A profound cultural shift is underway in the landscape of work, variously hailed as “quiet quitting” or criticized as selfish laziness, yet at its core, it represents an overdue recalibration of the dialectics between labour and life. The headlines trumpet post-pandemic depression or postmodern malaise as explanatory tropes, while psychologists and coaching industries profit from booming demand. Yet, beneath these surface narratives, foundational changes are reshaping work itself: disengagement, whether willful or weary, has become a byword for a generation—or perhaps for an era.
Is this a cultural reckoning or a collective abdication? Has “chilling” become the new watchword of Western modernity? In the corridors of schools, the endless scroll of social media, or the dinner table conversations of the privileged classes, there is a recurring question: why work more than you must? Why not seize the opportunity to do just enough, and guard the sanctity of leisure against the encroachments of a never-satiated obsession with work?
The romanticized memory of postwar generations—our parents and grandparents—celebrates a “work hard, play hard” ethos of heroic struggle, hard-earned advancement, pride in craftsmanship, and a gradual, well-deserved ascent to middle-class stability. Yet the evidence suggests this, too, is a partial myth. The breadwinner model excluded millions, and the Protestant work ethic brought with it repression, burnout, and conformity. Work has always been a double-edged sword: a means of survival, an occasional path to self-realization, and frequently a source of quiet suffering.
What, then, has changed? Contemporary data reveals a paradox: job satisfaction and engagement in much of the developed world are in long-term decline even as material comforts has never been higher. The vocabulary of burnout, precarity, and quiet quitting is especially prominent among the knowledge and service workers, whose labour is increasingly detached from tangible production and shared purpose. Underpinning this are structural forces: wage stagnation, housing crises, credential inflation, and slow erosion of the social contract.
The “new” ethos—if it is one—is more complicated than a simple retreat into self-indulgence. For many, disengagement is a rational response to management-by-algorithm, bullshit jobs, short-term contracts, and the relentless churn of platform capitalism. For others, it is the apotheosis of positive psychology: work is no longer expected to be a vocation, but a transactional arena for the pursuit of “wellness,” autonomy, and authentic self-expression. To “quiet quit” is not only to do less, but to expect less: the once hallowed ideal of meaningful work fades, supplanted by the more meagre hope of not being consumed.
And yet, the trend provokes critical unease. The quiet abdication of engagement, though understandable, risks conceding ground to the capitalist instrumentalization of labour for profit—an irony not lost on Marx, nor on contemporary scholars of the “precariat.” Is this really freedom, or simply resignation? This mutual withdrawal—workers retreating from commitment, employers treating labour as mere input—albeit asymmetrically, entrenches the hollowing out of work’s formative, life-shaping power.
At the margins, we see that this disengagement is not equally distributed. The luxury of detachment belongs mainly to the privileged: those with security, mobility, and voice. For the working poor, for care workers (still overwhelmingly women), for precarious migrants or the Global South, “quiet quitting” is not on the menu. For them, work remains a necessity, often stripped of dignity and upward prospects. The contemporary rhetoric, in its universalizing mode, risks obscuring this brutal inequality.
Still, even among the fortunate, something vital is being lost. Ancient wisdom—Aristotle’s vision of work as an end in itself, the craftsman’s pride in the gradual acquisition of mastery, Marx’s vision of humans as creative “homo faber”—are fading from our social imaginaries. The formative function of work, its role in building not just prosperity but character, mutual recognition, and societal solidarity, is quietly being surrendered.
The crucial question is not just whether disengagement is rational or moral, but what kind of society emerges when both capital and labour collude—actively or passively—in the evacuation of meaning from work. Are we sleepwalking into a future where work is merely endured or abnegated, estranging its civic and existential significance?
This, then, is the deeper crisis: a society that treats work as a means to profit or self-protection, rather than as a crucible for the good life, will find itself diminished—hollowed out, transactional, and disposable. Quiet quitting, like quiet surrender, is not just an individual strategy but a collective warning: without formative institutions that restore work’s role as a site for human dignity and flourishing, we risk losing the very possibility of meaningful life at all.
The future of work beckons more than discussions over wages, psychological safety or the nostalgia for the virtues of the boomers. It demands a reckoning with is being lost, and a conscious effort to rebuild robust institutions—organizational, economic, and cultural—that once again render work an end worthy of pursuit.
The future of work calls for more than debates about wages, psychological safety, or nostalgia for the virtues of past generations. It demands a profound reckoning with what is being lost, and a conscious effort to rebuild robust institutions—organizational, economic, and cultural—that once again render work an end worthy of pursuit.
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(Published: 10.07.2023)