How it Slackens

Clown World socio-cultural impacts & the real foundations of boomer culpability.

The second part of a socialization/oral history post. Jumping right in. Here’s the link to part one.

Slackening Paths

The rhetorical jiu jitsu of “slacker” is to reframe vanished paths as personal deficiency. Because in my case and many others, tremendous effort was put into mastering skills that weren’t valued by our booming elders. And as for our valuing friendships and social circles - having grown up in psycho-socially deficient families, something had to fill the void. The internet didn’t exist. And no one cared where we were.

Gen X blessings aside, I don’t exempt my generation from criticism. This is because a) my world view is built with observation and logic and b) I’m not CLI. Being completely blunt, the hard reality is that not all members of Gen X are earth-born angels. We forked. Some - like me - understand our historic position and try to pick up our heritage and pass it on. Others became boomer lite and are part of the problem. I obviously write from my perspective in the first group. Group two is repulsive.¹

This matters for understanding how responsibility comes in. Keep in mind the general correlation between [propensity for evasive whining] and [culpability]. As well as how totally inversive [abandoning self-preservation] is. Or how vapid any excuse other than the Venn overlap of sloth and cowardice is.

My position was vastly compromised compared to the family boomers. But my life plan has been oriented towards the anti-fragility and self-reliance I preach here. The legacy project underway offers as much flexibility and protection as is realistically feasible at my scale. Years of thought went into it before launch and it continues to evolve. Now generations of Bandlings are looking at sustainable lives with dignified homes. What they do with it is up to them. But I have done and continue to do what I can for the collective future. Even becoming a kernel of organic community myself despite all the antisocial instincts.

Maxfield Parrish, Dingleton Farm, 1956, oil on canvas

The point is that there are steps, even with diminished opportunities. And I’m far from the only one in my generation noticing this. Reality-facing means looking at the fullness of reality instead of pretending the House of Lies is it. Worried about modern infrastructure in a Nothing Works Anymore era? Figure out your own power and well + septic = your own indoor plumbing. Don’t treat the beast system as anything more than [a crappy human construct in reality] and discover ways. They exist now. Making the refusal to act inexcusable when they were still cheap and easy.

Note that no individuals are being singled out. This is simply a description of what objectively happened. There is an FTS-2 skew in the boomers as a generation but I don’t know exactly where that comes from. [Ground zero for centralized screen] probably covers all the bases, psychological and metaphysical. Not saying any other cohort would have done better in the same circumstances. But being objective starts with accepting objective reality. What objectively happened.

So the question isn’t if the boomers looked outside the narrative and planned for the future. Even to the same extent we did. They objectively didn’t. Nor if it was possible for them to realize things were changing on a structural level. They objectively did.

The question is if it was possible to use what opportunity was still there for an alternative to the House of Lies. A House that visibly wasn’t offering their posterity the same pathways that they took. That’s where the objective fault lies. Doubling down on the beast system instead of finding other ways. And if corroboration is needed, it’s that they still aren’t changing for the good.

Band Camp gets mentioned around as an example for readers, but it also shows skin in the game. I blast boomers from the perspective of actually doing better IRL. There is no better counter to “we couldn’t do [X, Y, or Z] because the screens …” than doing X, Y. or Z. In spite of the screens.

There’s another piece to the puzzle as well. They do know on some level that their conduct is odious. Greatest and silent bromides may have been retard-tier cringe but their moral compass was basically pointed right. Socially at least. The infantile self-indulgence may be unstoppable. But a lot of them have a voice in the background that won’t stop either. This is just an observation by the fruits. Obviously NABALT. Some have proven shockingly soulless in their sociopathy with age. But consider.

The endless emphasis on “new” everythings. It’s Enlightenment Progress! dumbed down to moron tier and presented as an a priori virtue. Obviously infantile self-indulgence is new. Society only gets one go at it before it stops being society. It’s only by cloaking it in faux virtue that the abhorrence can be ignored.

The catch is that the whole progress = venal = new = good pseudo-logic chain can’t have alternatives. This is how it is as inescapable historical reality. Making the downstream victims of the massive generational theft inconvenient. Note how much of their limited bandwidth is spent deflecting and defending. The risible “hard work” canard being particularly irritating. Yes, some put long hours in. But do you know why that’s magically different from people doing the same today? The promise of a payoff.

No generation in human history got more for less. No generation in human history paid a smaller percentage forward. And no generation in human history vaporized more socio-economic capital. It’s remarkable to consider what the family boomers could have accumulated with my perception. Even if they’d started when I first made my perception known to them. Roads not taken.

Fortunately, we can fell that decision tree and its poison fruit. That Gen X hinge. It’s just harder than it should be for less reward.

Anyhow, the rest follows pretty straightforwardly. Acknowledging the new circumstances leads to questions about what happened. And that leads to unpleasantries about doing to mitigate what was obviously false faith in a dying system. Again. The question is did you know?

Anyhow.

“Slacker” was a way to blame us for the disappearance of clear paths. Just like snowflakes and their avocado toast were supposed to account for the suburban split-level they paid 30 k listing for 780 before kicking off a bidding war. It’s aggressive deflection. Gaslighting and defensive lies about their birth on third and their betrayal.

The phenomenon called “slacking” was the result of those unique circumstances. Can’t stress enough how much loss of clear paths transformed the NUC. Everybody goes to college offered a kick at the old acceptable lifestyle. But along really different paths. With nothing to do with organic community building.

Time Magazine, Dec. 1, 1986; Jonathan Mahler, The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990, Random House, New York, 2025

In my SBC day, finance was the rage. 70 p.f.o. letters on the wall of shame → four interviews → one offer unless a budding superstar. Only a handful of schools’ grads considered. And north of 90% attrition after a couple of years. Law school was another favorite. What wasn’t on the option list was rolling back into the NUC and “starting a career”. Nothing terribly strange sounding to people today. But new to the West.

What was different was that housing was still relatively cheap. Not teenage boomers renting lofts in the Village or the Haight on soda jerk money cheap. But an order of magnitude better than today.

One of the biggest lessons of these oral history posts is the inexplicably underrated impact of housing costs. Working in bars, at the fitness center, labor, freelance jobs etc. could provide a decent pad and some money to burn. No asset acquisition or getting ahead, but a nice life while in physical prime. Some weeks I worked more hours than 98% of the boomers in my county. But still slacking because getting by and spending my free time working out, hanging with friends, reading, playing ball, etc. And not groping for a vanished socio-economic class ladder.

Until it was time. But that’s a different story. Without clear paths to carry us along or a self-directed vision through this new reality, what was there to do?

Of course, we didn’t see the internet coming.

John Atkinson Grimshaw, In the Autumn’s Waning Glow, 1893, oil on canvas

What’s funny is that my Singles years lasted fewer than three. Extended adolescence was still the province of the relatively young. And that started the long journey to sustainability on my own terms. It’s still possible, although objectively harder than it was. But it really needs awareness, opportunism, and clarity of purpose.

Recent awareness of the extent of FTS-2 makes this a problem. No system is viable that requires everyone to strategically manage their own futures. Think about it.

Moon Sang Jik, Sheep, 1998, oil on canvas

1. The adjective “lite” isn’t to suggest less moral culpability. It’s because the decline curve was already underway enough for diminished returns. The fumes of an echo. Or a floor on Park Avenue, not your own brownstone. The thought process is the same and culpability may even be worse.