So maybe the slackers had it right after all

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/02/09/so_maybe_the_slackers_had_it_right_after_all/

by robg • 17 years ago

26 23 17 years ago

boston.com

swombat2• 17 years ago

We brought you the Internet

I stopped reading there. "You" did what? Is the author suggesting that "slackers" brought us the internet? It seems to me that a vast army of workaholic scientists and hackers of all types "brought us the internet", not a bunch of wannabe artists working part-time jobs at Starbucks.

Perhaps I'm missing the point of this article, but it seems overly loose and unjustified, and filled with fallacies. Freelancers aren't slackers, they work harder than people in regular jobs, in most cases. Hackers aren't slackers - they have many characteristics of slackers, perhaps, but if you get down to it, most of us are obsessive, driven workaholics - for the right work.

robg• 17 years ago

It's an op-ed by a writer - creative license and all that. Keep reading. It's a bit better. Made me think about how the safe path isn't all that safe.

nostrademons• 17 years ago

Yeah, it seemed to me like an ironic jab at all those people that followed the "get ahead" mantra, did what they were "supposed" to do, and then found they lost everything when they got laid off, their 401k crashed, and their mortgage was foreclosed upon.

Interestingly, I've heard these sort of cataclysmic shifts in the environment are why procrastination and lazyness evolved. In the ancestral human environment, a "black swan" event wasn't just losing your job, it was having your whole tribe killed by marauding invaders, or losing your food supply to a bunch of hungry monkeys, or having a brushfire sweep through your camp and destroy everything. And they happened much more frequently than they do today. So it makes sense to eat the food now rather than stockpile it, fuck lots of women instead of raise the offspring, and not bother with building shelter because it'll just be destroyed. People who did otherwise often found their hard work negated by events outside of their control, and so they evolved impulses to not bother.

lionhearted• 17 years ago

"No respect for work and real estate or the value of a good pair of cufflinks... But now, in the cold glare of a recession, everything looks different: We've got no house to lose, no career to dash, no school-aged children in need of pricey Wii gaming systems."

Author makes some big leaps. He doesn't think that having high work ethic is a virtue regardless of what work he's doing... and he follows through with the logical non-materialism... and then, he's lucky he doesn't have kids, because you have to buy toys for your kids?

I think he was trying to drive home that he's a nonconformist, and nonconformity is looking a lot better right now than it did two years ago. Very true - but you don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

RobGR2• 17 years ago

Having a good work ethic when you are doing useless stuff like making triplicate copies of your TPS reports is bad.

Americans work more hours each week than other industrialized nations, but we have one of the lowest per-hour productivities. We need to change the productivity, at least.

RobGR2• 17 years ago

I think you are missing some nuances of what it means to be a Slacker. It's not just about work or non-work. It's also about a kind of passive, almost anti-social way of assigning a low value to things that most of society considers important.

I get the point about slackers bringing the internet. The internet may have been invented for "workaholic scientists" to scam more grant money out of DARPA, but it is what it is today due to the persistent, unstoppable, abuse of employer's computers and resources for non-work related activity.

It takes a slacker to show up to work early on Monday morning to use the faster internet connection to browse ebay.

If so much internet usage wasn't on employer's computers, there would less incentive to use javascript and AJAX, because it would be easier to get people to just install desktop applications.

jff2• 17 years ago

The Internet != the WWW

chris11• 17 years ago

Even if you define a slacker as someone with counter-cultural values, most of her examples were very poorly chosen.

Teach for America is a horrible example. The organization is good, and I'm not questioning the dedication of the teachers for giving up two years of their life for TFA. But the volunteers are not giving up a chance at a lucrative career in the private sector. In fact, TFA may be viewed as a strong positive to many companies.

Top business, medical, and law schools will give volunteers two year deferrals. HBS has TFA as 2+2 partner(2+2 is a program where Harvard will give admitted college seniors 2 years experience, then a MBA in 2 years. Stanford will give out two-year deferrals for law,medical, and business schools. Caltech will give out deferrals for some programs. UCBerkeley will give out deferrals for engineering. Also, many school have scholarships set up for alumni. Those schools are basically endorsing TFA

One of Wendy Kopp's goals is to move TFA alumni into leadership positions. Amgen and bulge bracket investment banks are working with TFA to recruit students. J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs have both found themselves competing with TFA for college graduates, so they decided they needed to partner with TFA. Google treats TFA like a core recruiting school, whatever that means.

So while volunteers are making big sacrifices to work for TFA, it might help them get other benefits like a high paying job, or entrance into a great grad school.

List of partnerships. Schools:http://www.teachforamerica.org/alumni/grad_school_partnershi... Employers: http://www.teachforamerica.org/alumni/employer_partnerships....

jff2• 17 years ago

The gist of this article seems to be "Having gained nothing, we have nothing to lose."

streety2• 17 years ago

'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

I wonder what he thinks of Tennyson.

inglorian• 17 years ago

I think it's a bit of a stretch to say that you "love" your big house, expensive car, and extravagant purchases in the way Tennyson meant "love" in that quote

Xichekolas• 17 years ago

It started out promising anyway. I was expecting a great piece on how living within your means and not trying to have everything all at once right out of college... but then he basically turned it into what you say: "neener neener neener I don't have a house to lose because I still live with my pizza delivery buddies!"

There is nothing wrong with prudent management of your money and the accumulation of wealth... the advantage that people that live within their means have right now is that they don't have cash-flow issues. Their lives don't depend on predictable steady cash-flow to the same extent as that prototypical American with the $22k in credit card debt.

The fact that most slackers tend to live within their means does not imply that most people that live within their means are slackers.

jimbokun• 17 years ago

It would have been nice to see some facts or figures verifying that his anecdotal views accurately reflect some significant part of the "Gen X" population.

nihilocrat• 17 years ago

But then it would stop being a superficial generation-piece, you see.

electromagnetic3• 17 years ago

He makes one good point, and that's that they lived lives they could afford. When you waste money on frivolous things like replacing a car because it's 'old', even though not a single warranty has run out on the vehicle, is going to place you in a very bad position. I'm sure lots of people have lost cars because they missed a few payments and then all of the money they had put into it is gone too.

Personally, I aim to never 'finance' something, aside from the house I buy. I aim to never have credit card debt, that my cards are completely clean before the end of the month.

Another thing, I want to live a life where I can afford 100% of my life, that I don't have to rely on my wife to work so that on the chance one of us loses our job we don't have 50% of our expenses to cut, we only have 10-20%.

chadmalik• 17 years ago

Yeah this is a great point and its a lesson the entire US economy has completely forgotten. The last decade - really the entire period after 1980 - is one big credit orgy. We really really really need to learn how to live within our means again and stop our debt-fueled overconsumption binge.

The last few years have been particularly disgusting. People competed to get ever-bigger and fancier houses, cars, and various toys that they really did not need.

Its time to start spending only what we earn as a nation, and individually.

electromagnetic3• 17 years ago

Right now I'm desperate to buy a couple of games. One is Fable 2 because I loved Fable, but I'm not spending $60 on a game, I'm just waiting for the drop to $20 that inevitably happens. The other game is Fallout 3, I've been a huge fan of the series and I want to look at the 3rd, again I'm waiting for the drop to $20 however this doesn't look like it's going to happen anytime soon as they jacked up the price here in Canada from $60 to $70!

I worked as a game reviewer for a number of years, and this is perhaps why I can value a video game much better than most other people. I reviewed many a game that I wouldn't ever justify spending $5 on.

I mean it's like the extended warranty they try to sell you on games. Whenever I buy a DS game, they always ask me for extended warranty (It's their job, so I don't snap at them) but the SD cartridge a DS game uses is virtually indestructible through normal accidents. I've had one go through a washing machine with suds and everything in and I took it out, peeled the remnants of the label off and continued playing the game. I stepped on one on a concrete floor in boots (it fell out of my pocket when I grabbed my iPod, tangled up in the headphones or something) and no one would be the wiser. Yet they ask me if I want to spend $3 to insure something that'll survive me: if I fall off a skyscraper, if I fall in the ocean and drown, get hit by a car and numerous other things.

wallflower• 17 years ago

"The bubble has burst. We can no longer rely on consumption by refinancing our homes or inexpensive money to fuel economic growth, and that’s certainly had a huge impact..

In 1929, for example, just before the stock market crash, the private debt-to-GDP ratio was 160 percent. Last year, private sector debt as a percentage of the GDP: 300 percent; far more leverage. And you can see it’s been a steady increase basically since almost the end of World War II.

In my view, what we now have will be a fundamental economic reset. The economy is going to have to re-establish itself at a level of spending that reflects the real value of underlying assets before we can all start growing again at a healthy rate.

This may not be the thing that people really want to hear, but it’s certainly what we’re planning on, and it’s the truth on which we’re basing sort of our model, if you will, at Microsoft.

In our opinion, in order to reach the reset point, three things need to happen. First, the economy must be deleveraged. Private debt as a percentage of GDP has to be reduced. Restoring health to the nation’s financial system is a fundamental part of this."

Steve Ballmer, February 2009 Speech to Democratic Policy Confab

So maybe the slackers had it right after all

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