Days are short, life is long, and Quiet Quitting is Bullsh*t

I’ve been in the workforce for a minute. My Social Security statements go back to 1978 (my first job as a summer lifeguard), and I’ve earned taxable wages every year since then. Back in 1978 we had inflation and an energy crisis and the Cold War and the Jonestown Massacre. Jimmy Carter was president of the United States, and we had rotary phones and encyclopedias. (Before you “Okay, Boomer”-me, know that I’m Gen-X, both by calendar and mindset.)

I have been in the workforce for a long time, and I am here to say: The notion of ‘Quiet Quitting’ as a 'problem' is bullshit.

We know that it’s bullshit because no one, absolutely no one, is 110+% dedicated to work 100% of the time. It’s physically, mentally, and emotionally impossible. There are high-level, high-profile workaholics who blather on about how fulfilling their work is. But at some point, even they learn – through illness, messy divorce, financial troubles - that there is more to life than work.

In general, I believe that work is a good thing, at least when the work includes a living wage and personal dignity, providing the means to keep ourselves and our loved ones housed, fed, clothed, educated. If we’re truly lucky, our work engages us mentally and emotionally, providing a sense of purpose and engagement.

But life – if we are lucky – is long and complicated and rich. Time moves relentlessly forward, running more quickly with each passing year. Since there is no going back in time, we all need to ask ourselves - what are the experiences that we want to include in the fabric of our being? What do we want to do today and tomorrow and next year and in 10 years, and what do we want to remember, and what do we want to become?

The good news for employers is that some of the time, that answer is “I really want to focus on work because this project I’m part of, this team that I am managing, this problem I am solving is interesting and I’m learning so much that working overtime is not a hardship.” Or it’s “I have a ton on my plate, and I cannot work overtime, but I’m so engaged that I bang out more in 8 hours than most people do in 12.”

I’ve been that engaged in work. I’ve thrown up from morning sickness ten minutes ahead of delivering a presentation. I’ve done calls with execs and analysts while frantically gesturing and snapping my fingers at my kids to be quiet. I’ve worked on a 9-hour trans-Atlantic flight and then landed and gone straight to the office for another 8-hour workday.

But now it’s 2022 and we're supposed to believe that there’s some sort of epidemic of laziness called Quiet Quitting that will cause the downfall of capitalism if we don’t nip it in the bud immediately. How did we arrive in this precarious position? Surely we can blame Millennials and GenZ.

Or we can take a step back and recap the collective emotional, physical, and intellectual trauma of the past couple of years. [For the sake of brevity, we’ll pretend that the traumas started in 2020 with the pandemic. We won’t include school safety drills where we learned hiding under our desks was going to keep us safe from nuclear bombs, tornadoes, and active shooters (the first school shooting I recall was in Pearl, MS in 1981), or oil shortages, or wars in the Middle East, or 9/11, or hanging chads, etc.]

Remember January and February of 2020? When we didn’t own large collections of face masks, when we still mostly believed in medical science, when there was some hope that if we as a society were faced with an existential crisis that we might all pull together to beat it back?

Since then, we’ve seen 6,490,816 million people die across the world from the COVID-19 pandemic, and many of us have had multiple close family relatives and friends die from that disease. We also witnessed how businesses and governments quietly did the math on how much a human life is worth. How much do we provide to people who are unable to work? Do we support those who are unwilling to risk their own health and life (as well as any family or friends that they live with) for minimum wage at a grocery store? In many sectors and businesses, workers saw just how much or how little their lives and health were valued. Work doesn’t love you back – and sometimes it doesn’t care if you die.

Along with the pandemic, we’ve all learned about the vulnerabilities of the global economy. We are suddenly feeling the impact of shutting down a factory in China and how high winds can wreak havoc on supply chains. War in Ukraine is leaving the globe short on wheat, steel, and fuel. We’re finally admitting that the extreme weather events that are getting more extreme, more deadly, more costly, and more frequent are due to the relentless advance of climate change.

Processing all these things takes time and energy. In addition, they’re not going away which means we’re spending even more energy compartmentalizing enough to be able to function on a daily basis. So please – give me more hand wringing about ‘Quiet Quitting’, about how saying ‘no’ sometimes at work is a bad thing, about how I should wrap my whole identity into my job, about how my only source of creativity and purpose should be tied to how I pay my bills. Do it, and I will laugh in your face – lord knows, I need a good laugh about now.

Give work it’s fair share, however that adds up for you today. But remember the fundamental truth: work doesn’t love you back. If you’re lucky, work tries to love you back. But honestly, work mostly can’t love you back, so don't expect it to. Instead, give the best of yourself to the things that can love you back - your family, your friends, your community, yourself. Because days are short, life is long, and time is our scarcest commodity. Anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is lying.