All right, so I'm looking at our show notes here. We got two good blocks of questions. Looks like later on, I'm also going to introduce a case study, try and do more of those, actually hear about someone who has applied some of this advice that we talked about and what it looked like.

As always, I encourage you to submit your own questions. There's links right in the show notes. You go to a survey, boom, type it in, comes right to us. We appreciate any and all questions that you send in. All right, so before we get going with those questions, I want to start today as I often do with a deep dive.

Many of you have been sending me notes and messages and articles about the current workplace related internet trend, de jure, which is quiet quitting. I then went relatively deep on this topic over the weekend for a writing project, something I was writing for a book chapter for my slow productivity book.

I went deep on this topic and did some research about where it started from and how it's being covered and what it's really all about. So I figured this was a good excuse today's episode to actually talk about quiet quitting. So if you haven't heard of this, this is the timeline I was able to excavate through my research.

This trend starts on TikTok. It starts in July. So there is a TikTok username at the time, ZKChillin. He has since changed his username, but his name was ZKChillin. He posted a 17 second video on TikTok that featured soft piano music playing over a montage of videos. There's one of it's him on the subway, and then you see a downtown New York City street and then a residential street.

And then for some reason, a child's automated bubble machine. So it has this montage and you hear his voice and I wrote down what he says in that video. So he says, I recently heard about this idea of quiet quitting where you're not quitting your job, but quitting the idea of going above and beyond in your work.

Then he goes on a little bit. I won't read the whole thing to reject hustle culture, to reject the idea that hustle culture demands, which is that your work is your life. And he says, the reality is that it's not, and your worth as a person is not defined by your labor.

So that TikTok video becomes popular. Other TikTok users start posting videos about quiet quitting, in particular, lots of profession specific videos. So there's a well-known one now that's a teacher talking about the demands of teaching and et cetera. Right. So it becomes a TikTok phenomenon. The mainstream media picks it up as far as I can tell, early August, they pick this up and it has now been covered extensively in the mainstream media and other types of media since then.

So it jumped from TikTok into mainstream discussion. So I'm loading up here on the screen. So for those of you who are watching this episode or segment on YouTube, you can actually see the article, but I'll narrate for those who are just listening. There is this article from the Guardian on August 6th, which I believe as far as I can tell is one of the first actual old school media sources to tackle the topic.

So it was titled "Quiet quitting while doing the bare minimum at work has gone global" and it was written by James Tapper. I just want to point out a couple of things from this article and then what I want to do is give you my thoughts on all this.

So this article opens, I just want to point this out by saying Bartleby is back, although no doubt he would prefer not to be. This is a very British way to open an article like that. There is a book, Melville wrote a short story, I think it's a novella short story, I think it's a short story, maybe novella, called Bartleby the Scrivener.

And it's actually one of the first, as far as I can tell, books about knowledge work on Wii. So check out that book if you haven't seen it. But anyways, that's very British. The number of American TikTok users who would know that reference I'm going to assume is low.

All right, so let me jump ahead here. Here's another key quote. "Instead, they are doing just enough in the office to keep up," so this is talking about the "quiet quitters," "then leaving work on time and muting Slack." The writer then adds kind of snarkily, "then posting about it on social media." So here's the summary of quiet quitting that this Guardian article gave.

They're doing just enough in the office to keep up, then leaving work on time and muting Slack. Now, there's some good analysis in this piece trying to understand this trend. So here's a quote from an expert. "Since the pandemic, people's relationship with work has been studied in many ways, and the literature typically across professions would argue that, yes, people's way of relating to their work has changed." We talk about that often on the show, the impact of the pandemic on people stepping back and saying, "Wait a second.

What's going on with my life? What's going on with my work? Is it a good time to regroup?" Another quote from this expert, "The search for meaning has become far more apparent. There's a sense of our own mortality during the pandemic, something quite existential around people thinking, 'What should work mean for me?

What can I do in a role? How can I do a role that's more aligned to my values?'" And finally, we have another quote here from a Harvard Business School professor who introduced this term, "The great rethink" as a better way of describing the current moment in knowledge worked in something like the great resignation.

There's a lot of rethinking happening. All right. So I want to give, let me give some thoughts here. First of all, I should go on to say this article, which was one of the first, was one of the better articles on this topic. They defined what quite quitting was and then gave this psychological context, what's going on in the workplace, why might this trend have emerged?

Since then, things have been going downhill. I do not necessarily suggest getting, looking at the online coverage of this topic as I went into it for my, the chapter I was writing. In the months since this, this idea first arose, I think online discussion and coverage has become a pile on of superficial criticality.

The online commentators are seeing this issue mainly as a chance to prove their sophistication and bona fides by trying to one-up whoever talked about it last by pointing out what they missed. You thought this is wrong, but you're the problem because you missed out on this problem and then someone else comes in.

And I find it to be completely non-useful. So you have the original quiet quitters on TikTok, and then you get the reaction that's like kids are lazy. This is just called having a job. What are you talking about? And then you have the crew that comes in and says, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, you both are wrong because what neither of you are doing is cataloging every single identity group and trying to argue which identity groups will have an easier time than worse.

You have to have a huge appendix trying to rank order the ease with which different groups can do quiet quitting. And until you acknowledge that you're the problem, then someone else comes in and says, "No, all of you guys are the problem because what you don't realize is that you're bougie stooges and the key here is to rebuild capitalism and replace it with something better." This discussion in general is just part of the superstructure that is upholding this economic exploitation.

Everyone trying to one-up everyone else, everyone else trying to make everyone else seem dumber than them. It's a mess. It's a pile on. Ignore it. So let's push that aside. Let's get rid of the posture and get back to the original issue here of quiet quitting and this context that I think the Guardian provided, which I think is quite good.

So I think there is something important here. What we're seeing in that TikTok discussion is a new generation. We'll call it this pandemic generation, the generation that had the pandemic disruptions hit early in their adulthood. Meaning for lack of a better word, lifestyle design. The idea that work is one of the factors that you can intentionally deploy as part of a larger plan to construct a life that is meaningful or deep.

So it's an intentional approach to life in which you are designing your life to meet whatever criteria you have for meaning and depth. So it is good to see a new generation discovering this. The frustration is, is they're starting from scratch. I mean, quiet quitting is a simplistic and crude first step towards trying to understand, well, wait a second.

What role does work have in my life? I'm working too much. I don't know why. Probably because someone's being evil. I think I'm going to work less. It's a very simplistic first step towards a deeper, more necessary conversation. This is a topic that has been covered every single generation going back quite a few generations.

Go back to the 19th century, read Walden by Thoreau, jump forward to the 20th century, read the seven story mountain, jump forward another 20 years, read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, jump forward to the 21st century. You can start with Eat, Pray, Love, then go onwards to the four hour work week, which by the way, was covering this exact issue the last time we went through this, which was the post 9/11 recession.

And my generation, the early millennials entering the working world and trying to find their way, we had Tim Ferriss's version of lifestyle design. It's also covered by us here on the show and in my writing extensively when we talk about the deep life and lifestyle centric career planning and career capital and the method of intentionally trying to construct a life that is deep and how you have to be systematic and deploy lots of different angles at it.

So it's not a topic we're starting from scratch. The TikTok crew kind of is. So I think this is the good news, bad news. The good news is what a topic. And I'm glad I think it's a serious topic and I'm glad it's getting attention with this particular group.

The bad news is, look, if you start from scratch, I don't think you're going to catch up to Thoreau anytime soon. Like people have thought about this. So you should pull from what is already out there. So I think this is an important topic. I'm glad it's being looked at.

This pandemic generation probably has had the most impetus to look at this topic that we've seen since, I don't know, maybe the Zen of the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, sort of 1960s, early 70s. That's probably the last time we had a comparable disruption in culture, evolution of culture that required a pretty serious re-rethinking.

That eventually, by the way, led to the 1980s. We talked about this recently, early 1990s notion of passion and following your passion and the bastardization of Campbell's Follow Your Bliss, which has been the mixed bag. And we're having another one of these evolutions now. The great rethink of induced by the pandemic is going on.

We're trying to rethink these things. So I think quiet quitting is reflecting a good trend. Even if the details of these TikTok videos are easy to dismiss, I would say let's resist that urge. Yes, if you're going to look at 23-year-olds posting 17-second videos, we can make fun, we can make ourselves feel smarter than everyone else.

But I think what we should do is see this as an opportunity to help a group, a large group of dissatisfied and earnestly searching people find their way so they don't have to do this all from scratch. So that's my thoughts on quiet quitting, Jesse. It seems like that would be a topic in both books that you're going to work on.

Yeah. Because this is a slow productivity book, right? Slow productivity, right. That seems like it would be even a bigger product topic in your next book. Yeah, I think the Deep Life book is going to be a big topic, is going to be a good match for this. I mean, it's all in the air right now.

And this happens every generation. You get to a place, economically things are going good, there's other concerns, you don't really think much about work. And then once you get going, something happens and you're like, well, what role is work supposed to have in my life, what's going on here?

And people try to figure this out. So with slow productivity, how does it relate? Well, I mean, I think slow productivity is maybe a little bit more narrow in its attack on this topic, but slow productivity is saying, what even are you going for when you say you want to be productive?

Like, what is your definition of a working life well executed? And the argument there is that we have these, we don't think it through. We have these superficial definitions. I don't know, busyness is better than less, hustling is better than not hustling. I want to feel like I'm earning my keep, but it's all very haphazard.

And a lot of what we actually do when we're trying to get after it, quote unquote, in our work is ironically counterproductive, makes us more miserable. It's not maximizing useful output. And so slow productivity is saying, why don't we go back and rethink what we even mean by productivity, especially when it comes to knowledge work, to try to find something that's more sustainable, that's going to make life more meaningful, and it ultimately is going to produce better stuff.

So it's like a narrow first stab at the great rethink. And then the deep life is much broader. The deep life is where you say, you know what, we're going to move to Kentucky. So quiet quitting kind of helps define it. And then from there you can start. Yeah.

Yeah. Quiet quitting or quiet quitting is a response to the same underlying impetus that my books are coming out of, which is people starting to rethink work, its role in their life, and what they're trying to do with their life more generally.