What "Quiet Quitting" Says About Modern American Work Culture
It's not what I thought it was.
When I first heard the term “quiet quitting,” I assumed it was when an employee stopped showing up to work and did not tell anyone they were quitting. That would be pretty obnoxious for an employer and all the other employees who suddenly have to pick up work or handle bureaucratic documentation.
It turns out that is not the essence of quiet quitting. Investopedia says, “Quiet quitting refers to doing the minimum requirements of one's job and putting in no more time, effort, or enthusiasm than absolutely necessary.” That does not sound like quitting of any kind. It sounds like doing your job.
Fulfilling your responsibilities as an employee is regarded as a form of quitting, reflecting a shift in American work culture influenced by deeper cultural and technological transformations.
An employee/employer relationship is a contractual relationship. The employee signs a document that they will perform X activity, possibly over a given period, for Y amount of money. Employees fulfill their duty to their employer by performing X activity, and the employer pays them Y. This is close to the Platonic form of a modern job. So, why is it described as quitting?
Life is not purely contractual. A marriage is (or, at least, should be) more than the marriage contract filed with the state. Until we reach the blockchain anarcho-capitalist Nick Land paradise, most life will reside outside written contracts. Instead, the rules for behavior are “written” in a social contract, tacitly agreed upon by members of a social body.
Social contracts are not composed by lawyers and are filed with the court. They evolve through the interaction of individuals, sometimes across generations. A social contract is part of a shared culture. If a written agreement is breached, the guilty party must pay restitution to the injured party. If a social contract is breached, the guilty party is often ostracized from the group and forced to find a new group. The ape parts of our brain do not like losing the tribe, so we tend to stick to the social contract.
But what if many tribe members start violating some aspect of the social contract? When a part of the social contract is repeatedly breached, it must be written down and formally enforced. This is the case with many parts of the law. For example, do not strip off all of your clothes in public. This rule is not in the Constitution but in the books, presumably because enough people stripped off their clothes in public, and the magistrates had to write down some consequences for anyone else who dared try.
Social contracts rely on a certain degree of trust and mutual respect. My employment contract does not specify that I will refrain from making rude remarks to my coworkers, nor does it state that they will treat me the same, because that is part of the social contract. Once such behavior starts to seep into formally written contracts, we can deduce two things: 1. The written contract is becoming tyrannical, and 2. Something has gone amiss in the social body.
If one party begins to violate the mutual tacit agreement within the social contract, the other party has two options: either to violate in a way that benefits them or to try to formalize and enforce the violated aspect of the social contract. In an employer/employee relationship, the employee has more barriers to formalizing enforcement. Therefore, if the employer begins to violate their side of the social contract, the employee can only violate it in turn.
This is the essence of quiet quitting: employees feel their employers have either violated the social contract or can no longer trust their employees to honor it. In response, the employee withdraws from the social contract entirely and falls back on the letter of the written agreement.
The social contract between an employer and employee typically states that the employee will go above and beyond expectations for the sake of the mission and look for ways to improve the company. In return, the employer will have a reasonable opinion of them, leading to pleasant interactions, more freedom in the workplace, bonuses, and maybe even a promotion.
Why do employees feel like their employers have violated the social contract?
Accountability is a critical aspect of any contract. However, an employer is first and foremost accountable to the shareholders. An employer is not accountable to the employee (comparably speaking). This is the root of the violation. This is not to say that employers are doing anything wrong; their primary duty is to make the business profitable.
There are two ways employers have lost their employees' trust.
First, the rise of artificial intelligence puts many employees in uncomfortable positions in many domains. Even if AI cannot entirely replace someone’s role, the hype sends that message. Many employers are picking up on that hype, predicting that they can reduce payroll costs with vector multiplication machines.1 An employee must wonder: Does it matter how many good boy points I get this quarter? How does the boss’s opinion of me stack up to actual numbers on the bottom line? Good boy points do not fit in a spreadsheet. Therefore, it is reasonable for an employee to fall back on only doing their job and not exceeding expectations.
Second, cultural clashes can profoundly damage a social contract. American culture started as a strange admixture of European customs. Primarily Anglo at the start, it has incorporated aspects of Irish, French, German, Italian, Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant culture, to various degrees depending on the region. These cultures had already interacted for centuries before the birth of America. Many socially contractual expectations had butted against each other and found equilibrium by the time American culture came into its own.
The mass migration of non-Westerners, which has accelerated in recent years, completely disrupts this European social contract. Whether from India, China, Africa, or South America, many immigrants do not come from a history of Anglo-European norms. Some assimilate, but the process can take generations. Incorporating complete foreigners into tacit cultural expectations is impossible when they come in droves. Sure, many assimilate perfectly fine. But, on average, the possibility and expectation that they will have diminished.
Employers are increasingly outsourcing work to foreigners. This takes different forms, whether employing Visa holders because they cannot quit or switching to remote overseas jobs. Regardless, the impact is the same as that of the AI case. Employees realize that the accounting department does not have a field for how much the boss likes them. However, the difference with the AI case is that this has already happened. Americans compete with immigrants who are willing to work for half their wages at all economic levels.
So, how do we fix this? If you are a quiet quitter, are you right to do so?
It depends. Are you using the extra time and energy to scroll TikTok all day? The future looks bleak for you, my friend. There are better things that you can do.
When the social contract erodes, and the corresponding rules have not been put into a written agreement, we have this neat thing called asymmetry. This gives you many opportunities. Do not waste it on doomscrolling.
Tortuga’s initial claim to fame was the job-stacking scheme. Although I am not a stacker, this is an example of taking advantage of the asymmetries produced by the erosion of the social contract.
I am not a quiet quitter. I am very intrinsically motivated, especially to benefit myself. My employer and I have a tacit agreement that I am allowed to improve myself as long as it benefits the company.
I cannot tell you precisely what to do. But do something that benefits your future.
On a societal level, employers are not wrong in fulfilling their primary obligation. Technological changes always create strange interim periods where nobody knows what full integration will look like. AI will probably not replace many jobs within the next few decades. Some businesses store all their critical data in Excel sheets. They are about two decades behind in terms of automation. They will not embrace AI-automation tomorrow. The hype will die down, and people will begin to understand how AI has impacted the economy. The social contract will heal.
On the other hand, mass migration and outsourcing remain significant problems. There should be less high-skilled immigration. The United States should pursue a policy similar to Keir Starmer’s proposal: a 33% salary fee for all foreign workers employed by a company, maybe even higher. This will encourage employees to find high-IQ young people in fly-over countries instead of flying over cheap labor from other countries.
This is a time of economic transition. Immigration policy should first benefit Americans. The full impact of AI will become clear. In the meantime, you need to be proactive. Think ambitiously and creatively about your future, and then map out your plan to get there. Shout-out to Tortuga for helping me out in this process.
At root, artificial intelligence is mostly vector multiplication.
Excellent analysis. Too often, the younger generations lack of enthusiasm for wageing is mischaracterized as simple laziness or poor morality. It’s refreshing to have someone actually interrogate the WHY of the phenomenon with candor.
In my experience, while quiet quitting is indeed unpopular, quietly automating your job is even less so. To understand why, one must examine the psychology of the manager. A manager measures his self-worth firstly by the number of people he supervises, and secondly by how busy they appear to be. Since his work mainly consists of communication, the manager will often define productivity by the amount of communication occuring both within his team and between his team and other teams. The clever automator who writes a script to obtain information others make phone calls for appears lazy and socially inactive, hence diminishing the self-worth of his manager. It is for this reason that the most productive members of a corporation are also the most reviled by their superiors.