February 24, 2009
The bums haven’t lost.
Articles that justify my lifestyle will always have a place here on clusterflock:
“Slacker,” like most labels, has always been a crude and misleading shorthand. We were a bit aimless, us urban, liberal-arts types. We were a little too enamored of irony, perhaps. A little too frivolous.
But there was something to be said for a life in the moment; for a dalliance in California, for concerts and failed screenplays, for a little fun before the fall. And the truth is, we were always more purposeful – more responsible – than our fathers and uncles and grandmothers realized.
Those of us who took low-wage jobs were not just marking time. Not all of us, anyway. We were doing work we cared about, as journalists and teachers and social workers.
All that job-hopping and freelancing? We were dilettantes, on some level, it’s true. But we also understood, before most, that something had shifted – that we were moving to an economy of telecommuters and independent contractors and less-than-loyal employers.
And while the best minds on Wall Street cooked up the real estate mess that destroyed a global economy, we were sensible enough to steer clear of that overpriced condo and move into a dingy, three-bedroom rental with a few of our meathead friends.
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Maybe I should’ve taken a liberal arts program. I love the material I studied, but it’s all so practical and applicable. Maybe I’ll go back some day.
Oh man, do I like this.
Some grandmothers do understand and also have followed a path of our own, choosing to keep in perspective just what really contributes to a successful life.
Barbara, yes! The life of the mind was not invented by the current generation. But it has always gone against the grain (in the US, anyway).
Daryl and I were once rehashing an old argument–that of my tendency to go headlong into the unknown in pursuit of the serendipitous, while he has had enough of uncertainty and tends toward preparedness and planning. This makes for friction at times, since I’d love to drop everything and move to Mexico for a few years, while he turns pale and worries that I’ll really do it. So, on this day when we were hashing it out for the hundredth time, I turned to him as I was getting out of the car and said something to the effect of “I wonder how many people lie on their death beds and think, man, I’m glad I played it safe.” And he just sat in the car for a long, long time.
It hasn’t changed anything, of course. But it made for a dramatic moment.
This puts me in mind (in an oblique way) of something I’ve long noticed about people (ever-dwindling in number) who lived through the Great Depression of 1929 to [pick your end-date]. There is a spectrum, of course, but to some degree I’ve noted that these people chose one of two responses: either to resolve, like Scarlett O’Hara, never to be poor again, and to cling to the making or the saving of money (or both) as to a lifeline — or to take the view that you could lose it all in a twinkling, so carpe diem.
Yep. Similarly, the post-atomic response, which was either to go all hipster existentialist and live for the moment, or prepare for survival in the event of nuclear attack.
I’m with hipsters, y’all.
I just know that when my money and my capacity to earn have just about sputtered out, I will be hobbling on my lame grasshopper legs to Cooper, begging for a corner in his semi-detached utility room/laundry shed where I can lay me doon and die.
Harold and Maude.