How to Take a Break From Your Job (Forever)
So now that the guy who started that whole "quiet quitting" movement is back at peak hustle culture, I will tell you something.
The first time I heard of "The Great Resignation" I expected the worst; like we had just lost some essential workforce — perhaps long-haul truckers were quitting en masse to get remote jobs and standing desks, leaving us commoners to panic hoard toilet paper and research all 6 seasons of Running Wild with Bear Grylls before the supply chain and life as we knew it came to an abrupt shutdown.
But oh thanks sweet baby Jesus and whatever other influencer you pray to, it wasn't truckers — or miners, or firefighters, not even animal masturbators (that is a thing, yes) who were tired of wanking off stallions every time McDonald's needed a restock of creamy ranch sauce.
Turns out, a bunch of white collars with Zoom fatigue decided they were burnt out of their dreadful pyjama workdays, so they were gonna lean into the side of the Pareto distribution of employees that do most of the idling for a while.
Newspapers then took this as an opportunity to justify paywalls and put all their trend-hungry journalists to whip up think pieces about it. That was when we started hearing of the quiet quitting movement, the "acting your wage" vibe...
And then it hit me.
People love to string a bunch of loose, hearsay anecdotes and give it a name to think they're onto something, don't they?
Oh, a bunch of screenshots of minimum-wage workers quitting over iMessage, you say? Nobody wants to work anymore!
Even Kim Kardashian butted in with some tweetable remarks but all I could hear was "My ass is worth a billion but my thoughts aren't worth the penny" because, unless low-level pyramid schemers had finally grown tired of moving Herbalife merch for a shit commission, then there has never been a "great resignation" cooking anywhere.
Yes, many more people had quit their jobs then, but not because they were rising up against the job market; no one was throwing their visor hats and name badges to retire to a wood cabin where they could grow their own off-grid vegan soap. Some were simply changing to better jobs and others were hitting early retirement to shell themselves from whatever the sequel variant to Omicron was going to be.
See, anecdotes are not data.
The data said that "quiet quitting" was not the systematic, anti-capitalist movement that headlines were selling. It was just the latest cultural iteration of good ol' cubicle frustration and "Mondays, amirite?" that's been making profits to antidepressant manufacturers since the dawn of the 9-to-5.
People very much want to work still.
But I'll give you this; some welcomed this newfound vocabulary anyway, simply because of the vibe shift it caused.
Some truly felt like dialling back a bit at work anyway. They wanted to skip Thirsty Thursdays and excuse themselves from the next company retreat because they no longer see the point in learning how to power pose at a Tony Robbins seminar anymore.
They felt like going old school and treating work as a transactional period of time; clock out at five, collect paychecks. No more peer-pressured overtime, no more pretending to bond over a cross-departmental foosball tournament and putting the "cult" in "workplace culture" because they had lives outside of their cubicles.
So factual or not, there is something deeply cathartic about assembling everyone's anecdotes and rumours and MacGyvering a whole trend out of them. And to be fair, "acting your wage" packs a lot more meaning and context than saying you need a 3-figure amount of vacation days from your shit job because you are "disengaged."
But I don't think we need Malcolm Gladwell to come out of his sensory deprivation tank and write some best-selling pop psychology about this for us to understand something. If we are disengaged, disjoined, and disconnected from what we do at work, perhaps it's time to dust off our LinkedIn profiles and take a break. For good.