Over the last month or so, the phrase “quiet quitting” has become more well-known as more and more people, especially young people, quietly quit their jobs or otherwise enforce boundaries to cultivate a more sustainable approach to working. When I first heard this phrase I assumed that it simply involved quitting your job, but not making a big fuss about it, and I was surprised to learn that “quiet quitting” does not involve quitting at all.
“Quiet quitting” equates to merely doing your job instead of the ethnocidal norm in the U.S., which is to work above and beyond your job in search of promotions or some type of elusive fulfillment that your job can allegedly provide. Quiet quitting is clocking in at 9am and clocking out at 5pm, and not letting your job consume most of your life. Quiet quitting helps ensure that your life is your life instead of your job being your life.
Generations of Americans have been raised with the belief that their job defines them or is their identity, and this belief encourages people to devote their lives to their jobs. Quiet quitting is a rejection of this ideology, and unsurprisingly the United States’ work-oriented, capitalistic society has responded by professing the dangers of quietly quitting.
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There have been many misleading articles describing the alleged financial difficulties people will encounter from quietly quitting. Additionally, these articles say that minorities and women can supposedly ill afford to quietly quit because they are already in a precarious situation within American capitalism where their race and gender already serves as a professional impediment.
Right now, America is having an important conversation about our relationship to our jobs, and while quiet quitting has become an important conversation, the language we are using actually serves as a subtle impediment to the progress we hope to create.
How Existentialism Explains Quiet Quitting
In existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s book Being and Nothingness there is a famous passage about a waiter that Sartre uses to describe what he calls mauvaise foi, or bad faith.
In this example, Sartre describes a waiter whose actions and movements were “a little too precise, a little too rapid,” and it appeared as though he aspired to define himself as being a waiter. The person’s actions were almost mechanical in their precision, and it appeared as though he believed he was some idealized, mechanical version of a waiter instead of a human being who had agreed to get paid to work as a waiter for a determined amount of time. Sartre described this person’s bizarre pursuit to be a waiter as “mauvaise foi” because he was lying to himself, and/or believed that the lie of becoming a waiter was the truth and obtainable.
In my book, The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America, I use Sartre’s example of mauvaise foi to describe America’s unhealthy work relationship, and I state how this example is often hard for Americans to understand because we have been taught that being a waiter is our primary purpose in life. In America, if you sacrifice your life so that you can be a waiter, you will allegedly obtain the wealth that can allow you to buy a big house, fancy car, send your children to the best schools, and afford healthcare. We are told that by sacrificing your life, you can then obtain an even better life.
This relationship with work is of course a lie, but there is a complexity to the lie because most of us are unaware that we are lying. Most of the time we are not consciously lying to another person, but are instead lying to ourselves and convincing ourselves that the lie is true. This is what Sartre calls mauvaise foi.
When asked, most Americans know that our work culture is unhealthy, but we spend a lot of time trying to convince ourselves that it is good. We want to believe that things are good because we want to believe that we live in a good place. Therefore, we want to be a waiter so that we can prove that it is good.
As we suffer through stress, anxiety, burnout and financial instability, we can all see that it is bad, but our desire to believe in the goodness of our society inclines all of us to continue to live in mauvaise foi. As I write in my book, in America “we devalue life in favor of the freedom and wealth that perpetual labor is supposed to provide,” and “The gateway to American freedom reads ‘Work will set you free.’”
Quiet quitting is a bold attempt at pursuing a freedom that does not require being worked to the breaking point and losing your humanity.
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The Language of Quiet Quitting
In our last newsletter, I spoke about the difficulty of creating proactive language in American English. Much of our supposedly positive language exists only as a response to something bad. We linguistically aspire to be “anti-bad,” but rarely cultivate language that is “pro-good.” Quiet quitting is another example of our anti-bad language in pursuit of something good.
Quiet quitting articulates that workers have chosen to quit engaging in the extra work that comes with the perpetual hustle and rat race of American capitalism. They are against working in this unhealthy way, and that is important, but what is more important are the proactive good actions they intend to do instead.
If your ideas are anti-bad, and if you do not also cultivate a pro-good philosophy, then it will become incredibly easy to revert to your bad way of life because you have not figured out another way to proactively live. Being merely anti-something will eventually become passive, boring, and stagnant, so you need language to help you cultivate a healthy, nourishing, and good life. American English is strangely absent of these words, but many other countries are not.
For example, the German word Feierabend is essentially their equivalent of quiet quitting, but it has a completely different meaning. Feierabend means “evening party” and for centuries German people liked to end their day with a feierabend. However, as capitalism spread throughout Germany and people began working longer and longer hours, Germans realized that their feierabend started to disappear. They found themselves living in a world without an evening party, and Germans agreed that this had become catastrophic.
The preservation of the feierabend became a rallying cry for the German labor movement, and now Germany is known for the efficiency of their work culture and staying late or working overtime is heavily frowned upon. German workers aspire to efficiently and effectively get their work done between 9 and 5, so that they never miss their daily feierabend.
Also, a feierabend is not a literal “party,” but instead it is whatever each person considers a “party” to be. A feierabend could be meeting up with friends for a beer, but it could also be quietly reading a book, going on a bike ride, or walking through the forest. A feierabend is a daily nurturing activity, and the act of nurturing yourself should be considered a “party” or “celebration.”
In both cases, Americans and Germans confronted the same dilemma and had the same goal, but Germany’s proactively good language revolutionized Germany’s work culture, and quiet quitting is probably destined to become one of America’s many passing fads due to its nature as a reactive, passively anti-bad term.
American English struggles to create pro-good words, and I believe this is because we are still unsure of what good is while we have very clear examples of what bad is. American culture has never created a daily evening celebration, so we can never ask for the return of a goodness that never existed here in the first place.
Instead we have to create a goodness that we have never experienced, and this process can seem fantastical despite examples like feierabend proving that it is often the status quo in other countries. To create good, we must use words to profess a proactive goodness instead of merely being anti-bad.