Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout
by
Cal Newport
Published 5 Mar 2024
GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In early August: James Tapper, “Quiet Quitting: Why Doing the Bare Minimum at Work Has Gone Global,” The Guardian, August 6, 2022, theguardian.com/money/2022/aug/06/quiet-quitting-why-doing-the-bare-minimum-at-work-has-gone-global. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The New York Times and: Alyson Krueger, “Who Is Quiet Quitting For?,” New York Times, August 23, 2022, nytimes.com/2022/08/23/style/quiet-quitting-tiktok.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT NPR followed with: Amina Kilpatrick, “What Is ‘Quiet Quitting,’ and How It May Be a Misnomer for Setting Boundaries at Work,” NPR, August 19, 2022, npr.org/2022/08/19/1117753535/quiet-quitting-work-tiktok.
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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT NPR followed with: Amina Kilpatrick, “What Is ‘Quiet Quitting,’ and How It May Be a Misnomer for Setting Boundaries at Work,” NPR, August 19, 2022, npr.org/2022/08/19/1117753535/quiet-quitting-work-tiktok. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT a “really bad idea”: Goh Chiew Tong, “Is ‘Quiet Quitting’ a Good Idea? Here’s What Workplace Experts Say,” NPR, August 30, 2022, cnbc.com/2022/08/30/is-quiet-quitting-a-good-idea-heres-what-workplace-experts-say.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The old-school Far Left: For the reader interested in this topic, in December 2022 I published an essay for The New Yorker that offered more detailed deconstruction of quiet quitting, including my interpretation of its meaning and importance: Cal Newport, “The Year in Quiet Quitting,” New Yorker, December 29, 2022, newyorker.com/culture/2022-in-review/the-year-in-quiet-quitting.
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Even Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary weighed in. (In case you’re wondering, he thinks quiet quitting is a “really bad idea.”) As typically happens with internet trends, the quiet quitting movement eventually catalyzed a dogpile of one-upmanship and reactionary criticism. The “kids these days” crowd scoffed at the somber TikTok declarations. Your worth as a person might not be defined by your labor, they noted, but your salary as an employee certainly will be. Others found the idea to be unnecessarily passive-aggressive. If you’re unhappy with your job, they argued, talk to your employer; to quiet quit just lets them off the hook for running a dysfunctional workplace.
Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future
by
Jean M. Twenge
Published 25 Apr 2023
The ethos was perhaps captured best by the 1999 movie Office Space, in which the main character decides to do the bare minimum at work, going fishing when his boss asks him to work the weekend (two consultants promptly and ironically decide that his attitude merits a promotion to upper management). Even the term quiet quitting was coined by a Gen X’er named Bryan Creely, who made a video saying there had been a “seismic shift” away from the “constant, incessant need to work, work, work… Are you somebody that has quiet quit on the job?” It remains to be seen if the post-pandemic trend of quiet quitting will persist, for Gen Z or for all generations. Figure 8.1: Percent of U.S. 12th graders who expect work to be a central part of life and are willing to work overtime, 1976–2021 Source: Monitoring the Future Notes: “Agree” and “mostly agree” responses shown for work centrality; “agree” shown for overtime.
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Schwartz and Coral Murphy Marcos, “Return to Office Hits a Snag: Young Resisters,” New York Times, July 26, 2021. Atlantic writer Derek Thompson calls the digital commute: Derek Thompson, “Superstar Cities Are in Trouble,” Atlantic, February 1, 2021. “Goal for today—500 calls?! We’re doing 50”: Matt Pearce, “Gen Z Didn’t Coin ‘Quiet Quitting’—Gen X Did,” Los Angeles Times, August 27, 2022. Even the term quiet quitting was coined by a Gen X’er: Pearce, “ ‘Quiet Quitting.’ ” Millennial Polly Rodriguez, whose company sells vibrators: Goldberg, “37-Year-Olds Are Afraid.” “The lesson for companies: ignore employees’ pain at your peril”: Ryan Faughnder, “Disney Is Not Alone. Young Employees in Revolt Are Holding Bosses’ Feet to the Fire,” Los Angeles Times, March 12, 2022.
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At least, it did until 2021 when the pandemic dealt a blow to work ethic and teens backed off their post-recession willingness to focus on work. Perceptions of Gen Z’s work ethic took a further hit in 2022 when the term quiet quitting (doing the minimum at work) started making the rounds, often on the Gen Z haunt TikTok. “Goal for today—500 calls?! We’re doing 50,” says a young woman in a TikTok skit on quiet quitting. “Don’t give me extra work,” she tells her boss. While it’s true that young employees were in the driver’s seat due to low unemployment and labor shortages, some pointed out that coasting at work was first publicly popularized not by Gen Z but by the “slackers” of the 1990s, Gen X.
Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters
by
Joanna Walsh
Published 22 Sep 2025
Of course, office jobs are a specific type of work, which increasingly has a hidden dark side: the hi-tech software-development offices of big data in privileged urban centres worldwide are a front for the traditional sweatshops where the components they rely on are mostly manufactured. There is nothing virtual about the virtual. LOLcats are not so much an expression of the refusal of work as a desire to be at work, but at a leisurely pace, uncommitted, painfully pleasurable. LOLcats are not a violent revolution but a go-slow or, in its more contemporary iterations: quiet quitting, bullshit jobs, lazy-girl careers, #fails. Cheezburger’s para-site, Fail Blog, expanded from photos of #fails (verb becomes noun) to whole narratives.34 Most of these 48narratives are not about the failure of the poster, but their revenge against a system that has failed them. In fact, it’s a success blog.
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They call for ‘acceleration which is also navigational, an experimental process of discovery within a universal space of possibility’, but they deplore the traditional ‘horizontal’ processes of the grassroots left and call for action ‘at scale’, despite recent evidence that the development of informal online micro-networks are one of the far right’s most effective strategies. These networks are created not via technological acceleration but by word of mouth. Land’s interest in Albert Hirschman’s distinction between Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970), which posits quiet quitting as the ultimate right of citizens to ‘exit’ democracy and form alternative structures, opposes voice to the body. If voice is adaptable to the virtual, physical exit is very analog. Its logical conclusion is today’s ‘seasteading’: offshore ‘micronations’ with their own laws. Despite the many defenders of the body as the ground zero of protest, physical political presence can depend on the rights and privileges of meatspace for access.
The Wealth Ladder: Proven Strategies for Every Step of Your Financial Life
by
Nick Maggiulli
Published 22 Jul 2025
: I asked that [work] should be looked upon, not as a necessary drudgery to be undergone for the purpose of making money, but as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself.[12] This is how work can contribute to increased mental wealth. While early retirement and being disengaged at work (i.e., quiet quitting) are currently all the rage, I ask that you reconsider such notions. The goal of work shouldn’t be to do less while getting paid more or to do nothing at all. The goal of work should be to find meaning in what you do. Because when you get paid to contribute very little, you end up giving up one of the most important things in your life—your purpose.
Working Identity, Updated Edition, With a New Preface: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career
by
Herminia Ibarra
Published 17 Oct 2023
When a relationship with a mentor deteriorates, or irreconcilable differences with our superiors arise, we experience more than mere disillusionment; our images of possible futures also change. June’s academic identity was forged in a relationship with her mentor; once her “personal agenda” interfered with his agenda for her, his support waned and so did the corresponding possible self. Like her, most of us feel bad about postponing the break. Some of us “quiet quit,” putting in progressively less and less time at the office. Others walk out the door (or are pushed out) sooner. Either way, short-circuiting the unpleasant but necessarily inefficient middle period when we are searching for alternatives is counterproductive. “We need not feel defensive about this apparently unproductive time-out at turning points in our lives,” writes Bridges, “for the neutral zone is meant to be a moratorium from the conventional activity of our everyday existence.
Look To Windward
by
Iain M. Banks
Published 14 Jan 2011
'He is resigned to a long wait.' 'I heard you took him walking.' 'Along the coastal path at Vilster.' 'Yes. All those kilometres of cliff-top path and not a single slip. Almost beggars belief, doesn't it?' 'He was a pleasant walking companion and seems a decent sort of person. A little dour, perhaps.' 'Dour?' 'Reserved and quiet, quite serious, with a sort of stillness in him.' 'Stillness.' 'The sort of stillness there is in the centre of the third movement of "Tempest Night", when the steel-winds fall silent and the basses hold those long, descending notes.' 'Oh, a symphonic stillness. And is this mooted affinity with one of my works supposed to endear him to me?'
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
by
Robert M. Pirsig
Published 1 Jan 1974
It can occur to a monk in meditation, to a soldier in heavy combat or to a machinist taking off that last ten-thousandth of an inch. It involves unselfconsciousness, which produces a complete identification with ones circumstances, and there are levels and levels of this identification and levels and levels of quietness quite as profound and difficult of attainment as the more familiar levels of activity. The mountains of achievement are Quality discovered in one direction only, and are relatively meaningless and often unobtainable unless taken together with the ocean trenches of self-awareness so different from self-consciousness which result from inner peace of mind.