Your “Quiet Quitting” is Quietly Killing Your Co-Workers

I really hoped the discourse around “quiet quitting” would settle down sooner, but much like the lovely Great Resignation some workers survived last year, this new pithy phrase is still ripe and ready for exceptionally bad hot takes all around.

Here’s the thing: “quiet quitting” is not a new thing, my sweet Zoomers. Y’all didn’t invent doing the bare minimum required of you OR setting healthy boundaries, you’ve just made the algorithms pay more attention to both of them and thus promote for more visibility and “engagement” among the normies and by extension The Bosses, so… Congrats?

“Quiet Quitting” is absolutely a misnomer for workers doing their job and nothing more, but that’s not the sense that has been creeping under my skin for the last year or so, and has only been growing. I’ve watched coworkers leave for better opportunities (and then get laid off six months later, or go freelance for three months and end up FT elsewhere, or go to an independent shop that is promptly acquired by a larger conglomerate), and I do not ever begrudge colleagues who leave for more money, better benefits, true flexibility, etc. I’ve been left behind by coworkers I truly loved at companies I truly hated, and I’ve always managed to move on myself, eventually. So it’s not that.

It’s the sense I’ve been getting from writers and columnists that there are only be two parties affected by so-called Quiet Quitting: the Quitter and their Manager/Boss. This was similar to the discourse around The Great Resignation last year, too — the only relevant people are the Resignee and whomever signs their paychecks. The Individual is always either a heroic inspiration for those of us who do not dream of labor or an entitled, money- and power-hungry goldbricker preventing their well-meaning overlords from reconciling any growth this quarter — depending on which publication you’re reading.

The quiet part that I finally have to start wondering out loud is:

What about the rest of us?

What about those of us who aren’t managers or bosses and are the only ones still left after a year of almost complete turnover in our departments or disciplines? What about those of us who used to have some semblance of healthy work/life boundaries that have been obliterated because our companies can’t find anyone else and we now have to take on the roles and workload of two, sometimes three people — at the expense of our mental and often physical health and without the pay rise that would come from actually working two or three separate jobs?

I know the leftovers of any great cultural zeitgeist aren’t as interesting or have any monthly search volume, but there’s still a lot of us who haven’t resigned because we can’t afford to. Who can’t look for new jobs because the current one is eating us alive. Who dread opening up our work emails after a long weekend of successfully not looking at any of them, knowing that tomorrow is going to be extra packed with meetings that will only serve to delay the never-ending Sisyphean avalanche that keeps snowballing over us down the same jagged peak.

If you’re not the one who’s Quiet Quitting here, if you’re the one who feels like you’re alone with all this work that you’ll never get caught up to, or never get finished or never get acknowledged because you’re the one who always does more than your job description because that’s who you’ve always been, and you’re sitting there reading this all this bullshit about a TikTok epiphany as a new rallying cry for labor the same way you read about all those people who quit last year without backup and a dream gig landed miraculously in their lap, know this: you are not alone. There are more of us than we realize, but we’re all too exhausted and burnt out from just hanging on while it feels like everyone else is self-actualizing into their front-facing phone camera for the world to see.

Because here’s the thing about folks who aren’t Quiet Quitting right now: we’re the ones who are actually going to Quit-Quit because we’re the reliable ones, the “productive” ones, the ones who get shit done while others stay off-camera and on mute and shut down their machines at 4:55pm on the dot every day without fail. Quiet Quitting would probably not even be a thing without us for the QQs and sometimes the rest of the company to fall back on. (Side note: I’ve now just learned about Quiet Firing, and it seems like a much more accurate and insidious problem than all of Quiet Quitting combined).

We’ve been doing it all our careers, and probably most of our lives, too. We’re the ones who got the A on the group projects that everyone else got claim, the ones who were taught to believe in the lie of meritocracy, to care too much about the capitalist system that does not care about us one bit. Bear with us, please, while we realign our entire lives and reprogram our brains accordingly.

This division between individual and collective workplace communication, naturally, could be mitigated with more labor unions in office workplaces, which are depressingly few and far between and probably illegal in most of the states and industries in which we work. There is no National Strategic Planner Labor Association, much as I would love to join or found one, or even just one for Agency Employees in general (You know it’s grim when you search for “ad agency union” and the first result is… an ad agency named Union). There’s nothing for us to all come to a consensus to Quiet Quit together, otherwise known as setting collective boundaries to make everyone’s jobs and lives better, not just one or two individuals.

I don’t have an answer or a solution for any of this, except the systemic dismantling of capitalism and the implementation of Universal Basic Income so no one needs to dream of labor if they don’t want to. Where’s that signup sheet in the empty office kitchen?

It also feels like the remote work revolution, while opening options for people who can’t work in traditional office settings and broadening talent beyond local talent pools (which has frankly been a net positive here in the flyover Midwest), has further isolated us from the actual humanity of our coworkers. We see pets and kids on camera, and that’s fun, but even for big projects, it has more often felt like everyone just does their own thing and moves on then they’ve checked the correct boxes — nothing more, nothing less — without checking to see who might need help with this project, who is struggling with other projects, whose good ideas aren’t being considered, which important voices aren’t being heard or included. And it’s felt like that for a year, if not longer.

But also, I don’t blame them, either, if that’s the only recourse they feel they have against the weight of everything crushing us right now.

For what it’s worth, I’m an Elder Millennial and I do not plan on quiet quitting. If I do quit, it will be LOUDLY and with a backup job ready in two weeks or less if I can help it, but truly — and I know this is the shadow of the Girlboss I Wanted To Be potentially still speaking — I actually like my job. I enjoy the work that I do and I’m also really good at it, and I want my work to reflect that. I can’t disconnect that part of myself immediately when things get busy, or force my brain to switch off as soon as the clock hits 5:01pm every day. And in case it’s still not abundantly clear, this is absolutely not me expressing concern for the bosses or the brands or the bottom line or the state of business as we know it.

Basically, if you’re going to Quiet Quit or you’ve already started doing so, please just tell someone else so we can all know what your boundaries are and adjust our own accordingly. You don’t need to tell your manager, and definitely do not tell HR, but maybe tell the colleague from another discipline that you work on the most projects with. Or your lunch squad or coffee crew or book club — those things that are hard to come by when everyone is just doing the bare minimum in the name of survival. I can say with almost absolute certainty that they will be supportive and potentially even empowered to communicate their own to others. Boundaries mean nothing if you’re the only person who knows about them.

I had to draw some firm lines last week when my resourced hours were in a literal crisis state, and it was the hardest thing I’ve had to do in a long time, maybe in my entire professional life. The guilt I felt knowing that I’m definitely not the only person drowning in months of backlog and the shame of having to admit to that I thought I could handle it all when I actually could not was almost as painful as the 60+ hr weeks, the many cancelled-and-rescheduled-and-cancelled-again Summer Fridays, the missed deadlines and personal events and milestones, the constant apologies to both coworkers and loved ones, the screaming impostor syndrome, the sub-par work I put out because of time and energy and hours and lack of sleep and inability to focus and perfectionist procrastination.

Being vocal and honest and firm about my work boundaries was terrifying and it might come back to bite me, but trying to keep going without saying anything OR shutting down completely without telling anyone would have been much, much worse. I’m frankly still dreading tomorrow and the ensuing Short Work Week Time Warp, and the weeks ahead in the last month of the quarter. But knowing that I set those boundaries, that I said something and someone heard me, makes me feel more in control and secure than just silently and passive-aggressively leaving anything outside my own job description to be someone else’s problem.