Are you in fashion?
That is a loaded question. However, I was reading an article today that mentioned a few of the very predictable results from "Quiet Quitting", the ridiculous advice that some people seem to have followed under the belief that it would improve their wellbeing. I say it is predictable, because I have written about it several times over the last year or so in articles like this one from last year.
Rather than addressing the issues that are making you miserable at work, quiet quitting is probably making you unhappier, less productive and less hireable in the future.
Being seen as disengaged from your work and the company culture can also negatively impact your reputation, limiting future opportunities such as training, bonuses, or promotions that you may be interested in.
It isn't an "Aussie" trend, it is global. And, I don't actually work with people who would do this, because the people I work with tend to be motivated and keen to have a career, not stagnate in whatever position they currently have forever. But, what is interesting with these "movements" is that a lot of the young people seem to be influenced by the social media influencers and follow suit, as if some random person on TikTok should be their guiding light for career aspirations.
If everyone is doing it...
Crowds are not very bright when they are aligned along a single thought process, and social media trends are even worse, because it is the loudest voices that get amplified. What this means is there is an availability bias that doubles down on our confirmation bias, leveraging the emotional state of "not feeling adequately valued" in the workplace, suggesting a reaction to the problem, not a solution. If you are going to "work your wage" you are going to get treated how you work. So, if you are feeling under-rewarded and your reaction is to work what you are rewarded, the likely outcome is you are going to be valued even less.
Not a good career move.
But it is not just the career prospects that suffer, because as the article points out, people who have done this are generally unhappier for it. There are multiple reasons for this, but a few of them are the lack of opportunity to grow, the boredom of doing bare minimum and the lack of purpose. The "what am I doing with my life?" question comes up, because what does it mean to do the bare minimum at a job that one isn't willing to do extra for, and then realizing that they might not have options to move internally, as they no longer have a suitable reputation within the company for a promotion. On top of this, if you have ever worked with a colleague who does the bare minimum, you probably don't build very strong bonds with them, which means that these people are also becoming more isolated.
It is not the end of the world for the young though and hopefully, they will use this as a learning experience to work out what is actually important to them in life. Sure, work probably isn't a passion for most people, but most of our passions require work in order to acquire the resources necessary to enable them. Therefore, we have to come to terms with the work we do, and we have to predict what resources we might need in the future.
Today, you might be happy earning enough to pay your rent, eat out occasionally and spend Friday night drunk with friends, but is that the life you want for yourself in a decade from now? What does that life look like and what resourced would you need in a decade to have it?
For many of us, as we progress though life we change our wants as we mature and experience new things. A young person might not be thinking of having a family now and perhaps thinks they don't want one at all, but can they commit to that, even if they meet the person of their dreams who does want to start a family.
Will the opinion change?
Maybe, maybe not. But, what affects does that have on the relationship, what affects does it have five or ten years past that point? While we can predict how we will feel in the future, we should also note all of the times where our predictions haven't been accurate. We have all had the planned night out that we expected would be awesome, but ended up lame. And, we have all had the expected lame night that randomly ended up awesome. This is what the future of our life can be, because what we are predicting with now is based on past conditions, not what we will actually face in the future.
But if you are making decisions on the future that are pushing hard to a commitment to a course of action and result based on what we know today, when that result happens, is it still what you want? It is impossible to tell, but one thing is for sure, we can't do anything without the resources required to do it. If you want to drive your car but don't have money for the fuel, what do you do? This is the way our life operates.
On resources.
The personal resources we have available are our time, energy, attention and skills that we can apply to activities, but if the activities we are doing are not leading us to personal growth and improved application of resources, we will stagnate at best and fall quickly at worst. Neither stagnation or degradation are typical conditions of satisfaction and wellbeing. And this is what we are seeing with the people who committed to quiet quitting, a stagnation of their career growth and degradation of their current state - and they are feeling it.
We should value ourselves and we should look to be valued in the work we do. But past of that is valuing the work we do, or the process and implications of the work we do. If we don't value what we do in an organization where people are relying on us to do a job, they aren't going to value us. This isn't about being taken advantage of, however it really isn't easy for us to objectively value ourselves in an organization, as we tend to think that we do more work than the person next to us, even if it is not true at all.
All trends go out of fashion and the lifecycle of social trends is getting shorter and shorter. And this is why people who follow social media trends have to consider the impacts and implications past the short term gain, because in general, they are instant gratification triggers that take away an immediate pain, but can leave us with far deeper issues down the road.
Perhaps what people should be quietly quitting, is following the loud voices of the uninvested masses.
It is out of fashion anyway.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]