Bad news for all the aspiring “quiet quitters” out there: the dubious trend is officially over. A few months ago, media outlets were working overtime to push out pieces about how nobody wants to work hard any more. Hustle culture is over, the narrative went: burnt-out employees are doing the bare minimum. Now, however, the economy is rubbish and a recession is imminent. Instead of quiet quitting, everyone is loudly labouring.
Well, maybe not quite everyone, but one guy certainly is. In March, Insider featured an anonymous recruiter using the pseudonym Justin who had started to deliberately slack off at work. That column inspired a TikTok; soon thinkpieces on quiet quitting were everywhere. The trend appears to have been short-lived though. The magazine recently caught up with Justin and found that his work attitude had shifted dramatically. Some of his colleagues had been laid off and he was worried about the economy. “Today Justin, the OG Quiet Quitter, is back to going above and beyond,” writes the journalist in the latest update. “He is working 50 hours a week.”
Not everyone seems to have got the memo about the economy shifting, by the way. On 27 October, Bloomberg published an article entitled Quiet quitting surges in finance as it gains steam across sectors. “The viral quiet quitting trend is taking hold in finance,” Bloomberg reported. I’m sorry Bloomberg, but do you hear yourselves? Do you think people stop going above and beyond at work because it is a viral trend to slack off? Or do you think that maybe a global virus fundamentally changed how many of us think about work? I’m betting on the last. I’m also betting that there are a lot of Justins out there and that, after a brief period in which workers were able to demand more from their employers, the power balance has shifted. Quiet quitting was a funny concept. Employers going back to holding all the cards, however? Slightly less hilarious.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
