A Quiet Revolution: why quiet quitting and WFH are tools in a new personal labor movement

Quiet quitting. If you’re a part of the professional world you’ve no doubt heard the term and seen the myriad of think pieces about it. The term has sparked a debate and set the LinkedIn world on fire. This conversation comes at the same time as another fight is heating up, the one around remote work and what it means to be employed in today’s world. Malcolm Gladwell recently jumped in with a piece of his own criticizing work from home and its proponents. While I disagree with the criticism of quiet quitting and work from home (WFH), I think they both serve as a useful lens to view the current state of work. 

Let’s start with quiet quitting. This is the idea that instead of quitting outright, people who are disenchanted with their jobs simply stop applying any effort. They’re doing the bare minimum until an opportunity comes. Basically, it’s the idea they’re doing just enough not to get fired but don’t go above and beyond because they aren’t motivated to advance in their current situation. While some of the behaviors may be accurate I think what all of these opinion writers have wrong is the motivation. 

While it makes sense that those who are unhappy in their position aren’t trying hard, there’s a whole other set of sociocultural factors at hand. One we’re all burnt out. We’re going on the third year of a pandemic that has required us all to be constantly on. Not just for work but in our lives. We have to carve out intentional times to unplug now, and for some of us, that’s easier during the day. We just don’t have it in us to be trying to get ahead constantly. More than that, many of us especially those who are younger don’t want to get ahead. We want to do our jobs and then actually live our lives. This is what I think is the biggest driver of “quiet quitting” it’s not that we’re quitting these roles, it’s that we’re quitting the rat race our parents and grandparents created for us. 

It’s not that we don’t want to succeed, it’s that success means something different to us. Sure we want to have economic security for us, our partners, and our families but that’s not everything. Many of us were raised with parents who weren’t there because they were caught up in the race to get ahead. Whether it was out of pure necessity to provide or deeper societal pressure, this had a lasting effect on us. We want to be there for the ones we love. Whenever I have kids I don’t want to be too busy sending emails to spend time with them. I want to be present with my family and the ones I love. Many older people who were constantly trying to get ahead also lost their friendships, something we don’t want to risk either. 

This sentiment around spending time for others also applies to ourselves. We’re in a new age of self-care and finding ourselves. Something again our parents and grandparents didn’t have the time for. Work isn’t our lives, our lives are our lives, and work is just a part of that. We want to do things that move us and help shape us. Unfortunately, most modern jobs just aren’t that, they’re simply means to an end for us to do the things we truly enjoy. That’s why quiet quitting is such a misnomer. We’re still doing our jobs and doing them well, but we stopped identifying ourselves with those jobs. Many of us are going through the motions, not because we don’t care, but because we do care about our lives outside of our careers. 

This is also why WFH has been a revolution for this generation. It’s given us the freedom that self-employed people have had for decades. We can do our laundry, run errands, go to the gym, and take our pets for walks on our own schedule. The worst-kept secret in the corporate world is that there’s dead time. No company is immune from bottlenecks, which creates pockets of time where you can’t work. Before you just had to sit there wasting time in the office, now we can be productive in the other parts of our lives. Again, work isn’t everything, and we’re finding ways to integrate it into the bigger picture. It’s also not like the work isn’t getting done. Productivity hasn’t declined and some people are working more hours, it’s just not in between the set hours of 9-5. They’re figuring out what works for them. 

This is what makes Malcolm Gladwell’s criticism so ridiculous. One of his comments was “what have you reduced your life to” in the context of people working from home “sitting in their pajamas all day”. We haven’t reduced our lives to anything, if anything they’ve expanded. I can meet a friend for coffee or lunch, or even hit a walk while it’s still sunny out during the bleak Seattle winters. All things that used to never happen. I can also do more in my evenings with the time I save from doing small chores in between tasks at home and not commuting. No one I know truly stays in their pajamas all day, we all have things we need to do during the day and now we can do them. 

Collaboration also hasn’t suffered. Most meetings that weren’t with your immediate team were on zoom pre-pandemic anyways. The nature of knowledge work was becoming decentralized long before Covid. Almost no one in the professional world works for a company that only has one office and has clients or partners who also only reside in that city. It’s just not how things work. As far as teams go, I’ll give the critics that at times you lose some collaboration over distance. That gap is closing though, we can work in real-time over documents, and can quickly jump on informal calls to work problems out. The only real thing lacking is the in-person comradery. That's why I do think hybrid makes sense. You can go into the office to connect and collaborate when it makes sense. We can have happy hours and parties that let us experience co-workers as humans. I think that’s all necessary for a thriving workspace. We shouldn’t all be silos. Yet, we also have to allow people the flexibility to live their lives, even if it doesn’t fit what previous generations thought of as work. The office is no longer the institution it once was. It’s now a tool, just like anything else. That’s what this new labor movement is about. 

This new movement that includes “quiet quitting”, WFH, anti-work, and a whole host of other philosophies is about living the life you want. It may sound like idealistic bullshit, but that’s what we want. I think it’s what people wanted for a long time, but it just wasn’t a possibility. For the first time in history, we have the tools to allow us that freedom while maintaining productivity. We don’t have to spend 10-12 hours a day in an office and commuting, then come home too exhausted to do anything. Also, why should we? One of the most famous economists of our time said with rising productivity that we would only have to work 10-15 hrs a week by now. That didn’t happen instead the goals kept getting raised and with that the expectations of who we’re supposed to be were also raised. In order to meet those goals, we had to dedicate ourselves to our careers, while neglecting all the other pieces that make us human. Now we don’t have to do that. We’re ok with just doing enough to not get fired because at the end of the day that’s what’s needed from us. We’re ok not going to the office because we don’t have to. We’re no longer living to work, and that’s what’s most important. We’re working to live, and not just live but thrive. Quiet quitting and WFH are just the start of a revolution in us taking our lives back.