Stop normalizing overwork!

"Quiet quitting" is what everyone should be doing

There’s a scene somewhere in Charles Bukowski’s Factotum where Chinaski explains his problem with work: “It’s not enough that you show up and do the job. These people want you to pretend to be happy while doing it. They don’t want your brute force, they want to own your soul”.

I get it: we all have to work because Eve took a bite out of an apple or whatnot. Agreed. We’re destined to work, to plow and labor through life, in exchange for some days off and the weekends, when we drink ourselves silly to forget the sheer soullessness of being a cog in a machine.

Don’t get me wrong: if you’re happy at your job and find meaning in what you do, well, congratulations. You’re part of the minority. Rock on, do your thing, go to the office on a Sunday morning and bleed for the company. What’s utterly unfair is that you demand other people feel the same. It’s a highly discriminatory system, since the only way you can get a swank job at some tech company with ping-pong tables, slides and all the other infantile perks, is if you go to College or University, which is a major investment. We’re not all the same: some people don’t get to chose and wind up stuck as a gas station clerk or barista. Asking them to enjoy their horrible, underpaid jobs, is the “Learn to code” of 2022.

I remember being at a job interview to be a waiter, at night, for minimum wage, no transport fee or even meals included; because I just couldn’t find any other job. I couldn’t care less, but when the boss looked at me and asked, “why do you want to be a waiter here?”, I just exploded.

-Do you really think I want to be a waiter? I’m a student, a foreign one at that, and this is all I could find. Of course I don’t want to be a waiter! Can I be honest? Anyone who walks through that door and says he wants to be a minimum-wage night water with no transport back home after the Metro closes, is lying to you, Sir. Nobody wants to do that. We just don’t have an option, is all. That said, if you hire me, I’ll be the best waiter I can be, I’ll try and learn and do a good job, but heck, don’t ask me if I’m living my life’s dream while carrying trays about”.

Now we have a new concept, “Quiet quitting”, cooked up by our oligarch overlords to advance their psychopathic worldview.

What is “quiet quitting”, you ask? The first time I came across the word, I thought it referred to people giving up on their jobs, doing nothing (aka, “quitting”) and just sitting at their desks until the boss fired them.

Man, was I wrong about that one. According to Wikipedia: “Quiet quitting is an application of work-to-rule, in which employees work within defined work hours and engage solely in activities within those hours”.

Wait, what? People who “work within defined hours” and refuse to do office-related BS outside those hours? That’s your “quiet quitting”? This is ridiculous: don’t call it “quiet quitting”, call it WORKING, because that’s what work should look like.

This maniacal framing of “work” is another symptom of the loss of meaning in our societies. I’ll be writing more about that in the future; for now, we can acknowledge we’re living in Nietzsche’s dire dead-God predicament: a world in which any search for transcendence through a deity is scoffed at, and some naïve form of pantheism (“God is energy”) has imposed a search for immanent meaning. In layman terms, if there is no God, you turn inside to look for transcendent meaning-making structures. However, this “inside” is completely hollow, an empty space people desperately search to escape, leading to an explosion in anxiety, depression and all the mental problems ravaging the West.

A priori, one could be led to think work would be a suitable substitute for God as a meaning-creating structure. This is absolutely the case for Homo Faber, the man-that-makes-things, like a baker or a blacksmith. However, in the case of Homo Laborans, the man-that-labors, contemporary society and our hyper-specified division of labor has reduced us to complex tasks so small they seem meaningless.

Whereas a hundred years ago, you might have been part of a task force building a car and get to see the project to completion, nowadays, you’re just in charge of this micro-micro function: aligning bolts with a computer, for example, an activity so far removed from the final object (the car) that it seems utterly meaningless as time goes by.

Work cannot make us free because we’ve siloed and compartmentalized labor. Let’s face it: anyone who “works” in a company today will tell you over half his time is spent sending e-mails, making BS Excel sheets, writing reports nobody cares about, defining abstract “KPIs” that are supposed to measure “growth” (they don’t)... In other words, doing a bunch of tasks that have little or nothing to do with the final product.

Is it surprising, then, that people have started saying “enough” and retrenched to the bare-bones aspects of their jobs? Do you really expect us to keep on swallowing your HR bullshit, “we’re a family and we care about you”, which only works to bait you into going to the company’s horrible “seminar” but which disappears magically once the “family” gets to downsizing?

Friends don’t “fire” friends. Family doesn’t “let people go”. We see through you. It’s a scam, a hollow, valueless system you’ve created, which you pretend has meaning and value, when the truth is, you only care about the money.

So stop pandering to us with your condescension and your silly judgmental concepts: we’re not “quiet quitting”, we’re WORKING a full-time job, and then trying to BUILD A LIFE outside the hell-hole you’ve created, through friends, sport, art and other, more humane endeavors than your sitting-at-a-desk sending emails lifestyle.

We’re not “quiet quitting”: you’re “loud exploiting”, which is very different.