Above: interior of The Beehive on Pittsburgh's South Side, an expression of Gen X and Slacker culture in the 1990s. Below: art on the walls of the South Side cafe, and interior of the Oakland Beehive.
The plight of "Generation Z," young Americans born between 1997 and 2012 (and so as of 2026, from ages 14 to 29, though by some measures Gen Alpha began in 2010) has engendered some alarmed and alarming coverage. Being an old person, when I read these articles I can't help thinking about the various plights of earlier generations, such as my own, the one before and the one after, which came to be called Generation X. I am reminded that I wrote about those earlier three, around the time that the movie Slacker was defining the youth of Gen X in the popular mind in the early 1990s. I'm posting that piece now, for contemporary readers to draw their own conclusions about contrasts and similarities.
Every generation is different, of course, especially in this era when things very large and small change so quickly. One of the more disturbing analyses of Gen Z's difficulties that I've read was a New York Times opinion piece by Jessica Groce. In addition to a scary job market, especially at entry level, there is the pernicious effect of technology that poisons both the work and the experience of applying for that work. Computer monitoring and AI are being used as tools of oppression, creating workplaces that in their own way are akin to the sweatshops of yore (though these exist elsewhere in the world, combining classic as well as new technological oppression.)
Within today's "grim" job market, Grose writes, "the entire process of getting and keeping an entry-level job has become a grueling and dehumanizing ordeal." She describes a process in which the "first levels" of job application scrutiny is often done now by AI, including interviews on line. (The Guardian goes into more detail about today's Orwellian hiring process.)
Jobs themselves are often micromanaged and otherwise abusive, as well as poorly paid and with negligible benefits. Electronic surveillance has become the slave-driving boss, as has the speed with which computers perform tasks--instead of being "time-saving" they function as employer expectation-raising for the amount of work and the speed with which it is done: a more intense workplace. One result: An annual study of nearly half a million American workers finds that workers under 25 are as unhappy as the unemployed. When job satisfaction rose for other age groups, it fell for the young.
However, Grose begins and ends by referring to prejudices of older generations. "The older generation always discounts the workplace complaints of the younger generation," she begins. "Gen Z-ers don't even deserve this perfunctory slander...Whatever is going to happen for Gen Z-ers as we all live through the A.I. revolution, I hope that their elders approach them with more compassion than disdain."
I certainly hope so as well, though that would be easier if these generation stories didn't so often end up blaming the boomers for, among other things, having the temerity to remain alive. The New York Times in particular keeps harping on the boomers responsibility for what ails everybody else, as if all members of this giant generation are as responsible--or have as much in common-- as say billionaires. If any other group were singled out like this, it would be considered some kind of awful 'ism.' (For more thoughts--and photos--on this, I refer to my post about one such presentation.)
Perhaps subsequent generations have (or are having) a tougher time. Apparently they think so, because the prevailing image of boomers is how easy everything was for us. That sort of revisionism is hard to swallow. I was reminded of this when I stumbled across an old book, an early look at my generation, which I write about here. But my memories are clear enough, even if the emotional edge is a bit worn.
We, too experienced the egotistical brutality of the workplace, and those new to it are apt to get the brunt of it, and feel it more acutely. In fact I'll never forget the dazed look of a beautiful young woman I knew in college who'd just experienced her first forays into the working world, in the early 1970s. When faced with a smug employer who demanded to know why he should hire her, she said that the first response that came into her head was: "Because I'm smarter than you."
I'm not making comparisons of severity. By reviewing past perils and contexts, my intent is not to dismiss or downplay the plight and soul-destroying experiences of today's young, but to offer this as an expression of empathy. And maybe a little hope based on the ultimate survival of others, however misshapen.
At the time, Gen X was being defined in the movies (Slacker, The Breakfast Club, and John Hughes films in general) and television (Beverly Hills 90210 and especially as the MTV generation) and a growing number of books and articles.
I was living at the Greenfield edge of the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh then, after working for an editorial firm and a different alternative weekly, both on the South Side. It was there that a prominent expression of Generation X outsider culture began in a funky cafe called the Beehive in 1991. It was one of the first cafes in the city (and so earned a place in another piece I wrote later on Cafe Culture in Pittsburgh.)
These were the days that outside bands--some about to be famous--played the Decade and Graffitti, the Artery and Metropol, as did local bands like Rusted Root, the Spuds, the Clarks and Affordable Floors (though the venues are gone, all of these bands are still playing), with holdovers from the 80s like the Iron City Houserockers. Pittsburgh was a happening place for Generation X, coexisting with the earlier musical cultures of jazz and folk.
Slacker culture as a category was seen as the rebel or outcast culture of Gen X, though (as earlier outcast cultures) harbingers and awkward articulators of what many others in that generation were facing. As such they suggest those broader aspects. If there is any more specific relationship to a rebel faction within Gen Z, that's for others to discern.
In this piece I refer to "the speed of life," and I wrote about that more specifically around this time. This was one of the last "trend" pieces I attempted. The culture was moving on and in some ways leaving me behind. But I could then--as I can even more now--offer some historical perspective. So here it is:
1993: Slackers Culture in the Land of the Frazzled and the Home of the Frayed
Suddenly culture mavens are focusing on the twentysomething generation. Cover stories have recently appeared in Time, the Atlantic Monthly, Business Week, and New Republic, while demographics-hungry television producers unveiled a new wave of sitcoms designed to catch this prime market's primetime channel-surfers. While most of the attraction seems to be to the twentysomethings' viability as workers and consumers, some attention is being paid to their rebel subset known as slackers, a name popularized by Richard Zinklater's movie called "Slacker," about the post-college young who hang out on the university's scruffy fringes in Austin.
In the book version, James L. Haley calls this movie a non-fiction look at a "netherworld of space cadets, goonballs, punk groupies, gently aging iconoclasts, coffee-shop feminists-going around the bend, conspiracy dweebs lurking in used bookstores, artists and anti-artists, and a whole purgatory of other refugees from the world of productive sanity."
While the film is specific to Austin, there's some Pittsburgh resonance here.
It's dangerous to define any generation or subculture too closely: people are more complicated that these categories. The sixties generation, for example, has supposedly gone from Yippie to Yuppie, from war-protesting, acid-dropping, guitar-playing, civil rights activist flower children, to cynical status seekers and hypocritical entrepreneurs. In fact, in that generation as in most, the rebels against the established culture were a firm minority (even if they define a generation in history and fashion.) Not all of those became 80s entrepreneurs or stolid suburbanities.
The difference was that the Boomer generation was so huge, so even a small percentage added up to influential numbers. Still, it was a relative few that suffered the slings and arrows of an outraged culture as well as the sneers of their more conventional, career-bound contemporaries.
Similarly, in the late 1960s much was made of the differences between hard-edged political dissenters and soft hedonistic 'hippies'. The lives of most young outsiders contained a mix of both, plus more conventional and traditional pursuits. This is probably just as true now; all the names and categories are mostly and at best a conversational convenience.
These contradictions can describe different people, or elements of the very same people. Some may resent the heavy cultural and economic presence of the Boomers (as the magazines say), and still listen devotedly to sixties music.
So slackers may tend towards dour Depression era overalls and Satanic jewelry, and they may also be (in the words of Douglas Copeland, author of the prime twentysomething novel, Generation X: Tales From An Accelerated Culture) "...dreamers on the edge...characters out of key, in and out of love, drifting, slightly twisted, still willing to listen--childlike and full of wonder with their world..."
What seems undisputed is that slackers, however defined or self-defined, are the outsiders of their generation. As such, they're linked with outsiders of the past-- a recurrent if not perennial phenomenon, at least among the middle class. There always seem to be those who need a few more years of low-impact living and unfocused searching than college provided. They may play at graduate school or work unpressured jobs, live loose in cheap and communal settings, and float from one activity to another, but (as in the movie) they are always willing to indiscriminately discuss with anyone whatever subject pops up at any moment, the more momentous the better.
The impulse to slack off is especially tempting (and often involuntary) in today's depressed economy, when jobs are scarce, as well as low paying and demeaning. But what the main culture sees most of all is that slackers don't get real jobs, pursue careers, join the rat race. As Copeland writes, "People gripe that it's some horrible crime against society not to work in a creepy job that has no loyalty to you, and is killing you anyway."
So in some ways, slackers are hippies without the ideology, beatniks without the bongos. They may even have some of the flavor of the mid 60's pre-hippies who called themselves Seekers, who informed their intellectual and spiritual quests with the physical explorations of sex and drugs. Though they have some of the wanderlust of the Kerouac cult, they also seem more likely to stay put, to revert to campus, where they have made their first and only homes away from their parents.
Slackers seem less cynical as well as less energetic than their high-sheen, high achiever, go-getter contemporaries. Their low affect irony also separates them from the more ebullient and angry outsiders of the 60s, though it links them to the rebel style of the 1950s--the last time the idea of "cool" was so prominent.
Twentysomethings have more often grown up with divorced, overworked and overextended parents, and now face a constricted economy and a shaky society. Surrounded by the appearance of freedom, they soon learn that the rules of the game are few but exact. Those who screw up may suffer outlandish consequences; those who make an invisible mistake may never be forgiven. Even those who hew to the line can find themselves out in the cold.
Like their cultural ancestors, today's slackers who live on society's edge may find themselves among the truly desperate, the seriously confused, the irresistibly doomed, and the seductively evil. Anyone who leaves the beaten path can get lost, and life can get seriously consequential.
On the other hand, some within it as well as outside it say the slacker culture is mostly a tedious avoidance, a pretense, an excuse. That has been said from within as well as outside other bohemian scenes as well.
Though few slackers will be assaulted in the streets or beaten in bars for having long hair, and none face the long arm of the law drawing them to the killing fields of Asia, it is still risky to stand out as a rebel, even a relatively quiet one. In a time of relative scarcity, society's poobahs can use any excuse to lock you out.
So why do they rebel? What are they rebelling against? The latter is the same question a cynical waitress asked the biker in black leather played by Marlon Brando in "The Wild Ones," prompting his famous answer: " Whataya got?"
They were born in the late 1960s or early 1970s. As children they unknowingly saw the hopes of the 60s coopted and marketed as fashion merchandise, and perverted into self-indulgence; the light flipped on its back, showing only the dark side. As adolescents they became aware of the world in the decade of apocalyptic cynicism and self-righteous greed: the 1980s.
Everything in the 80s was exaggerated, because only extremes sell. Image was everything: every necktie must be a Power Tie, every paid thug in Central America must be a Freedom Fighter battling The Evil Empire. Language was inflated: every crisis had a Day One; nothing was sad or unfortunate, it was always Tragic. As images are inflated they are simplified, sensationalized. Everything is advertising, and everyone knows it. You are even expected to "sell yourself."
Any sense of values or morality is irrelevant except as a marketing tool, because the only question anyone asks is will it sell? In one of the most trenchant and terrifying few pages written in the 80s, an essay published as the introduction of his play Aunt Dan and Lemon, Wallace Shawn wrote: "So when a precipitous slide really does take place, a particular effort is required in order to see it. Sophistries, false chains of reasoning, deception, and self-deception all rush in to conceal the fact that any change has occurred at all. If we live from day to day without self-examination, we remain unaware of the dangers we may pose to ourselves and the world."
Compare this to a passage from Generation X, in which Copeland's narrator is trashing a Yuppieish friend named Tobias: "I realize I see in him something that I might have become, something that all of us can become in the absence of vigilance. Something bland and smug that trades on its mask, filled with such rage and such contempt for humanity, such need, that the only food left for such creatures is their own flesh."
One legacy of the 80s' excesses is the increasing tyranny of time. Technology, greed and economic contractions resulting in 'downsizing'all mean people are racing faster with less rest or respite. They speed from poorly paying jobs at understaffed workplaces to the necessary second job, to childcare or commuter deal-making on the cellular phone. Even the middle class is now engaged in an around-the-clock struggle for survival.
The 1980s can be summed up in a bumper sticker: "The rat race is over. The rats won." In the 90s, it's not a rat race the rest of us are involved in anymore. We're hamsters in a cage, engaged in spinning somebody else's wheel--all the while worrying that the cage will tip over, or that we'll be replaced by a cuter, more energetic pet. Few have enough money or stability to feel safe. The middle class equity cushion is gone, replaced by debts that won't go away. Jobs disappear helplessly.
So who can afford standing up for their rights against bosses who bully them into working uncompensated overtime, or under illegally unsafe conditions? Who can afford to be gossiped about, to fall out of favor, to blow one deal, offend one crazy customer, let one unguarded word slip out? The stakes are too high.
Artists may be the antennae of the race (as poet Ezra Pound maintained) but the young are its raw nerve endings. Some are feeling this widespread vulnerability and its fundamental insanity more acutely. It's clearest for people on the economic edge--and these days, that's quite a few. An illness, an accident, a mistake can send you spinning through a merciless legal system, or bounce you off a merciless medical system, or drop you down fast into the endless pit of a pitiless economic system.
In this context, the slacker culture may be the only sane one going: Keep down costs, maximize mobility and flexibility, value time and control over your time, stay involved in your community as well as the hamster cage of money.
But the basic thrust of the slacker culture, the one that gives it its name as well as its special place in outsider history, is the attitude towards time. It's expressed by an interesting range of twentysomethings.
"Experience, living, being, cannot be measured by time," writes Jonathan Barnes, a Pittsburgh writer in his mid-twenties. "[But] those of us who experience life in any other way than Clock Time are perceived to be nuts."
"I was finally really getting involved in what I was doing," a graduate student in the high pressure Carnegie Mellon Drama department told me, "but you can't really do that. You're always supposed to be anticipating what's next, BAM BAM BAM, get it all done. You never experience what's in front of you." She's since dropped out.
"I thought the city would be exciting, but it's not," said a Pittsburgh woman in her early 20s who was raised on a farm, and came to the city to be a writer. " It's just empty and fast. I wanted intellectual excitement, but nobody has time to talk about anything but careers and survival." She's since moved back to her family's farm, and has begun writing again.
"I just wanted to drop a few hours a week," says another young woman who worked in a psychology lab. "I wanted to read, walk my dog, just break the stress and monotony. Actually, my therapist advised it. I was willing to take a pay cut. I was even willing to take work home with me, as long as I didn't have to be there at the same time every day. Instead of working forty hours, I asked to work thirty-five. My boss looked at me like I was crazy."
When the adult world simply doesn't make sense, it may be clearer to those who are just entering it. Perhaps they intuit what those more experienced can barely admit to ourselves, that the speed of our lives is out of control. America looks increasingly like the land of the frazzled and the home of the frayed. In what Joni Mitchell memorably calls this "land of snap decisions, land of short attention spans", we are overworked, overbooked, overstimulated and overloaded.
Future shock has become the daily numb-out. Our memories are overrun, and our battle to just keep up obliterates our appreciation of the present and our vision of the future, so that today we are literally destroying the forests for the trees.
It not only makes us crazy and sick, it leaves us with
split focus, divided selves and cognitive dissonance that have become the norm.
Leisure is disappearing, and so is civility, tolerance, deliberation, craftsmanship and reflection. We're outrunning our own senses--of sight, smell, taste and hearing as well as of perspective, decency, hope and humor.
Our lives are increasingly driven by fax machines in the bathroom and telephones in the air, none of which save time so much as insist that we work and remain accessible everywhere and every second. We are the servants of our technology.
Apparently we would like to become the machines we behold, since like them our conversations now are "interface" and our leisure is "downtime."
But we are not made of silicon and plastic. We are made of flesh and blood. We are not tireless machines, powered by electric current. Time is part of our nourishment. We do not operate at the speed of light. We live at the speed of life.
According to the dictionary, "slacker" is a term describing someone who shirks work, hangs back, stays slow. "Slack" means not lively or moving. But it also means a lack of tension, a looseness, as in the loose condition of a rope or a sail. That's the sense of it when we say "cut me some slack."
This is precisely what our tense, speed-obsessed society does not do. Ruthless competition borne out of fear on top of ambition, and a standard of belief and behavior perhaps permanently revved by technology, are combining to create a new social Darwinism that eliminates those unwilling or unable to keep up with the new machines.
It's a race flesh and blood cannot run for long, let alone win. If we don't cut ourselves some slack soon and slow down the speed of life, those slackers will seem less like a low-end category of the youth market and more like instinctive and prophetic survivalists.
