As a freelance journalist, I spend a lot of time on edge, wondering if I’ll ever work again, but I choose this job. This is what I love. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t. If I wanted to mentally unplug, I’d get a job where no one required my intellect, energy, or emotional investment.
Advocates of quiet quitting finally send the message that simply surviving, rather than living, is acceptable. Get the job done, check the boxes and move on. That doesn’t sit well with anyone who wants to live with a sense of purpose. In any case, since our jobs represent more than 75 percent of our daily life, it is impossible to separate our “real life” from the one we would supposedly leave.
Charging
That applies whether we are 20 or 50 years old. Why spend most of your life in a job you don’t care about? And for what? To avoid burnout? I’d burn out sooner working hard at that kind of job.
As the Millennial teacher admitted, two years after “quietly quitting,” she actually quit. She should have done her students, her colleagues, and herself a favor, and quit as soon as she decided that simply showing up was enough. Will her students one day look back at that poker-faced teacher repeating their lessons from memory and think, “I’m so glad I checked it out in her head, so she didn’t work herself to exhaustion”?
If you’re tempted to quietly quit, man or woman, get up and quit. Take a holiday. Find a job you can invest in and work with a purpose. Or take a side job that you are passionate about. But don’t sit back and engulf your colleagues in passive disregard for the work you share.
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