#44: The idea of 'quiet quitting' is dangerous
Right, that's it - your imperfect friend here can't keep quiet about this any more. This idea of 'quiet quitting' that you've been reading about is bullshit, OK? There we all were, minding our own business and struggling with our usual productivity-related guilt and the idea of a healthy work-life balance, and then along came an avalanche of media articles telling us that unless we're going the extra mile in our jobs (read: doing work for free), we're 'quitting'. It's a perfect storm for mental health. Shut that laptop and join The Academic Imperfectionist for a pep talk about why good enough is good enough.
Here's Zaid Khan's TikTok video that started it all off.
References:
Krueger, A. 2022: 'Who Is Quiet Quitting For?', The New York Times, 23rd August.
Kudhail, P. 2022: 'Quiet quitting: The workplace trend taking over TikTok', BBC News, 1st September.
Episode transcript:
You’re either bending over backwards or you’re quiet quitting, right? Wrong.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
How are you doing, friends? I want to talk, today, about how important it is to protect your leisure time, and in particular to avoid allowing your job and your professional activities and obligations to bleed into your free time. How boring, right? Because you know this already, don’t you, even if you’re guilty of checking your work emails while you’re supposed to be relaxing, or taking care of a quick 5-minute task on a Sunday morning so that you can stop worrying about it and enjoy the rest of the day. I know you know this - but bear with me, because over the past year or so I’ve noticed a worrying trend towards a way of talking about work in the media, including social media, that frames your job in such a way as to suggest that you ought to be giving more of yourself than your employer pays you for, as part of normal, adequate service, in the course of business as usual. And this way of representing work is a form of propaganda - one that benefits employers at the expense of your happiness, wellbeing, and quality of life.
You’ve probably picked up on the recent notion of ‘quiet quitting’. It started off on TikTok, apparently. What’s quiet quitting? I’m going to quote Zaid Khan on TikTok, who said: ‘I recently learned about this term called “quiet quitting” where you’re not outright quitting your job, but you’re quitting the idea of going above and beyond. You’re still performing your duties, but you are no longer subscribing to the hustle culture mentality that work has to be your life.’ This idea has really caught on, and not necessarily in the way that Khan perhaps meant it when he popularised the term. There are articles about quiet quitting everywhere. And that, I think, is really worrying.
Why? Well, let’s take a closer look at how Khan characterises quiet quitting. It involves ‘still performing your duties’ but no longer ‘going above and beyond’, and rejecting the idea that ‘work has to be your life’. What’s worrying here is the idea that any of this equates to quitting your job, quietly or otherwise. If you’re ‘still performing your duties’ at work, then you are one hundred percent doing your job. There’s no ambiguity at all here. You’re not quitting. Neither is no longer ‘going above and beyond’ synonymous with quitting your job. No employee is obliged to go above and beyond - that’s why it’s called ‘above and beyond’. And how about rejecting the idea that ‘work has to be your life’? Rejecting that is absolutely correct. Even for people who choose to live to work rather than work to live, it’s still false that work has to be their life.
The problem with equating quitting with declining to do more than you’re obliged to do, is that it implies that not quitting involves going the extra mile. It implies that if you don’t intend to quit your job, then you need to be ‘going above and beyond’, and accepting the mentality that ‘work has to be your life’. Talk of quiet quitting implicitly entails that those things are your obligations, and if you have a problem with that, then you’re effectively quitting. And especially for early-career people who want to do well in their profession, and who are still feeling their way into the culture of working life and who don’t yet have the experience and confidence to say ‘no, this is not acceptable, I reject it’, that is really really damaging. It’s a recipe for misery, burnout, and feeling like an inadequate failure. All because of some ill-advised terminology. I don’t mean to suggest that Khan intended to spread this message when he posted on TikTok, but that’s certainly what seems to be resulting from the widespread media coverage of the idea. This is why I’ve called the term ‘quiet quitting’ a propaganda term. A better term for the same thing is ‘simply doing your job’.
Let’s take a closer look at why this terminology is damaging. Alyson Krueger, in her article entitled ‘Who is quiet quitting for?’ in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago, asks this: ‘Many people feel perplexed: Why do you need a term to describe something as ordinary as going to work and doing your job, even if it’s not well?’ This is a perfect illustration of how easy it is to slide from ‘not going above and beyond’ to ‘not doing your job well’. It highlights a big problem that is ubiquitous in work culture: the idea that doing your job well is inseparable from doing more than your employer is paying you to do. Good enough is no longer good enough. You need to throw in your blood, sweat, and tears for free. And what’s more, if you don’t commit all this, then not only are you not doing your job well enough, but you’re also not a very nice person: Krueger’s article includes quotations from a range of people she’s interviewed, two of whom describe quiet quitting as passive aggressive, and one of whom issues the reminder, ‘it isn’t always about you’. The message here is: quiet quitting - or, alternatively, ‘simply doing your job’ - is for selfish, passive-aggressive people.
Elsewhere in the media, quiet quitting has had a different focus. Last week, a BBC article by Perisha Kudhail featured the stories of two quiet quitters, both of whom had legitimate complaints about their employment: they were being inadequately rewarded for taking on extra work. The message here is that quiet quitting is for people who are jaded, who have tried their best to make things work but who have been unrewarded and unappreciated. It’s a stage that employees get to after they’ve already tried giving their employer free labour.
Perhaps all this is fine for those people - people whose experience of employment has left them cynical and pessimistic about the chances of their careers going the way they’d once hoped; people who are fed up. Perhaps it’s fine, too, for people who have spent enough time in employment to call bullshit on this idea of quiet quitting; there are, after all, a fair few dissenting voices in the media. But what about everyone else: what about those who are just starting out and who want to do well, play the game, behave themselves, and climb the ladder to the top? This is where things get dangerous. If the message is, ‘however much you’re expected to do, do more’, then no amount of transparency about job expectations is going to be enough to enable employees to set healthy boundaries around their work life. You can sit down for a meeting with your manager where you go through a list of your obligations and promotion criteria, and where your manager spells out exactly what she expects of you - but if the background culture is one of ‘good enough is not good enough’, then the unspoken message is that whatever you’re being told explicitly about your employer’s expectations, you need to find a way to meet those expectations and then do even more. Wherever your manager suggests you draw the boundaries between your work life and your leisure time, you need to make the ‘work’ section a little bit bigger. Because if you don’t - if all you do is conscientiously fulfill your obligations - then you’re basically quitting your job, like one of those selfish passive-aggressive cynical people you’ve read about in the New York Times and the BBC, and you’re not one of those, are you, you’re someone who hopes to thrive and do well. We end up with a binary distinction: either you’re doing more than you’re being paid to do, or you’re quitting. There’s no space left for doing what you’re paid to do and then logging out of your email and enjoying life.
Another thing associated with ‘quiet quitting’ is the idea of mentally ‘checking out’ from your job. This is mentioned in both of the articles I’ve mentioned here, and in others too. The focus here seems to be emotional investment and focus: you’re mentally checked out of your job if you’re doing your job without caring deeply about it, or perhaps just without fully focusing on what you’re doing. This is another troubling move. Here’s a reminder, in case you need it: the reason you are paid to do your job is that your employer does not expect you to care enough about it to do it for free. Caring about your job is not part of the deal. Now, that doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong or unhealthy about caring about what you do for a living. Some lucky people end up being paid to do something they deeply care about. But even if you’re not one of them, you might find yourself caring about doing the things that you’re paid to do even if you wouldn’t otherwise care about doing them: you might simply take pride in a job well done, for example, whether that’s solving some critical problem or simply filing something away neatly. You might take pride in being a good colleague, or a good mentor, or a good team player. All of that is completely fine and normal - but at the same time, there’s not necessarily anything wrong with you if that’s not how you feel. The idea that a good employee should be emotionally invested or even fully focused on her job all or most of the time is unrealistic, and also irrelevant. You can fulfill your professional obligations even if you’re not emotionally invested in them, and much of the time you can do it without even being particularly focused on them, and working that way is not equivalent to quitting. If we were talking about any other area of life, we’d have no problem recognising that. I’m mentally checked out of cooking my kids’ dinner pretty much every time I do it, but the idea that I’m therefore ‘quiet quitting’ motherhood is, frankly, ridiculous. Continuing to do the things we need to do even after we’ve stopped finding them stimulating and fulfilling is the exact opposite of quitting - it’s consistently and dependably carrying on despite the lack of excitement. This raises another important point, too. It’s normal to mentally check out of stuff that you do all the time. That’s the way our brains work, and it’s part of what helps us to be efficient and use our attention wisely. Cooking dinner, feeding the cats, taking a shower, driving a route that you take every day - these are all things that we end up being able to do pretty much on autopilot. Many aspects of our jobs are like that too. You probably don’t need to engage your conscious faculties and render yourself wholly mentally present every time you type in your email password, for example. You probably don’t feel a deep sense of emotional commitment when you check your pigeon hole or operate the photocopier. Ideally, there are lots of stimulating aspects of our jobs that keep us engaged and focused and interested so that we’re not mentally checked out while we’re doing them. But lots of jobs aren’t like that. For many people, their jobs are repetitive and unchallenging, and they can do them almost unthinkingly. In those cases, being ‘mentally checked out’ isn’t some conscious, deliberate decision made by the employee. Nor is it something that you do when you’re sour and resentful. It’s a symptom of unchallenging work. We’re approaching the sort of thing that Karl Marx meant when he wrote about alienation here. The problem is that the idea of quiet quitting places the responsibility to be engaged and mentally invested on the shoulders of the employee - and very often that’s not appropriate. When we use the term ‘quiet quitting’ to talk about employees who, through lack of mental stimulation, have zoned out, we thereby focus on the employees and the choices they are consciously and deliberately making, and which they might therefore be morally responsible for, when what might really be going on is that these employees are reacting completely normally and involuntarily to being underchallenged at work. Given what the employment market is like, and that it often involves people taking jobs that they are vastly overqualified for, we’re talking about a significant number of employees here. They’re often taking non-ideal jobs to make ends meet because they can’t get the jobs they want and are qualified for, and yet the language of ‘quiet quitting’ encourages judging them harshly for not being wholeheartedly engaged in what they’re doing. Much of ‘quiet quitting’ is what you end up with when you put smart people in understimulating jobs.
Right. There’s a lot more opinion and a lot less practical advice in this episode than in most of my other episodes. But, in fact, sometimes, the practical advice just is to recognise that reality is being presented to you in a certain way, because that opens up the possibility that there are other possible perspectives. And that’s the main thing I want to leave you with here. Especially (but not exclusively) if you’re just starting out in your career, I want to open your eyes to the fact that you’re immersed in a culture that is pushing some pretty unhealthy ideas about what a ‘normal’ relationship is between an employee and their job, and I want you to know that you don’t have to accept these ideas. There’s quitting your job, and there’s giving more to your job than you’re obliged to do - but there’s also doing what you’re paid to do, and no more. That’s what your employer is entitled to from you; no more. You might sometimes choose to do more than that, for example if you’re competing with others for the best jobs, but you are not obliged to do so. Good enough is good enough. Finish your work, then take your leisure time wholeheartedly and without guilt. Go on, I dare you.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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