It's Not "Quiet Quitting" - It's Setting Boundaries

Have you heard of “quiet quitting”?

Of course you have. You pretty much cannot escape it. It’s on LinkedIn, MSNBC, CNN, it’s in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, NPR. Ever since the end of August, it’s been a near constant.

Before we go any further with that, it’s important to consider the stakeholders in this conversation. Why did quiet quitting garner so much attention so quickly, especially since it’s not even a new phenomenon?

That’s mostly because of who the mainstream media serves. The stakeholders include the millionaires and billionaires, and bosses and managers, those who will hurt most as a result of quiet quitting (as these publications define it, that is).

As Christopher Martin writes in No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class, newsroom editors are aware of their audience. With the growth on online readership and social media, audience metrics are more important now than ever.

Despite the pearl-clutching and public displays of principled ethics, newsrooms are largely for-profit businesses. They answer to their audience and, more importantly, to their advertisers. Even NPR, as a publicly funded entity, still answers, in part, to their underwriters and bureaucrats.

Therefore, much of what is covered must be couched and angled in a way that appeals to their audience.

Take, for example, this opinion piece in the Times. The piece begins with a generally agreed upon definition of the term quiet quitting, which Vanderkam writes is “essentially, doing the bare minimum at work.” Vanderkam then proceeds to make this an issue of time management. While she relents that employee burnout and employee stress are at record highs, the responsibility is placed on the employee to fix.

She proceeds by citing research on some of the well-meaning kind. To be fair, these are useful and insightful, but only if the problem at hand is actually time management.

See another example from a famous anti-social parasitic reality TV star. And no, I’m not talking about Trump. I’m talking about Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary.

If you know anything about O’Leary, you won’t be surprised that he thinks that quiet quitting is a bad idea. After all, this is the same guy that replied “It’s fantastic,” when asked about a then-recent Oxfam study that revealed the world's 85 richest people have equal wealth to the 3.5 billion poorest people, because it gives people something to look up to.

In a segment for CNBC, O’Leary states that he looks to hire the people who will work “25 hours a day, eight days a week.” He also says that if you’re shutting off your laptop at 5 p.m. and going home, “you’re not working for me.”

O’Leary, who has an estimated worth of around $400 million, insists that work should consume literally more time than you actually have in a day or week.

These are only two relatively recent examples of the way in which quiet quitting gets discussed by prominent voices in media.

Burnt out? Manage your time better.

Want to leave work at an appropriate time? Too bad. You better keep working if you want to keep your job.

At no point do these pieces, nor many others, discuss the systemic issues of American work culture. The inability to allot time for a healthy work-life balance rarely falls on the individual worker. It’s a top-down issue.

More than that, Vanderkam’s use of the phrase “bare minimum” is hilariously tone deaf.

As many employers like to remind their workers, they are there to do a job. The employer pays a wage, and the worker sells their time and talents in exchange for that wage. The responsibility of the employer, as many would argue, is to maximize the amount of work product they receive for the least amount of cost (wage).

Of course, these same employers who created this system will moan when the circumstances are described in reverse. Likewise for employers, employees are also making in investment in their employer. They trade their time and talents for the immediate return of a wage and, as is the case with many workers, for the prospect of higher wages and higher positioning within the company later on.

However, for those who are not interested in pursuing a higher position or who are employed at a company where no such progression is possible, it makes perfect sense that the inverse would still be true: do the least amount of the work for the most amount of financial gain (wage).

It’s the inverse of the rules that are baked into the system. It’s a perfectly fair position to hold.

However, many workers still land in the middle. And this is where the quiet quitting discourse immediately goes awry.

Examples of quiet quitting, as NPR stated (albeit, with some initial skepticism), include closing your laptop at 5 p.m., doing your assigned tasks and no more, and spending more time with your family. They also cite some of the criticism of the term, specifically that the term “…places the onus on the worker for doing the job they're being paid for and thus quitting.”

Again, while presented with skepticism and finishing the segment with some input from the only PR meme lord that’s worth listening to, Ed Zitron, it still does little to avoid assuaging its audience. Many pieces on NPR since have typically straddled this same line.

I want to assert here, unequivocally, that nearly all of the discourse around quiet quitting is nonsense. There is nothing wrong with establishing boundaries and fighting to hold on to them. There is nothing wrong with holding your managers and coworkers accountable when your workday ends. There nothing wrong with ignoring office emails and phone calls while off the clock.

You are paid to do a job. If you do that job and contribute to your team, you are remaining, even persevering. Quite literally, you are doing the opposite of quitting.

Having healthy boundaries with your workplace is not a negative. It is not a blackmark on your work history. Only in a country as soulless and communally deprived as ours would conflate the two.

Cover photo by Kevin Jarrett via Unsplash.