It’s Malcolm Gladwell waxing emotional about how much he loves return-to-office and pleading, “Don’t you want to feel part of something?” as if the man has never heard of, like, recreational softball. While everyone else got with the program that trying hard at work-against a political and national backdrop that feels like daily, endless crisis-is ridiculous, or worse, meaningless, these guys (it’s not exclusively a male thing, of course, but I’m not not being gendered on purpose) haven’t quite gotten with the program. ![]() They’re a cross between a teacher’s pet and a supply-room narc if they’re not already a manager, they certainly aim to be one day. The professional try-hard I’m talking about is someone who, in the year 2022, still earnestly and performatively buys into the white-collar hustle and prides themselves on it. We can call the former, if you’re feeling derisive, the “professional try-hards ” I’d love to be flip and just say that, at this point in planetary decline, anyone who’s a little too interested in emails and Google Docs basically counts as a try-hard, but there’s a specific category of salaryfolk and company leadership provoking a justifiable kind of scorn. “Realizing like, I’ve become kind of a unidimensional person…I’m quiet quitting mentally to make room for me to be more than just a worker.” (Klotz allows for the record to show that he, too, was not immune to the Big Quittening’s reach earlier this year, he resigned from his post at Texas A&M University for a new job teaching at University College London.) “People are talking about it as a mindset shift,” says Klotz, who has studied resignations for more than a decade. ![]() Whatever moniker you give it, there’s now increasingly accepted room for the idea that you might step off the professional gas pedal in order to protect your well-being and even sense of identity. “All jobs have core elements of the job, which we call in-role performance…‘quiet quitting’ is quitting everything beyond that, which we call citizenship behaviors-going above and beyond the call of duty,” explains Klotz. Take the latest debate on “ quiet quitting” as a trendy, divisive term for what Anthony Klotz, the management professor who inadvertently coined “ the great resignation” back in May 2021, links to the not-new concepts of worker disengagement and withdrawal. Of those who have given notice, there’s a predictable amount of regret: just not, it seems, amongst the clear majority.Īnd so the future of white-collar work has morphed from an advertiser-friendly thought exercise to an existential question with a daily subset of moral riddles: Is that an illicit midday nap, or is it just work-life balance? Is it really the end of work friends, or is it just that a defensive herd mentality is no longer crucial to getting through the day? Is it worse to work on vacation, or to have a little vacation at work? Is the delivery bot lost in the woods, or is he finally free? Ambitious women are reportedly done with girlbossing (now in vogue: girlresting) and The Wing has officially crashed it appears Kim Kardashian’s assessment that nobody wants to work these days was correct, because even Serena Williams can’t have it all. The antiwork subreddit is the hottest club in town. As the labor market has tightened and the labor movement regains cachet, living “under capitalism” has become a default punchline. Roughly one pandemic later, there has been such an abrupt rupture in the way we work-not to mention how we think and talk about it-that we grasp at new taxonomies for the disillusionment with the hustle: It’s millennial burnout, it’s the “Age of Anti-Ambition,” it’s the Great Resignation. It never occurred to me, or my colleagues, or these brands, to wonder if the real future of work might actually look like something far more radical. We knew advertisers loved the idea of fashioning themselves as part of this revolution, and I still remember how I’d decorate those PowerPoints with stock images of ultramodern office spaces and stylish, suited figures in carefully varied skin tones. One of the most popular themes was what we slickly called “The Future of Work”-a catchphrase cribbed from the marketing and MBA-swinging circles invested in forecasting all the exciting ways corporate life would change amidst peak millennialification of the workforce. During my first job in media in the late 2010s, I was a glorified PowerPoint assembler on a magazine’s marketing team, where we spent our days figuring out what kinds of stories and topic areas corporate brands liked to put their advertising next to.
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