By David Barnett
Back in 1991, Richard Linklater’s movie Slacker was
released. It was a laconic, meandering, plotless film which couldn’t
even be bothered to name its characters properly… in the credits they
were called things like “Hit and Run Son” or “Walking to Coffee Shop”. Slacker took
place over a single day in Austin, Texas, and the camera lazily passed
in and out of the lives of twentysomethings dangling from loose ends in
their lives. Witness this exchange:
Dairy Queen Photographer: “So, what? Do you fancy yourself as some sort of artist or what?”
Anti-Artist: “No, I'm an anti-artist”.
Dairy Queen Photographer: “Oooooh, one of those neo-poseur
types that hangs out in coffee shops, and... Doesn't do much of
anything. Yeah”.
Yeah. Last month I wrote about generation X, people like me
born between the baby boomers and the millennials. I suggested that
while those two age demographics were slugging it out about who had
things worse, it was generation X who were now, in their forties and
fifties, in a position to rise up and save the day. The piece got a lot
of traction and is still being shared about. Some saw it as a manifesto,
and I really do hope it ignites people into action. Just as many
readers were outraged, blamed generation X for the lack of opportunities
available to the millennials (those born, roughly around 1982 or later)
and more than one person commented along the lines of “what have
generation X ever done for us? They were just a bunch of slackers”.
For a long time, the terms generation X and slacker went
hand in hand. As crystallised by Linklater’s movie, we were the young
people who came of age in the late Eighties and Nineties who were
aimless, feckless, drifting. The neo-poseur types who hung out in coffee
shops and didn’t do much of anything. Yeah? No. Why did they call us
slackers? Because we didn’t want what our parents wanted. We didn’t want
the jobs-for-life, we didn’t want to work half a century in the same
place with only a carriage clock and a “Don’t let the door hit your arse
on the way out” at the end of it. We didn’t want to “settle down” by
the time we were 20, and wear the same style of clothes our parents did.
The Independent
