Trend watch: The anti-slacker

LONDON, England (CNN) -- The year is 1994 and the zeitgeist-y movie is "Reality Bites."

You know the one: slacker boy smokes bongs on couch while trying to figure out what to do with his life while wise-cracking, cynical girl is stuck in McJob folding sweaters at Gap.

How things have changed! The New York Observer earlier this year declared the slacker to be dead and in its stained flannelette shirt place is the scarily titled New Victorians. According to the New York Observer: "Recent years have seen a breed of ambitious, twenty-something nesters settling in the city, embracing the comforts of hearth and home with all the fervor of characters in "Middlemarch." This prudish pack -- call them the New Victorians -- appears to have little interest in the prolonged puberty of earlier generations."

It's the world of dinner parties, Le Creuset cassoulet dishes, knitting, organic food, gardening and country houses.

Their baby names are Alice, Charlotte, Fred and Henry while their hobbies include home-renovation and dinner parties.

Says the Observer, "While their forbears flitted away their 20's in a haze of booze, Bolivian marching powder, and bed-hopping, New Vics throw dinner parties, tend to pedigreed pets, practice earnest monogamy, and affect an air of complacent careerism. Indeed, at the tender age of 28, 26, even 24, the New Vics have developed such fierce commitments, be they romantic or professional, that angst-ridden cultural productions like the 1994 movie 'Reality Bites', or Benjamin Kunkel's 2005 novel 'Indecision', simply wouldn't make sense to them."

Ekkkk.... Not even out of their twenties, these are the anti-slackers, who from birth have been shepherded from one skill/life enhancing activity to the next.

They did well academically, attended most prestigious universities, did summer internships at multi-national companies on their semester break and assiduously saved for their first mortgage.

No wonder they don't want to waste valuable time in their twenties lying on the couch watching day-time television and trying to muster the energy to re-heat the burrito in the microwave. It's not just their careers that they are taking seriously -- their relationships also hark back to another time.

Forget the commitment-phobic characters in "Reality Bites" or the serial daters of "Sex and the City" -- the New Victorians have found and married their life partner in their mid to late twenties. Promiscuity, affairs and the single-life are regarded by the New Victorians as afflictions: "The adultery-filled pages of John Updike's best novels now seem like dispatches from a foreign land. One need only mention the word 'affair' in the chatroom pages of Urbanbaby.com to get quickly excoriated as a 'slut' and a "home wrecker"; the New Victorian morality is not one that permits nuance or discretion," according to the Observer.

Children often come on the scene before the young-marrieds have celebrated their 30th birthdays as New Victorians have seen the fertility panic of their older sisters who struggle to reproduce in their late 30's and early 40's.

According to the New York Observer: "In the bustling age of the New Victorians, there just isn't much time for messing around, personally or professionally. 'Everyone's very focused,' said Ms. Dressler (nee Keit) of her close-knit coterie of friends. 'We're all kind of heading in the same direction .... We own houses, we own cars, and probably starting within the next year, some of them will start having kids.'"

The model New Victorians were named as twenty-somethings Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams with their daughter Matilda, while Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Philippe with their brood of children has also been mentioned as New Victorian role models.

On the other side of the pond, environmentalist millionaire Zac Goldsmith, 31 (he hates supermarkets and flying, and thinks plastic should be illegal) married at 23 after seeing the exotically-named Sheherezade having an afternoon coffee with friends.They have three small children (Uma, Thyra and James) and are often seen in glossy magazine's extolling the virtues of organic farming.

According to the UK's Daily Mail, "She's rather quiet and likes evenings at home, and she's utterly loyal to Zac. Said a family friend, 'Her husband once joked they married young to breed.'"

But are these New Victorians living in a fiction as deeply plotted but ultimately as imaginary as the Victorian novels of the Brontes or George Eliot?

Last year Goldsmith was forced to deny rumours that his marriage was on the rocks after being frequently seen at the house of 22-year-old Alice Rothschild, scion of another billionaire family.

The marriages of other model New Victorians have fallen apart -- Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Philippe have separated, as have Michelle Williams and Heath Ledger. While The New York Observer piece said today's young were more into having babies, and sedate dinner parties -- in London there's a whole bevy of wild women from Kate Moss, to Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen who make up for their more sober sisters.

Thank God. While the slackers could be tedious with their misanthropic take on the world, anything beats the smug world-view of the New Victorians. E-mail to a friend