” on a Japanese phenomenon called the “shin jin rui” — the futureless twentysomething “new human beings” wasting their days away at dead-end McJobs or in corporate veal fattening pens waiting for the older generation to simply die.

But while the Japanese youth were visible members of society, in North America their counterparts were more tucked away. “There’s more space over here to hide in — to get lost in — to use as camouflage,” Coupland wrote. That slid naturally into the idea that this generation was made up of Linklater’s “slackers” or Beck’s “losers” — an aimless cohort of underemployed and undermotivated twentysomethings. You could make us work, but you can’t make us work much, or work hard. And you certainly can’t make us care.  

For its part, the Slacker Handbook was little more than a bathroom-reader exercise in expounding the slacker worldview, complete with profiles of slackers through history (Diogenes, Coleridge, Rip Van Winkle), a guide to slacking your way through school and life, and then lifestyle advice for how to dress and talk, what to read, and even how have sex, slacker-style. It was interesting enough to paw through, but the self-conscious opportunism of the project pretty much undermined any credibility it had as a manifesto. 

A much more sincere version of the argument came from Hal Niedzvieki, a Toronto writer who had made a name for himself as an indie-scenester guru largely thanks to his role as the founder of Broken Pencil, a magazine devoted to zine culture. In the late nineties, Niedzviecki wrote for a piece for This Magazine called “Stupid Jobs Are Good to Relax With”, and it is the closest thing to a pure cri-de-slackerdom you are going to find:

For several years now, I have relied on stupid jobs to pay my way through the world. This isn’t because I am a stupid person. On the contrary, stupid jobs are a way to avoid the brain numbing idiocy of full-time employment. They are the next best thing to having no job at all. They will keep you sane, and smart.

If this sounds at all familiar to the contemporary ear, it should. For the past few years, the business/culture press has been full of think-pieces and scene-sketches devoted to a series of connected trends: The Great Resignation, followed by quiet quitting, grumpy staying, and – most recently, the “lazy girl” trend. 

The Great Resignation (also known as The Big Quit) was a pandemic-induced phenomenon that saw workers leaving their jobs by the truckload. While the GR hit almost every industry to some extent, it was workers on the frontlines during the pandemic — education, service industries, and health care — who were most likely to quit. It’s not hard to see why this happened: for many people during the pandemic, work became both a threat (because of the possibility of getting sick) as well as a burden (especially if you had kids at home because schools or daycares were closed). But also, governments were shovelling money out the door, literally paying people to stay home. You don’t need to be an economist to see the incentives at work here. 

Equally predictable was the sequel. Once the government subsidies were turned off and employers started implementing return-to-office mandates, many people had no choice but to go back to work. But they weren’t happy about it, so they simply “quiet quit”. This involves doing the bare minimum at work, while mentally disengaging. No more pitching in, staying late, going to meetings you don’t have to attend, and so on. No more caring. While employers have fretted about how to combat quiet quitting, some workers have just upped the ante. Back in the spring of 2023, the hashtag #lazygirl went viral, promoting the idea that women should take jobs that pay well, but have lax deadlines, little oversight, and let you work from home. All the better to relax to. 

In one sense, this is just old slacker wine with fresh hashtags on the label. But what is interesting about the current group of quiet quitters, grumpy stayers, and #lazygirls, is how much the narrative is about employers not caring enough about their employees. Workers feel like they aren’t valued at work, or that their managers or don’t care enough about their needs. The contemporary dissatisfaction stems from the feeling that your boss has given up on you, and isn’t willing to give you the time and opportunity  to contribute. 

And by this measure, today’s Millennial and Gen Z slackers have almost nothing in common, ideologically, with Gen X. If we go back to Hal Niedzvieki’s “stupid jobs” platform, he makes what is, at best, a half-hearted effort at tying his argument to the state of the economy and the job market. He waves at the (very high) youth unemployment rate, and he takes a few jabs at the structure of an economy that sees older people give themselves the best jobs. But ultimately, he comes back to the idea that the problem isn’t that there are stupid jobs, it is that jobs are stupid: 

“If I’m right, [people] will learn that the stupid job - and by extension, all jobs - must be approached with willing stupidity. Look at it this way: You’re trading material wealth and luxury for freedom and creativity.”

Or as he says later, “the tenets of the stupid job revolution are universal - work is mainly pointless; if you can think of something better to do, you shouldn’t have to work.” 

Jobs, in a word, are for suckers. 

So the difference boils down to this: For today’s slackers, the main problem is their inability to properly buy into the system, or to be allowed to do so. For Gen X slackers, the problem was always and everywhere the system itself. This fear of selling out, or its converse, being co-opted, was the black existential terror at the core of the Gen X spirit, and its negatively motivating ambition became the prime directive of virtually all serious Gen X art, culture, and politics.

That it will be the topic of the next dispatch. For now, enjoy this trailer for Slacker:

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If there are any subjects you’d like to see tackled here, please let me know in the comments. The feedback I have been getting is really interesting and helpful, which has encouraged me to think that this could be a somewhat long-term project. As always, If you like this newsletter, please share it around. — ap