The “Quiet Quitting” Doom Loop
A two-year collective existential crisis birthed an interesting phenomenon in 2022: quiet quitting.
While the term primarily began proliferating around the recesses of TikTok, it didn’t take long for quiet quitting to catch fire in the mainstream media. Publications breathlessly debated the topic and took pretty predictable stances: Gallup asked if it was real, the Harvard Business Review declared it was worse than the real thing, and the New York Times wondered who it was good for.
It was a reasonable response to the Hustle Culture x Pandemic mashup wherein corporate nihilism ran hot, but something about quiet quitting never quite sat right with me as an actual solution to the challenges of maintaining full-time employment.
It’s not because I think you owe it to your employer to go above and beyond every day (you don’t, unless they’re compensating you accordingly) or because I think there’s a perfectly linear relationship between effort and compensation (there’s not), but for the simple fact that quiet quitting is a life satisfaction doom loop.
Unsurprisingly, a doomer time netted a disheartening solution that essentially translates to the professional equivalent of, “Just give up!”
In Cal Newport’s Deep Work, he asserts a very simple thesis: The fulfillment you derive from your work isn’t based on the work you’re doing, but how you’re doing it. “To build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction,” he writes, probably between sips of fair trade espresso while pecking away in a minimalist chic office.
He points out that the pinging, dinging, and ringing of notifications and seemingly meaningless tasks keeps us looping in a frenetic, agitated state that doesn’t feel good—but this is so common in modern white-collar America that it’s basically become synonymous with the experience of modern office work (“LARPing your job” as opposed to actually doing it, as it were). When you’re the passive recipient of other people’s demands on your time, this dynamic is hard to escape.
“You can train yourself to like what you do by immersing yourself in it more wholly and engaging more deeply with the craft.”
Newport’s implication is clear: You can train yourself to like what you do by immersing yourself in it more wholly and engaging more deeply with the craft; by taking a more active role.
Assuming you accept Newport’s premise, quiet quitting is exactly the wrong medicine for burnout—not because it might help establish boundaries (a positive thing), but because it basically prescribes “opting out from caring” as the solution. And while not caring about the work you do can make your life less stressful in the short term, it also makes work (and, I’d argue, your life in general) less captivating in the long term.
You’ve been feeling a little disinterested in your job, so you decide to lean out a little more—but this only makes you feel more lukewarm about it, because the psychology of engagement usually functions on a positive feedback loop.
Not caring about your work is “easier” in the same way that eating Sour Cream & Onion Pringles for dinner (guilty) every night is easier. It fixes the immediate problem of being less demanding, but it doesn’t fix the long-term problem of actually nourishing you.
And the reality, for most of us, is that work is going to be a major part of our lives until we amass enough capital to pull the ripcord. Roughly a third of your waking hours for the majority of your life will probably be spent engaging in some type of labor—and being mentally withdrawn for a third of your life is, to put it bluntly, a little depressing, isn’t it?
My suggestion? If your job makes you so miserable that the only viable solution is emotionally disengaging entirely, you should actually quit (well, okay—find a different job that interests you more, then quit).
The sunk cost fallacy tells us that if we’re not interested in our chosen career, then that’s too damn bad; this is the path we’ve chosen to walk and it’d take too long to go back to the checkered line and restart the race.
“Sometimes, it’s not the job at all—it’s just the way we’re approaching it.”
But that’s not how the modern career trajectory works, and the truth is that most paths are more closely connected than they appear. A hop, skip, and a jump sideways may land you squarely in the middle of a different path.
And remember what Newport said? Sometimes, it’s not the job at all—it’s just the way we’re approaching it. We expect the content of the job itself to be the thing that ignites our passions and provides fulfillment, but what if it’s actually how you do the job?
So assuming your current employment situation is normal but a little lackluster, how do you make a job—any job!—feel like a dream job?
Try cosplaying someone for whom your job is a dream.
Think, for a moment, and conjure a fake employee tasked with doing your job who has been obsessed with being this particular thing their entire lives. If you’re an executive assistant, this is the person who grew up dressing as an executive assistant for Halloween every year and made their mommy play CEO with a complex calendar with them.
What would someone who’s obsessed with this role do differently? How would they approach it?
You might be like, “Oh, they’d use automation software to make this more streamlined, and they’d send proactive check-ins with information before someone asks for it, and they’d maintain calendars with the precision and discipline of a German train schedule, and they’d send thank-you notes on their boss’s behalf, and…”
Make a list of all of those things and start mapping them onto a weekly schedule. Pretend.
Maybe Monday from 8–9 they’d groom calendars for the week. From 9 to 10 they’d scan through email and make a list of what’s important and deliver it in a timely update. Maybe after that they’d field any new requests for the next hour.
“If you train yourself to like what you do, I guarantee your performance will improve.”
Mapping it onto a weekly calendar makes it real. It takes it from, “I don’t know, that person would probably be more enthusiastic,” to, “That person would spend 2–3 PM every Tuesday cleaning up their record-keeping and doing proactive sales outreach.”
I’m making shit up, but hopefully you get the picture. Now, at first glance, this might sound like a case for settling—but that’s not true. It’s about allowing yourself to derive genuine pleasure from whatever gig you’ve got right now, even if it’s ultimately just a stepping stone somewhere else.
I’ve used this technique to break out of work ruts in the past. It wasn’t until I actually mapped out an ideal week (and tried to actually follow the schedule) that I realized how little I had been giving, and in doing so, I realized I wasn’t having fun at work because I wasn’t doing very well at work. And if the work itself doesn’t get me hot ’n bothered, the second-most fun thing is being really good at it.
If you train yourself to like what you do, I guarantee your performance will improve—making both compensation increases easier to justify and boundaries easier to implement and enforce.
And if some parts of it feel slippery, try to operationalize it. For example, we all know how important relationships are at work—if networking feels awkward and untenable to you, operationalize it. For 45 minutes every Thursday morning, you’ll send five outreach emails to people to check in, or set up 20 minutes to hear about what they’re working on.
At first, it might feel exhausting and counterintuitive to try “caring more” as a solution for feeling disengaged or disconnected at work—but the alternative is almost certainly more spiritually draining and unsustainable long term.
