The Art of Doing Nothing (With a Little Help from Slacker)

Slacker - Richard Linklater (1990) Courtesy of Orion Classics

It's really no secret that most of us are taught to fear doing nothing. Idleness is suspicious. Productivity is the religion of the day. So, if you’re not grinding, optimizing, or “getting ahead” every second of every day, then what are you even doing with your life?

Me? I’ve always been on the other side of that equation. If ambition meant taking a straight shot across the field with a touchdown in mind, I would have been the person wandering around the edges, looking at dandelions and clouds instead. And for most of my life, I was told that made me a failure. A slacker.

Which is probably why finally getting a chance to sit down and check out Richard Linklater’s Slacker a couple of weeks ago – decades after it came out – felt like such a strange kind of homecoming.

Doing Nothing, Cinematically

If you’ve never seen it, here’s the gist. Slacker doesn’t really have a plot or any big, hairy point it's trying to make. There's no main character, no grand growth arc, no traditional payoff. It just drifts through a day in Austin, Texas, following one character until another wanders into frame a few minutes later, then shifting focus.

Most of the characters (if you can call them that) are, by conventional standards, “doing nothing.” They’re rambling about conspiracies, fiddling with art projects, spontaneously philosophizing, waiting for God only knows what, hanging out, talking about whatever. None of them are rushing to work or thinking about how they're going to reach that next rung on the corporate ladder.

And yet... it’s alive. Very much so. The whole film hums with this strange electricity, like the air between two people at 2 AM when you’ve both wandered way too far off the map of ordinary conversation.

It’s a movie that says, maybe nothing is something... if you look closely enough.

Slacker - Richard Linklater (1990) Courtesy of Orion Classics

What I Recognized in It

The thing that really registered for me about this film, especially after a couple of viewings, is the way Linklater doesn’t mock these people. He didn’t frame them as failures or treat them like background extras in the story of “real” ambitious people. He treated them as whole people in and of themselves. Worthy of being seen. Worthy of screen time.

For me, that was personal.

Because my whole life, I’ve been told I wasn’t ambitious enough and therefore not important. My mother especially measured success in material terms. Respectability, money, things you could brag about at a dinner table. She never truly saw the value in the way I thought, the things I noticed, the way I wandered through life, except possibly as potential resources to monetize one day.

So when I watched Slacker, I felt something click. Here was proof that people like me mattered. People who think sideways, people who don’t check boxes, people who hang out on the margins. They were the point, and it's one Linklater makes very well in so many of his movies.

My Own "Slacker Meals"

The thing about finally embracing and owning your slacker identity is that you start to notice the way it seeps into everything, even food.

The other day, a can of Spaghetti-O-style pasta in tomato sauce showed up in my grocery delivery for no reason. I hadn’t ordered it, but there it was all the same. I set it aside, thinking it might be perfect for a day when I just needed a lazy lunch option to fall back on. So, earlier today, I heated it up, buttered some bread, and dipped away. 

It became a whole vibe. I even put on Slacker again in the background while I worked on a different Slacker-inspired piece for my Substack, just to lean into the accident. Then tonight it was more of the same – sloppy joes. Messy, cheap, comforting, and a huge dinner favorite for Seth and me. Again, not glamorous, not curated, but exactly what I needed.

And isn’t that kind of the point? 

Life hands you random groceries sometimes. Or half-formed jobs. Or dream fragments that don’t make a whole lot of sense until later. You can call it failure, or you can dip your bread into it and call it dinner.

Slacker - Richard Linklater (1990) Courtesy of Orion Classics

Creativity in the Gaps

What I’ve learned is that the place I go when I'm “doing nothing” is often where the best of my creativity lives. It’s not in the hustle. It’s not in the perfectly scheduled calendar. It’s in the blank afternoons, the aimless conversations, and the after-dinner loitering hours where ideas get to bump into each other.

Because my best writing and art ideas almost never come when I'm trying to be productive. They come when I'm walking in my garden, zoning out in front of a movie I’ve seen twenty damn times, or eating a random can of mystery pasta.

And that’s what Slacker reminded me of. The way the magic isn’t in the plan. It's actually in the drift.

Why It Matters Now

If Slacker felt relevant in 1990, it feels downright prophetic now. Back then, all of Gen X got slapped with the “slacker” label because we didn’t look ambitious enough to the older generations. But fast-forward to 2025, and what do we see? 

Everyone’s side-hustling, cobbling, gig-working, trying to survive a system that no longer really rewards loyalty or hard work, if it ever truly did. Traditional ambition looks a lot less appealing when it doesn’t even buy you stability.

So maybe Slacker was never about Gen X specifically. Maybe it was about what happens when society measures individuals by the wrong yardstick. Maybe it was an early glimpse of the world we’d all be living in eventually. One where cobbling is survival, and “doing nothing” is actually a powerful form of resistance.

Slacker - Richard Linklater (1990) Courtesy of Orion Classics

My Loitering Gospel

I think about this a lot when I’m absorbed in my own little rituals – walking in the garden, staring at incense smoke as it curls toward the ceiling, writing dream travelogues about inns that don’t exist. To some people, that’s nothing. But to me, it’s where the world actually cracks open.

I’ve even created an entity called the Loitering God, a being that sprang from this idea that “just hanging out” can be sacred. That slowness, stillness, and unstructured time aren’t failures, but altars. Watching Slacker felt like a cinematic gospel of the same idea. A whole film that said, “Yes, this counts. This, too, is worth your attention.”

Slackers Do Build Lives

We just do it differently. We build in pauses. We find meaning in accidents. We loiter in places everyone else hurries past without even stopping to take a look. And when you look back on your life after you've accumulated a few years under your belt, you realize all that “nothing” adds up to something.

I don’t have every piece figured out. My living situation is far from perfect. My income is way too modest for my personal taste. I’m still building. But I have love, I have work I care about, and I have a creative practice that feels worth getting up in the morning for. That’s not nothing. In fact, that’s everything.

So if you’ve ever felt guilty for doing nothing – for staring into space, for wandering through your thoughts too long, for eating Spaghetti-Os while watching a meandering film with no plot – consider this your reminder.

Doing nothing is never really nothing. Sometimes it’s where life sneaks in.