Have We Quietly Quit on Standards

No one should endorse a quiet quitter or support their self-indulgence.

*Note, an edited version of this piece appeared on Spiked.com.

By Rebekah Wanic and Nina Powell

If you’ve paid even half attention to alliterative chatter lately, you’ve no doubt heard the phrase “quiet quitting.” This term has been adopted to describe individuals making the choice to disengage from work while still maintaining their employment. While Derek Thompson argues in The Atlantic that quiet quitting is not new or real as it was formerly simply “having a job,” a recent Gallup poll maintains that up to 50% of current employees identify as quiet quitters.

Whether quiet quitting and employee disengagement is new or old is not our concern, however. Rather, the entree of quiet quitting into public space and its associated glorification by workers and reinforcement by HR professionals is where the problem lies. We have written before about the importance of separating public and private narratives and are faced with this issue yet again.

Privately, if individual workers feel stressed or disengaged or put in less than full effort this is not only not unusual or unexpected but a perfectly normal part of the work experience. Who hasn’t, on occasion, not really “felt it” and walked when they could have run?

Publicly, however, it should be different. The public narrative around quiet quitting speaks to a larger, more pervasive issue: that many appear to have given up the expectation that we should maintain even the lowest of standards. When someone posts on social media or LinkedIn that they are quiet quitting and this is met with applause from even a small number of individuals, we should be worried. Rather than be embarrassed to share they are intentionally falling short of an obligation (workers are paid to complete tasks, not to simply exist), social reward instead follows, reinforcing this behavior.

Further, responses to such posts are often colored with mental health and self-care language, encouraging the individual to do what they need to make sure they are taken care of. This is because many endorse the belief that it is highly malicious of any company to expect an employee to do anything that makes them feel even the slightest bit put out. Here we reference Derek Thompson, feeling put out sometimes is called having a job.

In the narcissistic self-care climate, vilification falls upon anyone or any organization which might have an expectation that someone else perform what they have been tasked (and paid) to do, experience even the most minor amount of  stress, or engage in an activity that they find even mildly uninteresting. It is not up to the individual to take any action to address this, to self-reflect that perhaps challenge and boredom is a natural part of life, or to find another job. Rather, it is left to the organization or those around them to bear that burden.

The quiet quitter who posts about it is publicly saying “FU” to their fellow employees and society at large. This free-loader is taking a paycheck while giving nothing back but we’ve all been trained not to call the spade a spade but rather to celebrate their selfish mediocrity. For a boss to correct this and ask for their resignation or real work could compromise the quitter’s mental well-being, for a colleague who must now work harder to say something encouraging them to pull their weight would be to risk potential claims of harassment. How sad that we have allowed ourselves to quit on expectations, on holding people to a higher standard, and on fulfilling obligations.

Quiet quitting should not be branded as a “social” movement; it is the complete collapse of the social and a turn inward to the individual. There is no reason to elevate quiet quitting or equate it with historical efforts to unionize, strike, or engage in any collective, social effort to improve working conditions. Quiet quitting is a self-involved endeavor where individuals choose to, as the name suggests, quietly respond to their dissatisfaction in ways that hold no one accountable or offer no concrete suggestions for change that could lead to benefits in the long term for many.

Similar to many self-care movements, quiet quitting evades collective effort and is unlikely to result in meaningful social change. In 1925, when miners refused to accept a 10% wage reduction, 1.7 million workers went on strike in support of a million miners. This collective action led to sustained impact and was never about any one individual miner’s experience or job-satisfaction, but focused on long-term change in working conditions for all. This is just one of many examples of trade union efforts throughout industrialized periods in history demonstrating a social and collective effort resulting in impact because the movement rests on principles and calls for action.

Quiet quitting, in contrast, is devoid of principles and rests entirely on individualized experience and desire, lacking explicit calls for action because it is entirely self-absorbed and passive. It’s not dissimilar to a massive sulk - a resigned and petulant refusal to engage while offering no concrete solutions. This lack of interest in offering solutions shows how this behavior has very little to do with any interest in progress but instead is an indulgence in a deeply rooted pessimism about the state of the world and one’s position in it. In other words, a quiet quitter, and those who support them, has given up on reaching others through principled and reasoned calls for action and has given up on affecting change. Giving up is not a message worthy of support, but it is also not a movement of any kind.

Rather than publicly support the proud quiet quitter, we should point out their selfish behavior and suggest that perhaps they keep this flaw hidden. A struggling employee deserves help and working conditions that promote disengagement should be addressed. However, neither can be effectively accomplished nor can we hope to promote flourishing individuals while endorsing those who disengage. Louder voices that favor things like consciousness and putting in effort even when it’s hard are needed to drown out the squeaks of the pathetic quiet quitters and reinforce behaviors that benefit us all.