Quiet Quitting isn’t New: and it’s still a bad idea

When I first heard the term Quiet Quitting, I was immediately irritated. I’m sure this is simply a consequence of getting older, and that the generation that came before me thought all the same things about me and my peers, but the relentless rebranding of things that have always happened and then claiming them as new is becoming extremely tiresome to me. You’re not on a diet anymore; you’re bio-hacking. And you’re not lazy anymore; you’re Quiet Quitting.

There is nothing new about this approach to work. It’s as old as jobs themselves. In every western country I have ever spent time in, showing up to a job you don’t like and not doing it very well has always been far more common than showing up with ambition and drive. People have been Quiet Quitting for decades; they’ve just not been so insufferably loud about it.

What’s perhaps most irritating about this particular rebranding is that it is now being presented as a victory for the employee, when in fact the opposite is true. As if going to work and doing the bare minimum is some kind of loophole that has been discovered that has turned the tables on greedy employers. It’s being presented as a way to get one over on the bosses, entirely missing the fact that the bosses will all be completely fine anyway. The only person who is going to suffer from Quiet Quitting is the person doing it.

If you’re not in management or HR, and you’ve never had any exposure to internal talent assessment processes, let me let you in on a little secret: it would be an absolute nightmare if every single employee was ambitious and driven. We wouldn’t know how to cope with that. There aren’t enough opportunities, there isn’t enough money, and frankly, we actually do need most of you to just do the job we give you and not expect anything more. In fact, in almost every company that carries out any kind of performance review, the systems they use wouldn’t even allow for everyone to be rated in their top tier. We don’t just not mind you quietly quitting; we depend on it.

If you want to Quiet Quit, go for it, but just know that you won’t be hurting anyone other than yourself. If you really want to “win” though, don’t Quiet Quit. Just quit quit. Go and find a company that would appreciate you if you put in the effort, that would develop you if you put yourself forward for it, and that offers you a job that makes you want to do more than the bare minimum. Sticking around doing work you don’t enjoy to make people who don’t care about you money is not a victory, even if you do it badly.

And if you’re not ambitious, and you’re happy just staying in a job and doing no more than whatever the minimum requirement is, that’s fine too. But you don’t need a special name for that. That’s just called “having a job”, and literally hundreds of millions of people have been doing it since we came up with the concept of money.