You Already Missed Your Chance to Quiet Quit

Unless you’ve been living under a rock — and if that’s the case, congratulations to you for avoiding this world for so long — you’ve undoubtably seen an explosion of stories about young people “quiet quitting.” It doesn’t matter that you don’t know a single person who has quiet quit or seen a co-worker quiet quit, there was editorial space to fill and a specious, management-friendly narrative to box and ship.

If the term was one of your precious stonks, you’d be crossing your arms in great satisfaction as the one line is going straight up.

All this peer pressure may have wore you down and caused some deep, considered thinking about whether this method of just sorta stopping doing the job could work in your own situation. But, alas, those who hesitate will be lost. This morning, courtesy of CNN, we have a new wrinkle in the Great Quiet Quitting saga.

It’s apparently too late. The window is gone. QQ-ing is over.

Someone named Justin, dubbed a trailblazer in the field, is back to working 50 hours per week. Dammit, Justin! You’ve ruined it for the rest of us. Extrapolate this anecdote out nationwide and one can scientifically conclude that the power has shifted back from the worker back to the organization. Those few months were nice but are now in the rearview mirror.

Nothing left to do from here but grind fingers to the bone, show up at a miserable job for the next 50 years and hope some strands of the social safety net survive because, well, — *gestures at everything.*

Quiet quitting is over. Loud working is back.