A comment on the video: "I quiet quit 6 months ago and guess what, same pay. same recognition, same everything but less stress."
And: "Then when you do it you realize nothing at work matters and suddenly all the stress vanishes."
This reminds me of an old song I was listening to yesterday:
People are queer, they're always crowding
Scrambling and rushing about
Why don't they stop someday
Address themselves this way?
Why are we here? Where are we going?
It's time that we found out
We're not here to stay; we're on a short holiday
Life is just a bowl of cherries
Don't take it serious, it's too mysterious
You work, you save, you worry so
But you can't take your dough when you go, go, go....
That's been recorded many, many times. I started with Rudy Vallée, but I tested many other versions on Spotify. The original recording was Ethel Merman, which I didn't like. There's Judy Garland and Doris Day... and Lisa Loeb! There's Ann Sothern and Nat King Cole.
Not everyone includes the verse — "People are queer..." They just jump in with the chorus: "Life is just a bowl of cherries." I especially like the quick muddling of deep and shallow. My favorite line is: "Don't take it serious, it's too mysterious."
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Reddit.com/r/antiwork is your go-to source for this issue, as well as the rest of the problems of workers.
I once got a nicely printed certificate for my work, that saved my company from having to purchase a new multimillion dollar machine for the factory. And I got a very nice 1% raise that year, also, which was nice.
Guess when my uncaring kicked in?
"Quiet quitting" shows up in tiktok as zoomer euphemism for "checked out" employees.
Generation X's "Checked out" euphemism for "quiet quitting" employees hardest hit.
I can't recall, is "queer" a good word now? Can we use it? Isn't it the last part of the modern Pentateuch (lgbt Q)?
But I assume the game "smear the queer" is off limits. Now it's "smear the homophobe."
Exemplified in the adage that "No one on his death bed ever said that he wished he'd spent more time at the office."
Quiet quitting for me is slowly dropping, or slipping, or sliding out of school -- or work or active life -- without making a conscious decision to do so, but maybe that's "unconscious quitting."
Finally, an explanation for the Uvalde police (in)action.
I was trying to guess the old song before clicking on More. I did not succeed.
Isn't this just being a government union employee?
Enjoy yourself
It's later than you think
Enjoy yourself
While you're still in the pink
The years go by
As quickly as a wink
Enjoy yourself enjoy yourself
It's later than you think
Some of the verses quite predictable: don't leave the big trip until it's too late, if you kiss a dollar bill it won't kiss you back. But how about this?
Your heart of hearts, your dream of dreams, your ravishing brunette
She's left you and she's now become somebody else's pet
Lay down that gun, don't try my friend to reach the great beyond
You'll have more fun by reaching for a redhead or a blond
One wonders when we'll reach the point of too few caring and there's not enough to drag humanity, kicking and screaming, into the future. Or, are the masses all ready to settle down into The Great Reset where you will own nothing and love it? I think more and more are, as they see concrete things, such as buying a first home, simply out of reach due to massive student loans and housing prices at levels far beyond their worth, reachable only by the Chinese, BlackRock investments, tech employees, and a few boomer retirees.
No worries. The Global Elite are there to take care of all of us. I know. They told me so.
Play for pay jobs are a hobby for all day all the time.
Around 1973 they gave me my own IBM 360/65 mainframe to work on nights.
Teachers call it "working to contract".
I remember when this was referred to as being “retired in place”
Lol, the MO of gov't employees
What about us that get an adrenaline rush by closing a project ahead of schedule, under budget with results far exceeding expectations?
People set down everyday to crack the NYT crossword. That doesn't pay a dime. Taking college classes, just because it's interesting. I spent a day and half of my time and $150 to take some field training classes. While I have done this literally dozens of times, I got a different persons perspective on research, some of which goes back to the formation of land grant colleges. I enjoyed it, and will allow me to perform at a higher level of confidence in my job, which greatly reduces stress, but will not add to my pay check.
It takes all kinds. In agriculture I run into farmers everyday that work hard, are 70 years old, and more money than Hunter Biden could suff up his nose. But its what makes them feel alive.
My partner in our surgical practice once said, "I hope they never find out that I would do this for free." It was a bit of a joke but it represented a time when people, a lot of them, loved what they did. Not all were surgeons, either. But I'll bet there were not many white collar salarymen who felt that way.
"nothing at work matters"
Corollary: nothing management does matters.
But nothing matters in different ways. In schools and government bureaucracies, nothing matters because the outcomes don't matter--certainly not for the employment of staff. In organizations with supposedly clear outcome metrics, nothing matters because there are plenty of ways to keep the unproductive unproductive. Prog personnel policy adds layers of cushioning. Making prog priorities matter is a way of ensuring that nothing matters.
I worked for a German pharmaceutical company (the research facility was in Connecticut) from 1995 until the Summer of 2009. I quiet quit in the Summer of 2008 when I realized I was going to be laid off. I attended my sister's wedding in September of 2008, and when I returned to the office that Monday morning, my supervisor wasn't there and his office had been cleaned out- almost everyone at his level had been fired site-wide, and everyone at my level was put on performance review which indicated my level was going to get hit within a year, and they were going to try to do it for cause rather than a traditional layoff. My enthusiasm for the job ended that day, and I put in the exactly the minimum effort while I looked into switching jobs. However, I must have put in enough effort since I wasn't fired for cause in the end, and got a big severence package that was nearly a year's salary and benefits. I don't think all of colleagues let go that day were as lucky, and I know that the firings continued for the next 3 years, almost none of which got severence. I was getting calls from colleagues for those three years asking me what it meant getting put on a performance review plan- I was honest- I told them they needed to look for another job because they were getting canned.
"Teachers call it "working to contract"."
No. Working is what others do to pay their salary and benefits.
"Phoning it in" has always been the perk of a civil service protected government job, spreading gradually to non-profit sector (academia, charity and church). The George Floyd BLM protests even made it self-preservation for big city police forces (more than one way to abolish police!)
The COVID lockdowns opened up new vistas of quiet quitting to the white collar for profit sectors of finance, law and tech. The office provides a natural environment of busy-ness that set a higher minimum bar for work and a competitive need to exceed that bar. Far easier to quiet quit in the privacy of one's home, with occasional Zoom calls to performatively work. For profit firms that relied on that competitive culture for productivity are not currently set up to monitor individual productivity the way manufacturing businesses with blue collar work forces do. But they'll get there. And in a recession economy, it'll be easy to let the quiet quitters go: hell, they're already half-way out the door.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the employees most likely to resort to "quiet quitting" are also inadvertently providing less drama and less stress to everyone else involved.
Next stop, on the county.
I think it might be unwise to assume that no one is noticing when an employee's contributions are no longer worth the paycheck. The non-contributor is also probably making someone else look bad, whoever the supervisor is, and that can also be dangerous.
It can take awhile for these things to play themselves out, for management to work around to doing something about the dead weight, but sooner or later there will be a reckoning. Unless it's a government job or some kind of tenured position in education, if it's a for profit endeavor there's someone looking at that bottom line. Businesses don't mind getting rid of employees, IMO, e.g., outsourcing to Mumbai or Manila, where the cost is a lot less.
Exemplified in the adage that "No one on his death bed ever said that he wished he'd spent more time at the office."
Now that I'm publishing my own books, I'm worker harder than when I was at the office. And on my death bed, I'll wish I had written more.
Read the 4-hour Work Week. It embraces the "quiet quitting" mantra in a way. The first step is to get out of the office and work remote. With remote work, quiet quitting is decidedly easier. The pandemic and subsequent shutdown, broke the seal and there's no getting that toothpaste back in the bottle.
Maybe a recession will do it...
If your job doesn't provide satisfaction in doing it well you should be looking for other work. However stressing about work is usually counterproductive. If it's stress because you are in over your head, you need to talk to your supervisor about their expectations. I remember reassuring a number of team members that all I expected was what they could do or helping them break things down into more manageable parts.
If it's stress because your supervisor doesn't listen to you, some introspection is called for. If you are sure you are correct, you should change jobs.
It seems to me that the current generation of college educated women have very unrealistic expectations about what a job provides and requires. I am under the impression they are getting their ideas about work from novels and movies. There was a real shift when colleges stopped requiring students to do anything difficult to graduate unless you were in a STEM field.
Generally, you can’t quiet quit if you are your own boss. I know several people who have built successful businesses, handed the reins over to someone else, and had to return when the business went sideways.
Your employer *always* works to contract. Anyone who thinks there's something bad about an employee doing the same thing strikes me as misguided.
I've been fortunate to find work that I care about (in government!), and I put in the extra effort to do it right for personal satisfaction. If you've found something similar, more power to you. But I understand that for most people, work is what they do to pay the bills, and I don't fault them for doing only what they're told. (Then there are those who slough their work onto others, which is poisonous, but one learns to work around such people).
I have worked around ambitious go-getters, and there are two problems with that approach to life. However hard your work, there is always going to be someone willing to put in more hours than you, so you need to bring something else. Also, ambition has major tradeoffs. So many of the law firm partners I knew who made it to the top had rotten home lives and lousy relationships with their kids.
At some point we will get back to a place where people care about each other as much or more than they care about themselves.
Part of the magic of the United States was that our country built a high trust society where people were able to feel good about doing more than was asked of them.
Part of the effort of the Oligarchs to turn us back into serfs was to make people self centered and capable of "quiet quitting." It is also much easier to quiet quit on a giant faceless corporation.
The megacorps pushing this garbage are trying to reset society. But they are going to be the first to fall with the regime they installed.
When your job becomes "just a job." Doing it just for the paycheck.
I understand the sentiment, but it is based on a bad assumption. Your current employer may not care, but find a better one that does. If you can’t find one that does, it could be you. Either way, in good times, you can be a free rider. I think a better approach is the old adage about the hikers and the bear, “you don’t have to be the fastest, just don’t be the slowest.” The real trick is in a recession, there is more than one bear and you don’t know when they’ll run out. That’s when you’ll wish you found the better job earlier.
Quiet quitting is essentially what John Galt was doing while spying on Dagney Thaggert.
Years ago I worked at a job where I spent almost 10-12 hours a day there. Took work home, I stressed, I worried, I delayed plans, took meetings on vacation, etc. Got the basic 3% raise, and ended up getting laid off when the company merged. I learned to set expectations up front, and I now work the basic hours required, and still get the 3% raise and the same bonus.
In many cases, Companies take advantage of those dedicated workers and rely on them without compensating and rewarding them for the effort put forth.
Many, possibly most, office jobs can be done in quite a bit less time than the 8 hr/day once you have been there awhile and figured things out, but there is minimal, if any, benefit to doing additional work.
In gubmint work this is called ‘retirement in place’. The first year is just repeated 25 or 30 times .
Michael K said...
"But I'll bet there were not many white collar salarymen who felt that way."
It's very hard for a salaryman/woman to achieve job satisfaction, so they mostly measure their careers by the amount of money they take home. I quit my middle-management job in midlife and learned that I'm good at IT consulting. The best consulting firms are the ones that understand and emphasize the fact that two things matter: customer satisfaction and billable hours. I have had to put up with almost no corporate bullshit in the last twenty-plus years. The BS interferes with the two important things, so it's expensive to indulge. The corporate rat race has only gotten worse since I got out of it, so the whole quitting-on-the-job thing makes a lot of sense.
Joe Smith said...
Isn't this just being a government union employee?
Not necessarily. I'm a 31-year veteran of the USPS, and I've always had the Protestant work ethic with which I was raised. Any job worth doing is worth doing right the first time, etc. I've always said that I don't care if people say that they don't want to work with me because I'm a prima donna know-it-all who wants the job done his way; guilty as charged; but I'll never have anyone be able to honestly say that they don't want to work with me because I don't pull my share of the load. These days, I mostly work on my own rather than with a partner, since I'm a Manual Letters clerk rather than working on a machine, but that's still my attitude. I work hard because I like doing the job right, and I know if I'm not. My own opinion about my work matters more than getting attaboys from Management.
There was only one brief period of six weeks when I didn't feel that way, which was back in November 2017 when Management was screwing with us and trying to get senior workers to retire or quit, and abolished my bid, forcing me from a day job onto a 6:00 p.m. - 2:30 a.m. shift, which only lasted until I bid back onto days on the next bidding cycle. I honestly didn't give a damn during that period, which was very liberating. However, once I was back in a day bid (and Manual Letters, to boot!) I was much happier and went back to caring about my job. Although I'm retirement eligible, I'm still working because I enjoy what I do and the people I work with, and I'm providing a valuable service to the customer.
In defense of slackers, I want to point out the effect of remote, uncaring leadership. The retail and the restaurant businesses where an enormous number of people work, are dominated now by national chains and franchises which have replaced small local businesses. The leadership at these large corporations simply does not care about their employees and the employees have adopted the attitude of their leadership about their job. There are still people who expect to get promoted and people who are learning something - marketing, financials, first job - and those people really work. The rest get the job done well enough to keep from being fired or "quiet quit" or move on to a more humane workplace, a small business, maybe. What bothers me is that I keep wondering if large numbers of people will continue to work for 45 or 50 years in these situations where they aren't interested. I want to say there's something difficult about life that makes being interested in what you do an imperative, but perhaps imperative isn't the word. Only I don't see people getting through without a lot of drive and boredom stifles that needed drive.
I would guess that about half the people that are doing this quiet quitting routine have actually increased their overall productivity.
My long ago dear departed Dad used to say " You won't get rich working for someone else". Of course he never did anything else. Neither did I.
It's very hard for a salaryman/woman to achieve job satisfaction, so they mostly measure their careers by the amount of money they take home.
I agree, which is why I hope my grandson chooses a trade. My nephew has a college degree, then he did a three year apprenticeship in elevator repair and maintenance. He was white collar for a while but has gone back to field work as it is more money. He would love to get out of Chicago but elevators limit his destinations.
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