Why the fuss over quiet quitting?

livemint.com:

TikTok, a social-media platform, in which an American called Zaid Khan embraces the notion of not going above and beyond at work, has caused an awful lot of noise. The video itself is amazingly anodyne. A piano tinkles.

Bromides such as “Work is not your life" and “Your worth is not defined by your productive output" flash on the screen. Mr Khan implies that time not spent hustling at work can be better spent playing with a bubble machine and admiring trees. Dull or not, it stamped on a nerve.

Workers approvingly shared their stories about deciding not to work overtime, about prioritising work-life balance and about doing enough to get their job done without succumbing to burnout. Several bosses promptly lost their moorings. Kevin O’Leary, a businessman-cum-television-personality, called it “the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard".

Arianna Huffington, another entrepreneur, wrote a LinkedIn post in which she described quiet quitting “as a step towards quitting on life". The fact that some employees feel unenthused about their work is hardly new. In all workplaces employees show varying degrees of commitment to their jobs.

Some work late, others leave at 5 o’clock sharp, a few seem to do little more than respire. A survey of workers around the world by Gallup, a pollster, found that only 21% of them are engaged by their jobs. The very idea of going above and beyond requires a distribution of effort, with less committed colleagues providing a baseline against which others can be judged.

The nature of the work also matters: it is easier to be engaged by some jobs than others. It is unsurprising, too, that quiet quitting has a particular resonance now. Lots of employees feel detached from their work.