‘Quiet Quitting’ — Not Just For the ‘Silly Season’
Just as I was wondering whether various crises were coming too fast to allow our usual “silly season” of oddball late summer news, an appropriately weird-sounding social trend popped up on social networks and intriguingly struck a nerve.
It’s called “quiet quitting.”
Put simply, it refers to the act of taking your job seriously but not too seriously.
It has generated millions of views on TikTok at a time when workplace studies are showing a surge in young professionals who feel disengaged from jobs that, among other problems, have turned out to demand more than they expected.
As TikTok user Zaid Khan described it in a widely read and retweeted post in early August, “You’re not outright quitting your job but you’re quitting the idea of going above and beyond.”
“You’re still performing your duties,” he continued, “but you’re no longer subscribing to the hustle culture mentality that work has to be your life. The reality is it’s not, and your worth as a person is not defined by your labor.”
No, as I have advised my own millennial son, your work does not have to be your life. But it comes in very handy when you need to take care of such nontrivial matters as eating and keeping a roof over your head.
Still, I sympathize with what young workers are up against these days. Besides the pandemic, they’ve had to face economic pressures from rising costs of living, college loan paybacks and an uncertain economy, among other challenges. They have plenty to complain about.
And employers aren’t happy with recently higher levels of employee disengagement, meaning discontent, in America’s Generation Z, also known as “zoomers” (now entering the professional workforce), and their next elders in Generation X.
For two consecutive years, employee engagement — a measure of worker contentment or disgruntlement — has fallen in the U.S. workforce, according to Gallup. But Generation Z individuals reported the lowest engagement of all — only 31% during the first quarter of this year.
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