yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Birth of the Slacker | Generation X


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Most Gen Xers are in school during the crash, so at first they think, "Like, so what?" I'd never quite understood the stock exchange game enough to be interested. I would like to meet this Dow Jones; I thought he was a guy in all the Disney movies.

I vividly remember that day because all these classmates of mine in college were huddled around the TV, and I was like, "What's going on?" Like, full-on Keanu Reeves, like, "What's up? The stock market's crashing? Well, that's fine, I'm creative, who cares? I'm going to be a writer."

It turned out that had an impact on the job market. It turned out there weren't as many jobs. Recession is already here. General Motors and Ford are laying off almost 25,000 workers. Coming out of college with a degree doesn't matter; no one can find work.

I applied for every single opening in my field, but there's just—there's nothing. Times are hard. You just going to have to swallow your pride. For Gen Xers, the new reality sees the birth of McJobs and the death of traditional careers.

White-collar workers are hit the hardest this time. The stereotype of the slacker is born. The whole idea of us being pegged as slackers, I think, came out of the fact that we couldn't get jobs. People started looking at different ways that they could do things, precisely because those traditional paths weren't there anymore.

That's kind of what Gen X was—a bunch of us kind of gone like, "Well, maybe there's like a back door into this." All sorts of independent film, independent music, alternative ways of working. That doesn't make you a slacker; it actually makes you the opposite.

More Articles

View All
How AI Is Saving Humanity
The first ultra intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make. The statement was made by mathematician Irving John Good in 1965. He was envisioning a machine smarter than any human who had ever lived, one that would design even smarter…
Meet the $250,000,000 man
As many of you know, I’m an avid YouTube connoisseur. Now, even though I’ve only been making videos here on YouTube for about 24 months, I have been on here as a loyal viewer since about 2010. Every now and then, someone comes across your screen that gets…
Interpret proportionality constants
We can calculate the depth ( d ) of snow in centimeters that accumulates in Harper’s yard during the first ( h ) hours of a snowstorm using the equation ( d ) is equal to five times ( h ). So, ( d ) is the depth of snow in centimeters and ( h ) is the tim…
Animals Cannot Be Blue | Explorer
[music playing] Sometimes nature plays tricks on us. What we think we know to be true may not be. Animals, for example, have lots of secrets, like their remarkable use of color to attract mates or disguise themselves from predators. Well, it turns out the…
Random numbers for experimental probability | Probability | AP Statistics | Khan Academy
Pascale Rickets has invented a game called Three Rolls to Ten. You roll a fair six-sided die three times. If the sum of the rolls is 10 or greater, you win. If it is less than ten, you lose. What is the probability of winning Three Rolls to Ten? So, ther…
How can I keep all my smart devices secure?
So Mark, so far we’ve talked a lot about device security, and when we talk about devices, at least in my mind, I imagine my phone, I imagine my laptop, a tablet, maybe a smart watch. But there’s actually a much broader universe of devices—smart devices, y…