The slacker's manifesto

Turn off, tune out, drop out

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“Is it worth the aggravation to find yourself a job when there’s nothing worth working for?”

Noel Gallagher

More than two years ago I wrote one of those long, rambly posts in anticipation of the birth of my first child. Number two arrived this December just gone, having rather dragged out the process. In fact, some of this post was written in hospital waiting for him to make an appearance.

Much has changed for me since 2022. I wrote the previous piece from the flat we were renting, which we have recently vacated in favour of a house down the road. This was bought with my partner’s inheritance after her dad died. As well as two kids, I now have several floors to my name and home insurance. At only 33 I am middle aged.

I’ve also not really worked since the summer, while at the same time exhausting myself with selling one house, buying another one, and moving. Plus the childcare. In one sense it has not been lucrative at all; in another my net worth is up considerably – so much so that I can use evasive phrases like ‘net worth’.

All this I say not to brag. Rather the opposite. From schlepping away at a middling job in trade journalism, events have landed me with privilege of only needing part time work to sustain my family. In this racket we call an economy, I’m on the right side of it.

I thought about this while watching various removal men haul my family’s stuff up and down staircases, feeling a little guilty at my new living arrangements – notwithstanding the bereavement. Some of them were headed back towards Bournemouth, where you can buy a decent size house for half or even a third of what it’ll cost you up in London. But it is nonetheless true that the governments of the past 30 years have conspired, deliberately or otherwise, to make the essentials of life largely unaffordable for millennials and zoomers across the country, to say nothing of generation alpha, who are currently children.

As the complaint goes, people of my age graduated into a financial crisis, then the long stagnation, then the plague. Thing are sufficiently bad that military men keep floating the idea of conscription. That’s before climate change makes the planet uninhabitable. All this has made us terribly depressed, so we’ve given up sex and alcohol, and people aren’t having kids. Or so I read in the Guardian.

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Media reports of crises are generally overwrought, since most facts of life are better measured by gentle inclines or declines on a graph. But I nonetheless have a sense of exhaustion that cannot be merely attributed to my chasing a toddler round the house, especially since my childless peers seem equally tired.

New New Labour spent much of the summer and some of the autumn going on about “hard-working people”. This is a signal to voters that the party won’t be lavishing free money on the feckless, undeserving poor, to say nothing of the men (and women) of, er, independent means.

My contention is that slacking off is a reasonable response to everything that’s gone on for the past decade or more. And the evidence is that more and more millennials and zoomers simply cannot be bothered to get a job. These are the kinds of people who read a spec with dread phrases like ‘fast-paced environment’ and have to place a call to the Samaritans. The sane, if you like.

There are a few of us about. The Financial Times – historically called the bosses’ paper – even ran a piece on it a few weeks back. Various young people confessed they preferred staying at their parents’ home focusing on hobbies over joining the commute (which incidentally seems to be coming back at the behest of people with an FT subscription).

In one hilarious example, one Redditor quoted in the piece says: “I was working [in] a retail store and the first few hours were OK, then I had to deal with customers. I packed my bag and just left.” Respect. Another makes the more intellectual case: “With inflation and rents rising, the incentive to devote all of my time to an employer to barely scrape by didn’t make sense any more.”

Even those still working may be choosing to ‘quiet quit’, going only as hard as required by the terms of their job contract. In plain English this is called: not working for free. Free labour is for slaves and family members, the latter especially when you’ve just moved and have a surfeit of Ikea flatpacks to assemble.

While old British farts are generally opposed to socialism, this voluntary withdrawal of labour tends to rile them up. They complain that the yoot are ungrateful for their opportunity to protect the pensions triple lock, or so I read with my cheap Telegraph subscription. If things keep going this way they may have to pay for their own social care etc.

Yet to look at the array of problems facing the country, you can hardly blame people for giving up. First, we printed too many degrees, so they are now worthless; we forgot to build any houses, so now nobody can afford them; what houses we did build are either given away to poor deserving foreigners or sold to rich undeserving foreigners who don’t even live here; as the country ages we must pour ever-increasing funds into health and social care. Worse than all that, Russia is going to start World War Three; climate change will turn the Fens back into a swamp; and I recently paid £7 for a pint. It is not wonder that Brits are again talking about migrating to Australia.

I guess New New Labour could fix some of that, which is why I voted for them. But the first sixth months have not exactly been reassuring, especially since the signal legislative achievement of the parliament has been to make it easier to kill yourself. I believe health consultants sometimes refer to this as ‘demand management’.

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Suffice to say that the young people who think that work isn’t worth it may be numerically correct. They are probably also correct that playing Europa Universalis IV for the 1200th hour will be more rewarding than gainful employment.

Many of the most ‘aspirational’ jobs seem to consist merely of sending emails to the right guy so that somebody with practical skills can make something actually happen. Sure, as Freddie deBoer says, this in many ways is a luxury compared to the previous hardscrabble older generations experienced. But there is also something intrinsically enervating about tapping away at your screen for 35 plus hours a week.

We can argue about what portion of work qualifies for David Graeber’s designation of ‘bullshit jobs’. But clearly it is a notable and growing portion of many people’s working lives, as well as their general lives. In the latter weeks of buying our new house, my conveyancing lawyer cheerfully admitted to me that the restrictive covenants document we’d paid for was redundant. The sellers were also strongarmed into buying liability insurance to protect against a council inspection that will never happen, not least because my council is bankrupt. And the fine print for the home survey admitted the surveyor was unwilling to accept liability for anything he’d said. What the fuck are we doing here?

You might say that’s just property purchasing. But a few weeks ago somebody pointed out that the growth of HR staff in Britain had massively outstripped any productivity gains. The compliance industry has boomed since the gamblers of high finance tanked the economy. And despite leaving the EU, I still have to click those damn website cookie notices every day. Forgive me for Toryism, but isn’t the point of work to produce goods and services, rather than jobs for excess humanities grads?

Apologists would no doubt say that Britain and much of the West’s competitive advantages lie in pushing paper. The country, or rather London, has been called the butler to the world. Some of the paper shuffling is not even facilitating financial crime, they say.

No doubt it’s a living, but is it any way to live? It cannot be good for people to sit at the same desk for months on end and have nothing physical to show for it at the end. My own career, if you could call it that, was more glamorous than most email jobs, some publishable gibberish even making it to the dead tree press. But could I earnestly claim that most of my work days were more genuinely useful than that time I replaced the toilet seat in my flat?

At least that toilet seat represented a commitment to stay in that flat, if only to get my money’s worth. Because if modern work is defined by the jeopardy of emails rotting in fields, it’s also responsible for the churning of people in and out of roles, workplaces and industries. While people still scoff at Norman Tebbit’s apparent suggestion that people get on their bikes and look for work, this is basically how our economy runs, emptying out places that have outlived their usefulness so that everyone can pour into London and push up the house prices.

On an individual level the opportunity chasing can be exciting, lucrative and even spiritually nourishing. But it also contributes to the sense that we are disposable cogs in each machine, chewed up and spat out by the grinding of the gears. People who spend their whole lives in one company are a grotesque curiosity, watching colleagues come and go.

My point, if I have one, is that we have to contrived to alienate ourselves from meaningful work. At the top, strivers seek prestige jobs several dozen layers removed from the spades in the ground, while the most unpleasant grunt work is reserved for immigrants who send their spare cash home. And if you pick up th phone to complain you can expect to hear an automated voice on the other end of the line.

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Back in the early days of Covid, I had to call around an engineer to fix my internet connection. In passing I mentioned we’d just returned from Sweden. The guy said he just had to grab something from his van and never came back. This was annoying, but hilarious. Fundamentally I respect a guy who shamelessly puts his own needs above that if his job. Why would you fix this arsehole’s internet at the risk of catching the superflu?

This is of course a special case, redolent of the madness of those early months in 2020. But I often see other examples of people checking out from low-paid, unpleasant work, and I cannot blame staff for the poor service they are providing me. Were I working such jobs I too would not care.

I accept that someone, or at least something, needs to do many of these jobs. The internet pipes must be cleaned regularly so this email can land in your inbox, alongside other important jobs. But I think we can acknowledge a lot of the work sucks, for reasons listed above, and that slacking off is ultimately an acceptable response to a broken social contract kept aloft by bullshit jobs.

How do you fix this? Well I don’t know, and frankly it would be unbecoming of an essay like this to leave a job fully done.