There’s No Law That Says You Must Work

Reader C sends us this quote from the commercial release of Richard Linklater’s Slacker script.

Slacker was an important antiwork film in the ’90s. As much as anything it created the “slacker culture” that gave us the Idler.

Anyway here’s the quote from director Richard Linklater:

Work isn’t mandatory in our society. There’s no law that says you must work. You can get by if you can do without. If you’re willing not to have […] a car, nice living conditions, nice clothes, and eat out every night; if you’re willing to go, “I just want to work part-time or not at all and spend most of my time making music, writing, reading, or watching movies,” you can consciously drop out. There’s still enough freedom left where you can manoeuvre.

Let’s pause for a second here to remember that the quote comes from 1992. It is more difficult now — not legally but economically and administratively — not to work. But it’s still very possible and what he says is still true.

By “nice living conditions” he presumably means expensive living conditions. I have nice living conditions — clean, easy, happy, centrally urban — on very little money. Friends in cheaply-built but expensive-to-rent housing do not, in my opinion, have “nice living conditions.” They’re a trap.

The freebies and hand-me-downs in this society are probably the best in the world. For example, I was never really a student at the University of Texas, but that’s a great facility. I’d get my library card for thirty bucks a year and have access to one of the bigger libraries in the South. Just being a citizen, you can take advantage of a lot of things in this culture.

This is still true. A public library card costs zero bucks. A university library, if they have a special reader pass or similar, still costs a similar amount to Linklater’s time. The best things in life are very low-cost or even free: walking, reading, being with people, playing music, writing, domestic futzing.

As the man says, “you can consciously drop out” because, truly, even 20 years later, there’s still no law demanding that you work and “still enough freedom left where you can manoeuvre.”

Elsewhere, in 1995, Linklater said:

I think the cheapest definition [of a slacker] would be someone who’s just lazy, hangin’ out, doing nothing. I’d like to change that to somebody who’s not doing what’s expected of them. Somebody who’s trying to live an interesting life, doing what they want to do, and if that takes time to find, so be it.

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