Site Presented By
Tuesday, Oct 7, 2008
Learning how to relax can be a full-time job in itself. "It took me four weeks to learn how to sleep in again," says 30-year-old John Shiple, the former head of user experience for Bigstep.com. Shiple has been spending his past three months of unemployment napping and catching up on friendships. "For the last two-and-a-half years I got up at 8 a.m., no matter what," he says. But now he doesn't get up until noon. "Ten hours of sleep is about right, now. I like sleeping for 10 hours," he muses.
Similarly, Skye Ketonen, a director of marketing at LinkExchange (a firm purchased in 1998 by Microsoft), found that when she quit her job to relax she couldn't give up her to-do list. "The hardest thing about it was changing the way I think about what is a productive use of my time. For the first three months I was still making lists of things I should do, even when the things on my to-do list were 'do yoga,' 'get a backrub,' 'organize my photo album.'" But she eventually gave up the list and came to see "lollygagging" full time as a worthy pursuit in its own right -- that is, until she started working again as a consultant, for "just" 30 to 40 hours a week.
To be fair, the new slackers aren't really doing nothing. Many, like Rackerby and Robson, are pulling in the occasional freelance or contracting gig to help pay some of the bills. But even if they put in a day or two a week writing code, their attention is focused on the finer things in life -- such as going to cowboy poetry gatherings in Nevada, where Luke Knowland recently headed after quitting his job as a Web producer. For the past six years since grad school, he'd been working "like a dog" -- 60- to 90-hour weeks. But now he hasn't held a job since mid-December.
Knowland, who started working at Wired magazine's online site Hotwired in the early days of the Web, is surprised how many of his former co-workers are also living la vida lazy. He'll hit an afternoon matinee whenever he feels like it and never has a hard time finding anyone to go with him. Like so many of his generation who began working online in 1995 or 1996 and were caught up in the craziness of the "dot-com revolution," he burned out after merely half a decade. Has the acceleration of Internet time also sped up the onset of the midlife crisis?
"There's not that much that's really challenging anymore," says Knowland. "Nothing's changed that much in terms of what we've been doing for the last few years, so we're asking, What's next? Whether that's because we've all been working really hard, coupled with the fact that we all started really young, we're all entering our 30s and going, 'What the hell are we doing with our lives?'"
When John Pike, 37, was laid off from his job as a Web programmer for ComedyWorld in mid-January, he was already planning to quit in order to spend time with his new puppy, an Australian shepherd named Bodhi. Still, the layoff came as a shock: "I still felt dejected. It's kind of like if you're going to break up with somebody and then they break up with you."
But now he finds that life with the dog has its own demands. "He wakes me up every day before sunrise. I'm waking up earlier than when I was working. It's kind of like being in the Army. I wake up with the sun every day." His puppy is so cute that he's constantly stopped in the street by strangers who admire it: "I go to the post office and it takes 45 minutes," he says.
He finds the canine life more fulfilling than any cubicle job, and has discovered that he may be able to make that lost dot-com fortune with his newfound skills. "I'm not actively looking for full-time work, and I'm even considering doing something like walking dogs, because I've met a bunch of dog walkers and they make tons of money."
Get Salon in your mailbox!