The Carefree Lives Of Slackers
Ah, those lazy days of summer. Back in June, it seemed they would never end. Well, CBS News correspondent Cynthia Bowers is sorry to point out that Labor Day's right around the corner. Time to get back to work, but not for everyone.
Jen Raynes and her sister, Kelli Williams, have loaded up their van, so they can drive the California coast and look for the tastiest waves.
"I haven't had a real job for 14 years," Raynes says.
Only after surfing do Raynes and Williams worry about earning a living, which they're trying to combine with, what else, surfing. Jen paints surfboards and surfers, and Kelli photographs them.
"Now some of the jobs I've had have caused more stress in my life than not having money," Williams says. "So I'd almost rather not have money and—and enjoy myself than to have money and not like where I am or what I'm doing."
"There are many days like that that I get up and I say, 'I'm gonna still surf for an hour and then I'll come back and work,'" Raynes says. "Uh-uh. It's like four o'clock and I'm finally comin' home and I think, 'You are a slacker.'"
Jen and Kelli actually come from a long and honorable — or dishonorable, depending on your point of view — tradition. Two hundred-fifty years ago, Samuel Johnson wrote, "Every man is, or hopes to be, an Idler."
Tom Lutz hasn't been idle. He's just written "Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America."
"Before the Industrial Revolution, it was very clear to everybody that work was to be avoided at all costs," Lutz says.
He got the idea when his son Cody graduated from high school and spent a fair amount of time on the couch. Cody did nothing but lie there watching TV, and it drove his dad nuts.
"I would come up from my study and I would end up — I'd show up in that doorway completely surprised to find him there, and that's when the anger would come up," Lutz says.
So several years ago Tom Lutz started looking into slacking, tracing it back hundreds of years. He found even Benjamin Franklin — the "Early to bed, early to rise" guy — could be a bit of a slacker.
"He was also a lifelong fan of the air bath," Lutz says of Franklin. "You take off all your clothes, you lie in your bed, you open your windows, and you just let the air waft over you — that's the air bath. He thought this was the royal road to health."
Lutz found a long literary slacking tradition. From Henry David Thoreau hanging around the pond, to Herman Melville, whose main character in "Bartleby the Scrivener" said he would "prefer not to" do his job to the beat writers and Jack Kerouac, who in "The Dharma Bums" said "I practice do-nothing."
The word "slacker" originated during World War I, used to describe draft-dodgers in particular and work-dodgers in general. It was later applied to all manner of counterculture movements. Lutz also found plenty of examples on-screen, many illustrating the essential slacker paradox: we like the idea of slacking, but do we really want to do nothing?
For some people, the ultimate slacker is Spicoli, in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." But the new movie "Clerks 2" gives us slackers who are on the job, and that creates a whole new set of issues.
Workplace slacking is all very funny in the movies, but what about in real life? By some estimates, American employees may be idling away something on the order of $750 billion a year in lost productivity.
Mark Murphy is the CEO of Leadership IQ, advising companies how to improve their management. In a survey, his firm found that 87 percent of employees say they get so tired of working with slackers, it makes them want to change jobs.
If a slacker were just one slacker off doing their thing and they were checking out to go surfing at two o'clock every day, that'd be one thing," Murphy says. "The problem is that a whole continuum suffers from this. The customer suffers from this. The rest of the team suffers from this. The high performers are forced to work even harder to make up for the work of the slacker that the slacker didn't get done."
Even the average American worker admits to frittering away just over 2 hours per 8-hour workday. Top time-wasting activities are surfing the Internet, socializing with coworkers and conducting personal business. Workers' top excuses are that they don't have enough to do or they think they're underpaid.
But whatever the reason, even Murphy admits everyone needs to slack a little.
"You know, people can only work so hard for so long. Even the Navy SEALS need R&R every so often. We can only push so hard before we start to get burned out. So it's OK to take the break. It's OK to recharge," he says.
Chris Mauro has looked at life from all sides. In Surfer magazine a few years ago he wrote, "I had a real job for a couple of years. I know what it's like. It sucks your energy mentally and physically."
Ironically, that essay led to him becoming the editor of the magazine. It's a full-time job but one that keeps him close to the waves.
"I think, you know, one person's slacker is another guy's guru," he says. "Surfers don't really care because they look at most people and go, 'You know what? You're slackers. Look at you. You go to work every day and you—you know.' And you know most Americans it's like they're sittin' getting fat on their butt all day long."
"I do think that there's (an) enormous amount of energy spent looking busy in the average workplace. I can work all of the time, and I think if everybody in the country played as much computer solitaire as I do, the world would grind to a halt," Lutz says.
Which brings us back to Cody, the couch slacker.
"I don't think I've ever had a timetable really," he says. "I was trying to get a job in the way that I always try to get a job which is you know 'bout 25 percent or so."
And somehow it worked. After doing his time on the couch, Cody got moving. He's in the movie business now with bit production parts in "Meet the Fockers" and a few other films. In fact, Cody barely had time to meet with us.
Now his major regret seems to be not that he slacked…but that he didn't really slack like his father did. Dad—get this—spent a few years after college as a self-described "back-to-the-land" hippie.
"Well I've had more than a couple weeks of slackin' certainly," Cody says. "But I just wish that slacking on the couch was as cool as … being on a commune and having a blast."
No regrets from Cody, and in the end, no regrets from Dad, either.
"I'm really glad that I spent those years, you know, quote 'doing nothing,'" Lutz says.
So when you consider the end of vacation, and getting back to work, consider this. The issue might not be whether to slack, but when, how often, and how well.
