‘Quiet quitting’ is TikTok’s answer to grind culture, but it’s not what you think

Before the pandemic, 31-year-old digital strategist Jürgen* loved his job. He had a good team around him whom he considered friends, and the work he was doing was stimulating and manageable. “For a long time, I was genuinely excited to go to work every day,” he says. “I was working for a company I was passionate about, on projects I thought were interesting, and with people I enjoyed working with.” But, when Coronavirus and its resulting lockdowns hit, he found himself “working 15+ hours every day, due to cuts that were made across the company.”

“I became incredibly burned out, depressed, and felt permanently numb or panicked about work," he continues. "This resulted in me speaking to friends less, and made my relationship with my partner suffer." Jürgen sought therapy, which helped him realise how jaded he felt about the work he was once enthusiastic about, and see that the culture of the company had drastically shifted. So, he began to take a step back – sure, he still did his job, but he no longer dedicated all his thoughts and time to it, and instead prioritised his personal life and relationships.

Jürgen isn’t alone in this. In fact, the phenomenon has a shiny new name: quiet quitting. Quiet quitters avoid going above and beyond at work and reject the hustle culture mentality. Instead, they do just enough to keep up and then leave on time, muting Slack when they do. The label is particularly taking off on TikTok – the #QuietQuitting hashtag currently has 4.6 million views – where users preach about abandoning the idea that “your worth is defined by your productive output". It comes with a backdrop of depressing statistics from workplace analytics company Gallup, whose 2022 State of the Global Workforce report showed that just nine per cent of employees in the UK feel engaged with their work.

“Our ‘work’ and our ‘life’ aren’t easily disentangled,” explains Dr Maria Kordowicz, an associate professor in organisational behaviour at the University of Nottingham. “The quality of one directly impacts our experience of the other. Quiet quitting is about a conscious effort to uphold our wellbeing in the way we work, rather than risk burnout through working long hours or defining ourselves simply through our work.”

The idea isn’t strictly new. Quiet quitting is believed to be an evolution or adaptation of China’s “lying flat” movement, which sees young people reject high-pressure jobs that offer little reward for an easier, more balanced life. Although the trend – also known as “tang ping” – was welcomed by many when it emerged in 2021, the term was soon censored by Chinese social media platforms and rejected by the Chinese Communist Party.

Though the western trend may have been emboldened by its Chinese counterpart, the idea actually goes back even further. Anthony Klotz, an associate professor at University College London’s School of Management, calls it “withdrawal, disengagement, or neglect”, all of which are part of “citizenship behaviours”. As he explains it, “people are good citizens when they feel their organisation has over-invested in them, but if they feel like their company has under-invested in them, they’ll do the bare minimum.”

While the behaviour is long-established, the new name can be unhelpful. ‘Quitting’ suggests workers are slacking or giving up on the core elements of their jobs, when in fact they’re doing exactly what their job requires of them – and no more. Specifically, they’re no longer doing extra, unpaid labour. “It’s a terrible reframing,” says David*, a creative director from Yorkshire. “We seem to punish people in modern work culture who actually just do their jobs as per their job descriptions – when actually these people are the ones getting it right.”

It’s not a coincidence, either, that quiet quitting has been linked to Gen Z, most of whom are at the beginning of their careers – the time during which many companies expect to be able to exploit workers, based on their eagerness to “climb the career ladder”.

Kordowicz says the negative connotations of this phrase have already led to workers “being labelled as ‘lazy’ or ‘snowflakes’ in the right-wing media”. She adds: “Here we move to individualise the problem, blaming the worker instead of seeking organisational solutions – for instance, appropriate workload and the enactment of employee-centred wellbeing policies – or societal ones, like social security and the four-day working week.” What’s more, as Klotz says, in many jobs, a transactional relationship like this – “where people have minimum expectations of one another, and the job gets done” – isn’t even a bad thing.

Perhaps it's actually late capitalism (and clueless hustle culture cheerleaders like Molly Mae) – encouraging you to measure your worth via professional achievements big and small – that convinces you otherwise. This is something Lucy Arnold, an activewear brand founder, has started to turn against. Although she’s self-employed (and therefore in a more privileged position than many workers), Arnold sees herself as quiet quitting or, more aptly, rejecting hustle culture, particularly post-pandemic. “Instagram made me feel that, in order to be successful, I had to be working 24/7,” she tells GQ. After a relative passed away, Arnold found herself questioning this unsustainable work ethic. “I thought to myself, ‘What’s the point in investing in this constantly while the world passes around me?’” Arnold began prioritising her friends, started going on long walks while listening to podcasts, and, importantly, gave herself time to grieve.

Arnold is on the other side of the employee/employer relationship to Jürgen, but says her team noticed the difference when she stopped “micromanaging” them. “This was refreshing for them,” she says, adding that they’re “happy with” the change.

This trend of repudiating hustle culture follows last year’s so-called “Great Resignation” – as coined by Klotz in May 2021 – which saw workers all over the world quit their jobs at historic rates, with 85 per cent of UK businesses being affected. A year on – in the midst of a cost of living crisis and with a recession looming – quitting no longer has the same appeal. “Quietly quitting is a sensible response to a job that isn’t very fulfilling for you, [but is one that] you need to stay in,” says Klotz.

This isn’t to say that quiet quitting is a solution to the Great Resignation. In fact, it raises new problems. “The recession will help slow resignations, but it won’t deal with the underlying burnout [that’s led to them],” continues Klotz. “If 40 percent of employees want to quit their job, and they do actually quit, that’s a problem. But it’s an even bigger problem if 40 percent of your employees want to quit, but none of them do – they just keep working as disengaged workers.”

Although advocates on TikTok swear by quiet quitting, crediting it with alleviating their feelings of stress and worry, it’s really up to employers to help workers manage burnout and stress, and to give them a decent living wage.

When employers don’t step up, though, quiet quitting can offer workers autonomous respite from the grind – and can help them figure out when or if they actually want to resign. “I recently quit my job and I feel much lighter mentally,” says Jürgen. “For the first time in a long time, I feel excited about projects that I’m working on and more positive for what the future holds. I haven’t left the company just yet, but the shackles are starting to feel looser.”

*Names have been changed