Knowland, for example, is in the process of writing a cookbook called "Philosophies of Cooking," which he describes as a guide for young single people who want to start entertaining but don't know how. And Craig Bicknell, who dreamed of writing music even as he was slaving away as a reporter for Wired News for years, has been working full time on an album since he quit his job in November. "It's been excellent, it's been fabulous," he says happily.

It turns out to be not that easy to shut off your drive to produce just because you aren't sitting in a cubicle every day. "I really haven't spent any time slacking because maybe I have too much of the puritanical Calvinist work ethic, and it's hard for me to not be working at something," says Bicknell. But he's almost done with his album, and he's starting to think about really taking a break. "I needed to prove to myself I could get good stuff done before I was comfortable slacking. But I'm happy with what I've been doing, so now maybe I'll feel entitled to slack more."

Not all of the new slackers can boast an original early-'90s slacker pedigree. Many of the younger breed missed the first wave. They were sucked up into the economic hysteria of the new Internet economy right out of college, and unlike their peers who were just a few years older, they never moved to Prague to hang out in expatriate languor. Now that the balloon has popped, they are looking around and asking why they shouldn't also take the opportunity to do nothing.

For example, 30-year-old Cate Corcoran, who was the fifth employee at PeoplePC (a company that grew to 300 people in 18 months), says that "a lot of people our age were kind of floating around a lot in their early 20s and I wasn't, really. I was working." When she quit her job, she headed to Thailand for three weeks and ended up staying two months, including 10 days at a silent meditation retreat in a Buddhist monastery. "Once you get over there, you realize a bunch of things -- it's cheaper to stay there than it is to come home," she says. "For the price of a dinner in San Francisco, you can live for four days in a place like Thailand."

Travel is one thing that most dot-commers (with their standard two weeks of vacation a year) couldn't ever find the time for -- if they took vacation at all. "In two years working on the Internet, I only took a week off at Christmas," says 28-year-old Tara Torpey, who sold advertising for America Online until late January. "If I took a three-day weekend, I was on my cellphone and had my laptop. I was always wired in. Even when I went home for the holidays for a week, I was online almost every day." Since being laid off, she has already been to Hawaii, and is now planning a week in Mexico, two months in Europe and a leisurely monthlong cross-country road trip. "I have to leave my house by 11 in the morning or I'll sit there and watch CNBC all day. I'm addicted." She's also enjoying literary pursuits: "The library -- you forget how awesome the library is! They have CDs now! You can check out CDs, go home and burn them and bring them back the next day!"

Her advice for newly unemployed dot-commers? "Make friends with people in the restaurant industry. They don't have to work until night, so you have your daytime playmates. And if they're working in a bar or restaurant they will give you free food and drinks." With her severance package and her savings, she's not planning to look for a new job until August.

But Torpey, Knowland and Shiple are the lucky ones. They are dot-commers who either voluntarily decided to slack or have enough savings from the booming days of the Net economy to support their pursuit of nothingness. But there are plenty of other unemployed Net slaves who are finding that their slacking is enforced by a dismal job market.

Twenty-seven-year-old Alisa Weinstein was laid off from her job as an editor when teen site Kibu.com shut down in October. Although she has attempted to find a new job, she discovered in November that prospects were grim, and since then has been forced to work in a coffee shop and borrow money from her parents to make ends meet. "I don't know if a lot of people are enjoying this [unemployment]. Maybe the people taking off for Europe are enjoying it, people who made $70,000 a year this whole time and had money saved away. But I didn't have money saved," she says bitterly.

"When every day is Saturday, then Saturdays aren't as exciting anymore," agrees 27-year-old music writer Jennifer Maerz, who was laid off twice by dot-coms in the past six months. "You want to get back to being a productive part of society."

Unfortunately, Maerz is finding that there aren't many opportunities for music writing in San Francisco right now. Since she doesn't want to resort to temping, she has to find new ways to make ends meet. "I'm just trying to tread water in more creative ways until something that I really want comes up." Such as smoking pot for science: She's currently being paid $250 for three days of marijuana-induced video game playing, part of a medical experiment that is examining how pot affects brainwaves.

And life isn't so bad. "Every week since I've been laid off, I've had a new friend get laid off," says Maerz. "So I'm starting to have more people to hang out with." She's about to embark on a trip to Europe. "I think it will be cheap," she says, "because it will just be me and the other people who got laid off traveling around, and hopefully there aren't too many of us yet."

Regardless of whether the slackers are relaxing intentionally or not, almost everyone agrees that there is one valuable aspect to having all this free time. After six years of riding the Internet tidal wave, now is the time to reflect on what their goals in life really are. Just because the industry has been lucrative and open to young workers doesn't mean that it's the path many of these dot-commers necessarily want to pursue for the rest of their lives.

Because the truth is, they aren't really slackers in the traditional sense. Most will eventually get a job -- this leisurely time will last only six or 12 months before they head into a new job or a new career. Unlike the early 1990s, they can't live the lifestyle they've become accustomed to in New York or San Francisco on $10,000 a year. Even slackers like 25-year-old Asif Hassan, who was laid off by Petstore.com, spent only three months sleeping until noon and watching "The Simpsons" and "Star Trek: Voyager" before he started feeling the financial pinch of unemployment. "It's not really possible to hang out for very long," he says.

The challenge, then, is for the new slackers to figure out a way to marry the principles of nothingness and busyness in their next incarnation. The lessons of the dot-com downfall have been learned the hard way. "The problem of the last few years is that people were working too hard. They didn't go out and have a life. They were working morning, noon and night, and they weren't going out and seeing movies, spending time with boyfriends, etc.," says John Young, who recently quit his job as chief creative officer at Poppe Tyson and is about to head off for a vacation in the South Pacific. "Those are the important things in life, the things that inspire you. If you just sit at a cube all day, your life will be dull. There's no point to sprinting so hard."

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