While I was in Lisbon for Web Summit, Dead Cat co-hosts Tom Dotan and Katie Benner kept the podcast going without me. They brought on my old colleague Aki Ito, who is now a reporter at Insider, to talk about her reporting on coasting culture, which helped to spark the global discussion of “quiet quitting.”
The trio discuss how a recession will yet again change society’s relationship with work.
You can read Ito’s stories here:
* How hustle culture got America addicted to work
* Everyone's talking about “quiet quitting.” Here's what it means — and how the term got its start.
And here’s her latest on how the trend is reversing: RIP, quiet quitting — layoff fears have workers back to the grind
She writes,
One of the first documented cases of quiet quitting was a recruiter I'll call Justin. Deep into the coronavirus pandemic, after working 10- to 12-hour days for much of his career, Justin had decided to dial it back on the job. When I spoke with him in February, he had whittled his workweek down to 40 hours. In the ensuing months, he went even further, working as little as 30. Every week he worked a little bit less, freeing him up to spend more time with his wife and their newborn baby.
It was Justin, in fact, who helped spark the national debate that's been raging over quiet quitting. After speaking with him and other recovering overachievers, I wrote about how hustle culture, thanks to the job security granted by the roaring economy, was giving way to coasting culture. When a popular career coach on TikTok riffed on my story, the phrase "quiet quitting" became something of a new cultural dividing line. You either loved the Justins of the world for striking a reasonable work-life balance, or condemned them as slackers and cheats.
But by the time the US was furiously debating his new approach to work, Justin was already shifting gears. Over the summer, as the economy began to slow, he noticed his clients were scaling back their hiring plans. Performance reviews seemed to be getting tougher. Some of his colleagues were let go. "It made me nervous," he told me. "It hit me that I'm the only one who works in my family." So he decided to "play it a little more safe." Today Justin, the OG Quiet Quitter, is back to going above and beyond. He's working 50 hours a week.
Give it a listen
Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
00:00:05
Welcome. Welcome everyone to dead cat.
00:00:14
Tom dirt on here at joined by Katie better.
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Eric is away this week at the great European tax incentive
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known as web Summit so it's another one of those
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freewheeling off-the-cuff Katie and Tom episodes anything can
00:00:27
happen. But no we got structure this
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week. We could Tired.
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That's true. At it from any of our jobs.
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This could be the last time you see Kitty and I we got structure
00:00:36
this week, though. Because as our guest, we have in
00:00:38
the room akihito who is my colleague at Insider Aki is a
00:00:44
features reporter senior Tech correspondent and features
00:00:47
reporter. She's doing the deepen,
00:00:50
assiduous work of examining are very broken, very complex, very
00:00:54
troubled, psyche of work culture and she's written a ton of
00:00:58
really good stories about it. And as far as dead cat is
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concerned, it's just a topic that we come back to maybe the
00:01:05
most frequently on the show. It's then we explore the most
00:01:08
because it takes the least amount of expertise to talk
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about it. That's true.
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We're all working. That's true.
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You have to read the fewest numbers of articles about it,
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except for Aki's because we all work.
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We all find ourselves hating our jobs at different times and
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recognizing that other people hate their jobs.
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Nobody wants to work anymore, that has been like the great
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realization from the pandemic. Even though we all still do it
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and Aki and sort of been on the Forefront of examining, what has
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been going on in the last few years.
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And we'll talk about this later in the episode, but she wrote an
00:01:40
article about coasting culture that ended up being the
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inspiration for quiet quitting, and I would say you are directly
00:01:48
or indirectly responsible for that whole discourse, that whole
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cycle, where we talked about quitting.
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Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm sorry in advance.
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Yeah. Well, you're all responsible for
00:01:59
the term but we can talk about Later.
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So first of all, arguing you already said something, but
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welcome to dead cat. Thank you so much for joining.
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Yeah, good to be on. Hey guys aren't you want to talk
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about? Just your desire and decision to
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cover the work culture. Beat how long have you been on
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it at Insider or elsewhere? You know, I think I've been
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writing about work in some capacity for a really long time
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because I started out as an economics reporter and Tokyo at
00:02:25
Bloomberg. You know and I think work is
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like a big part of the job market, but you know.
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First, I covered it from kind of, like, a macro economics
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perspective, about the job market.
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And then when I moved to the states and 2012, I was writing a
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lot of stories about kind of the intersection of technology.
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And the job market held Tech was changing the job market in one
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way or another. So that involved a lot of
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stories about work in the late 2010's.
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Maybe around like 2018, I started like a YouTube
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documentary series about people in jobs that didn't Cysts may be
00:03:01
like a generation ago was called Next jobs and so that was
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probably, like, the closest I've done on like specific jobs and
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kind of more workplace issues. And then I came to Insider in
00:03:15
2021 and you know, from the beginning, I started as a
00:03:19
workplace reporter so that's kind of my trajectory got it and
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we say jobs that didn't exist a generation ago, but do now we're
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talking about social media manager podcast, Host.
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Let's see. What, what else do you put in
00:03:33
that group? Well, I think my favorite
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episode we did two seasons of it.
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My favorite episode took me to Rwanda which was really cool and
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I got to profile. This guy who was a drone
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delivery operator. So he helped these like
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autonomous drones, you know, fly blood to these really remote
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past battles or rural Rwanda was kind of saving people's lives
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that way. Yeah.
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Those kinds of jobs fascinating, okay?
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So I would put in the same category of importance as
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podcast host so I so what did you see as you started it
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Insider and got on this run of doing stories about the way our
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relationship with work has changed.
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I mean, what did you sort of see at?
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Let's say, 20, 20 21, when you began at insiders heard of
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writing these stories, what was happening?
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Well, I think, you know, from the beginning of my time at
00:04:26
Insider, I did want to write about this changing relationship
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to Work and mostly because my relationship to work changed a
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lot over the course of twenty twenty quite dramatically.
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And you know, I wanted to find a way to write about it.
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That wasn't just this like self-help.
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I don't know. Confessional, first person as a
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kind of thing. So I spent like most of 2021
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just thinking about it trying to find a way into it.
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And finally, in the fall of 20 21, I was able to convince my
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Editor to let me write like a big piece about it.
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And yeah, but We published that sa and January of this year and
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was that the essay about coast and culture that was before
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coasting culture. This piece was called how
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America got addicted to work. It was kind of like, I know like
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Aaron Griffith has been on the show before and like, you know,
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like the awesome stuff that she wrote back in when was it like
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2018, 2019 about puzzle culture, right?
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How ya like it was not going to last forever, wasn't
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sustainable? Yeah, yeah.
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Yeah. I feel like you know she and and
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Helen Peterson and it may be also Derek Thompson at the
00:05:36
Atlantic we're really early and kind of identifying this like
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crazy Devotion to work, especially, you know, Among Us
00:05:43
like the millennial generation. So I kind of wanted to take a
00:05:47
step back and this essay that I wrote that I published in
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January thinking about kind of like going back to like the
00:05:54
history like looking at like 150 years of American work, history
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and arguing. That it didn't really start out
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this way. You know, we have this image of
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America's like the Protestant work ethic country but you know,
00:06:07
people actually very much value Leisure at the beginning of the
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1900s there was this huge push you know organized by the unions
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to give us more Leisure Time and make us work less and that
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continued until about 1980. You know, American work hours.
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Continue to decline and Decline and decline for a long time.
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Americans actually worked a lot less than your P.
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Instead, but something happened around 1980, you know?
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And look at us today, we work about 4:00 less than Germans do,
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which is a crazy statistic, 04:00 more than Germans more.
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Okay. Yeah, yeah.
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Yeah. What was it about the 80s?
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I'm currently reading Reagan, land.
00:06:50
The Rick pearlstein history book, which is about, you know,
00:06:53
I mean, he's part of his whole series about the rise of the
00:06:55
conservative movement, but that looks specifically, you know,
00:06:58
the rise and Andrew love Ron. Reagan and him being
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specifically, like an appendage of the whole business community
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and kind of the rise of corporate America.
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Having far more direct control over political levers, but also
00:07:11
just social issues. I mean, what happened in the 80s
00:07:14
that you saw in your reporting that made for this dramatic
00:07:18
shift towards us being work-obsessed groans?
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I think a big part was, you know, definitely Reagan.
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So, you know, on the one hand, the first thing was that the
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returns to To overworking got a lot greater because you know,
00:07:33
rich people weren't paying as much in taxes.
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And so before, like, the government would have taken
00:07:38
everything anyway. So it wasn't worth, you know,
00:07:40
working crazy hours but suddenly now it was worth it for people
00:07:44
who are earning High wages. So that was one thing.
00:07:47
Another thing was that, you know, work became a lot more
00:07:50
precarious even for White Collar professionals.
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So before you could really assume that you would have this,
00:07:56
like, lifetime job security as long as you were at, like, You
00:08:00
know, midsize company, but you didn't have that guarantee
00:08:04
anymore with globalization and the rise of them in a.
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And so, as a result, you know, I think a lot of Americans felt
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compelled to overwork as a way to make themselves
00:08:15
indispensable. So, I think those economic
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forces were really big. I'm very curious about when you
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saw this idea of work and meaning start to emerge, where
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work should be meaningful. You'll wear, it should be our
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passion where it should and so many ways.
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Replaced, some of the leisure activities that you had
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mentioned earlier, that things like unions were trying to carve
00:08:41
carve out the time and space for for workers.
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And when did our jobs become meaningful.
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Yeah. I mean, it definitely isn't the
00:08:49
way that Americans talked about work, even back in the 50s or
00:08:53
the 60s. I think it really did start to
00:08:56
emerge as a result, as almost, like, kind of like a
00:08:58
rationalization. For working so hard.
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It was like we work so hard and as a result, we, you know, had
00:09:07
to find a quick, a reason why we were doing this.
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That made it seem more noble than it actually was.
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It's like a self-justification, right?
00:09:15
Yeah. Like at the end of the day, if
00:09:16
I've missed spending time with my family and Miss spending, you
00:09:19
know the personal growth that I might be able to achieve through
00:09:22
Leisure activity or other kinds of you know more self oriented
00:09:26
activities. You're like what I must be doing
00:09:28
it for a reason otherwise I should be really Rest right now.
00:09:30
Yeah, I think the decline in like Community Leisure is also a
00:09:34
big part in this too. You know, we used to have all
00:09:38
these Civic organizations and places to congregate as a group,
00:09:42
you know, we had religion, organized religion.
00:09:45
All of that has disintegrated over the years and so are being
00:09:49
form of leisure today is Netflix, right?
00:09:51
You know, you're just watching TV, maybe on a phone.
00:09:54
You know all alone and there's nothing really rewarding about
00:09:58
that. So yeah you have all these
00:09:59
studies. Actually paying people at random
00:10:02
times of the day, like, are you happy right now?
00:10:04
Are you not, how are you feeling?
00:10:06
And they find that when people are working, they actually
00:10:09
report higher scores of well-being than when people are
00:10:13
at home, which is ironic because you would think that it would be
00:10:17
the other way around. But yeah, work is the more kind
00:10:21
of communal, you know, challenging thing that we do in
00:10:24
our lives today and Leisure is just, you know, sitting on her
00:10:27
couch watching TV, which is It rewarding.
00:10:31
So, yeah, I think like that Leisure picture plays, like, a
00:10:33
big role in this too. It's interesting too.
00:10:36
Because, you know, this researchers are saying, are you
00:10:38
feeling, basically contentment or fulfillment?
00:10:40
Because I think those things are a little bit different from
00:10:41
happiness, especially in like, the American definition of
00:10:45
Happiness, which are so particular.
00:10:47
I think that if you asked, you know, somebody from France or
00:10:50
somebody from China, like, if happiness is a goal, they would
00:10:54
look at you. Like, you have five heads, but,
00:10:55
um, but there's also like such a connection between Willis,
00:11:00
you've worked very hard. You're allowed to take more
00:11:02
expansive and expensive vacations.
00:11:05
And so I'm getting it like there's this quote, and I'm
00:11:09
going to butcher a little bit, but I was rereading goodbye to
00:11:13
all that. And Joan Didion is writing an
00:11:15
essay about the wealthy people of Newport Rhode Island.
00:11:18
And she states flatly happiness is a consumption ethic, and one
00:11:24
of the things that happened during the 80s was we became
00:11:27
increasingly a consumer culture. I mean, was Be starting to
00:11:30
happen in the post-war period. Of course, well son, I've seen
00:11:33
madman to, but I think that in the 80s you saw that become
00:11:37
exceedingly. Supercharged, the idea of
00:11:39
consumerism, like, Beyond an Embrace of it, the idea that
00:11:43
that's who we are. As people, the term itself,
00:11:45
consumerism was developed in the 60s and 70s, like, it's all a
00:11:48
result of like this. Post-war America economic.
00:11:51
We all have toasters, we all have washer and dryers, you
00:11:54
know, sort of like, we can live this Amazing Life, As Americans
00:11:57
specifically, with. Also like In the very patriotic
00:12:00
about it. And so I think that she's kind
00:12:03
of seeing into the future in some ways.
00:12:05
This idea that we would create an entire ethic around
00:12:09
consumption and I wonder how that has changed how we see work
00:12:13
and how we see satisfaction. Yeah, I think that's exactly
00:12:16
right. Like you know the more we
00:12:18
consume the more money we need and in order to get that money
00:12:22
we have to work harder. So yeah, I think there's
00:12:25
definitely a vicious cycle going on there.
00:12:28
And if you look, you know, at the time Trends of different
00:12:31
Industries as they've risen and Fallen both in value but also
00:12:36
prominence. And like our culture.
00:12:38
It's interesting to see Tech fit into all of this because if you
00:12:41
look at the 80s and when finance and Wall Street were the most
00:12:45
desired jobs in America, these were like the captains of
00:12:47
industry. There was also like very much a
00:12:49
hustle culture. These people were working at all
00:12:52
hours and it was, you know, part of being a successful executive
00:12:56
in the finance world, was the fact that you are dedicated To
00:13:00
do your job, you have no family life, all of that, and that
00:13:03
became very unattractive. At a certain point, you saw a
00:13:06
lot of people in the industry. Either getting burnt out or just
00:13:08
disillusioned and then Tech is sort of there.
00:13:12
I mean, in a way that we consider it Tech in in kind of
00:13:14
the Facebook era, do you know Web 2.0 period where these
00:13:18
companies were all very Mission driven that they began talking
00:13:22
about, you know, Google's don't be evil or whatever, Steve Jobs
00:13:27
applied to Apple and why it was such an important company.
00:13:29
And they it kind of beat that into the head of their employees
00:13:32
that you were a good person because you worked for this
00:13:34
company and so you could kind of.
00:13:36
So you can we talk about this so much on this show but like,
00:13:38
subsume your personal mission and personal identity into that
00:13:41
of the companies. I mean, what's your take on
00:13:43
that? Like how did you sort of see
00:13:45
Tech specifically fit into addiction to work and people's
00:13:50
self definition being connected to the place that they work?
00:13:54
I think Tech really took the hustle culture that already
00:13:58
existed That time to the extreme, and I feel like I
00:14:02
really felt it myself. I got sucked into it myself
00:14:05
because I moved to San Francisco from Tokyo in 2012.
00:14:10
So, this was the, I think it was, like, the year that
00:14:12
Facebook went public. And, you know, I think, in the
00:14:16
2010s there was this, like real sense that, you know, Tech was
00:14:19
not only extremely lucrative, you know, but that it was really
00:14:23
altruistic to. And everybody around me was not
00:14:27
only earning, very nice salaries.
00:14:29
But, uh, So changing the world and, you know, you didn't really
00:14:32
talk about your salary because, you know, you pretended that
00:14:36
changing the world was the more important thing that you were
00:14:38
doing. Do you think people still
00:14:40
believe that companies and people who are employees?
00:14:43
Do you think that's something that they still think about or
00:14:45
still strive for? I don't know.
00:14:47
I think a lot of that bubble has popped.
00:14:50
I think, you know, not just because of the pain demek, which
00:14:53
made a lot of people, reevaluate their relationship to work but
00:14:57
also just because of the changing tenor of In a news
00:15:00
coverage of tech companies. Right now, we think of tech
00:15:03
companies has good, you know, mostly evil but we didn't just
00:15:07
like any other company like, right sure she's even more
00:15:10
concerning. It's not even that it's evil
00:15:12
because that would be interesting is that it's boring
00:15:14
ass just like Starbucks or Walmart.
00:15:16
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
00:15:17
Yeah. As fundamentally, you know,
00:15:20
profit-seeking corporations and that's not really how we saw
00:15:23
tech companies. I think back in the 2010s, like
00:15:26
I think back then when we saw Facebook as you know, the
00:15:29
company that Was you know connecting the world and you
00:15:32
know Google is a company that was organizing the world and the
00:15:35
information of the world and yeah, you know I don't I would
00:15:39
venture a guess that most tech employees don't really know kind
00:15:44
of have that illusion and choir. It would be strange if they did.
00:15:48
I feel, you know, I'm sure things in there are some that I
00:15:51
believe do but they would come off as even more Kool-Aid,
00:15:54
drinking, you know, dead-eyed Psychopaths.
00:15:56
If they set it now than they may have ten years ago, even when
00:15:59
Mark Zuckerberg. Rhetorically just sort of given
00:16:01
up on all that and then like we're here to make some money
00:16:03
and a diverse. We're not going to put in any
00:16:05
safeguards or really give a shit at all about how people feel or
00:16:08
what happens to them. They are I mean right, okay,
00:16:10
feels very blunt which is I think partly why the matter
00:16:12
versus a concept is so unappealing to people because
00:16:15
you're not really promising a better world, a more interesting
00:16:19
environment which you can interact with your co-workers or
00:16:22
your friends. You're basically like helping
00:16:24
him create a new platform that he could monetize and be first
00:16:27
in so that you know the company can.
00:16:29
Stave off the rise of copycats and tick-tocks and anything that
00:16:33
may have, you know, pulled away from their dominance.
00:16:35
Yeah, you're just getting them or pixelated version of the
00:16:38
current world, right? That the he can make better you
00:16:40
know more money on that he built industry on top of.
00:16:42
But anyway, let's zoom in a bit on the pandemic specifically
00:16:45
because like you said you started covering this in 2021.
00:16:47
So we're in this kind of nether region where we've been working
00:16:52
remotely for, you know, a year or so our connection to our job
00:16:57
in a relationship to our jobs is very different because we're
00:16:59
all, Home, I mean, what did you see developing as time went on
00:17:04
and we settled into our remote work lifestyle and began may be
00:17:08
reassessing the way that we work at our relationship to our
00:17:11
company's. Yeah.
00:17:12
I think there are a couple friends there.
00:17:14
I think probably the most important thing is that because
00:17:17
we were no longer going into the office which seemed like such an
00:17:21
important like such a central pillar of the way.
00:17:24
We live our lives that put everything else up for grabs to
00:17:28
and I think that Did our relationship to work how we
00:17:31
think about our jobs? I also think that you know in a
00:17:34
remote environment like your relationships with your
00:17:37
co-workers aren't as important. So people started to realize
00:17:41
that I think like, you know, they were too dependent on work
00:17:45
for their social lives that they wanted to build more
00:17:47
relationships outside of their jobs, especially if they were
00:17:50
going to stay remote and then I think just kind of a humongous
00:17:55
disruptions of the pandemic and the tragedy of it to made People
00:18:00
do a lot of kind of deeper, you know, more philosophical
00:18:03
thinking. Give them some time to think
00:18:06
about whether they were living their lives in a way that
00:18:09
fulfilled them. And if they work how they wanted
00:18:12
to live it a little bit differently and how did coasting
00:18:15
culture, which was sort of your next big Insight on the way that
00:18:20
we work. How did that fit into things?
00:18:22
So it, I mean, does it, does it flow directly from this period
00:18:25
where we said? Yes we witnessed this giant
00:18:28
tragedy and Hundreds of thousands and 1 million people
00:18:31
that have died because of this disease.
00:18:33
Our relationship with our co-workers is now severely
00:18:36
limited because we don't see them in person.
00:18:38
We don't see our bosses in person.
00:18:40
You know, we don't have the commute aspect that gave us
00:18:43
routine. Did that sort of lead in towards
00:18:45
a disillusionment with work and then ultimately people saying,
00:18:48
maybe I shouldn't be working that hard in the first place and
00:18:51
I can find other meaning in my life.
00:18:54
Yeah. Is there a way you could have
00:18:55
written this as more of a how-to manual as well?
00:18:59
It's funny you say that because like, you know, I was interested
00:19:03
in this topic because I underwent this, you know, kind
00:19:06
of re-evaluation myself and I wanted to figure out for the
00:19:10
coast in culture story, my initial kind of impetus for
00:19:13
writing, that story was I just wanted to talk to people who had
00:19:17
figured out a new way forward that wasn't hustle culture
00:19:19
because I was trying to figure that out myself.
00:19:22
So yeah, I just try to find people who were working a lot
00:19:26
less than they used to be and trying to see if, you know, Oh,
00:19:29
they were able to be successful with that, you know, to not only
00:19:33
keep their jobs but oh, so be happy with that decision to work
00:19:37
less as you talk to these people, that made that decision.
00:19:40
What was the rationale? I think that independent MC.
00:19:43
They decided they made the realization that they had
00:19:47
devoted to much of their lives to work, and they wanted to make
00:19:52
work less Central in their lives so they could make room and time
00:19:55
for things outside of their lives.
00:19:57
Whether it was, you know, their family, their House their
00:20:00
friends Community. Civic activities, were they
00:20:05
happier though? I mean, it's one thing to make
00:20:07
the decision and rebalance, the things that you're involved
00:20:11
with. But did you find that these
00:20:12
people asking for, you know, anyone out there who might have
00:20:14
made this decision or wants to like the people that, you know,
00:20:18
pushed things more in that direction?
00:20:20
Are they seeing the benefits that they thought they were
00:20:22
going to? I think the people I spoke to
00:20:24
for that story where a lot happier they found more time
00:20:29
too. Do the things that they found,
00:20:31
they enjoy a lot more than work. But, you know, I think it's an
00:20:35
astute question that you ask because it does come in like
00:20:38
kind of two steps, right. The first step is to work less.
00:20:40
So you have more time to do everything else.
00:20:42
But the second step is actually to find those other things that
00:20:46
you find actually fulfilling. Because, you know, if you're
00:20:48
using that extra time in your day to, you know, watch more
00:20:51
Netflix, for example, you know, that's probably not going to be
00:20:54
rewarding for most people and, you know, that might actually
00:20:58
lower your well-being as a Well, I think that's the part that I'm
00:21:02
still trying to figure out to, you know, to try to fill my
00:21:06
newly, created time with things that actually do.
00:21:10
Bring me more fulfillment than just work itself, right?
00:21:13
Because you know if it's about building Community or finding
00:21:17
meeting outside of work that takes work as well.
00:21:20
Like these things, it's not like it's like if you create a vacuum
00:21:23
if by removing the thing that had been there and the
00:21:25
expectation is like all the good stuff will just flow into it and
00:21:28
it doesn't just Back like it, you know, the idea of meeting
00:21:32
people that you live around, going out to a art museum or
00:21:36
whatever the hell would find meeting for you.
00:21:38
Like those are all things that would require work.
00:21:40
You gotta get off your ass and do it, and it's not something
00:21:44
that, you know, will just naturally fill in.
00:21:46
So I imagine that there are people out there that just sort
00:21:49
of like assumed that, you know, meaning and goodness would just
00:21:54
enter their lives because they removed something that had been
00:21:56
problematic beforehand and probably found very quickly That
00:22:00
it just didn't happen like that and that's likes is literally
00:22:02
just there, right? Yes.
00:22:03
Go from you know the dining room table that you're working at 10
00:22:06
steps over to the living room and suddenly you found yourself
00:22:09
filling your time with that. Yeah, I mean work is just there
00:22:11
to I think that's what makes it so difficult, you know.
00:22:14
Usually if you put in more time and more effort than you do get
00:22:17
rewarded for it as a result, whether that's you know,
00:22:20
professional recognition from your peers or that's actually a
00:22:23
higher salary whereas, you know, pursuing these things outside of
00:22:27
work. Yeah, comes in fits and starts.
00:22:29
It's a lot of experimentation and a lot of things that don't
00:22:33
end up being fun. So I think it's less of a sure
00:22:36
bet in that way. And I think that makes it hard
00:22:39
for people to, I'll say that. Like, one thing that I've
00:22:42
actually noticed now that I'm working fully remotely now and I
00:22:45
used to back when I was at Bloomberg, I went into the
00:22:47
office every single day. I found that like working
00:22:50
remotely has helped me kind of like maintain energy, even at
00:22:56
the end of the day to do something else.
00:22:58
And like, I'm pretty Did I think so?
00:23:00
Like, you know, back when I was going into the office every day,
00:23:03
by the time, I came home by, like 7:00, like, all I wanted to
00:23:06
do was, you know, not talk to anyone.
00:23:09
Maybe, I don't know, maybe I would talk to my wife at the
00:23:11
time or something, but like, you know, mostly like, I didn't feel
00:23:15
up to like, hanging out with my friends because I was so
00:23:17
exhausted. And by the time, Friday night
00:23:18
rolled around, like, all I want to do was watch TV because I was
00:23:21
so exhausted. And, you know, Saturday, I would
00:23:24
spend like, just the day recovering and maybe Sunday I
00:23:27
would feel social enough to do something but But now like I
00:23:30
actually, you know, spend a lot of my evenings hanging out with
00:23:34
people, you know. I took a pickleball like
00:23:36
everybody else. All right?
00:23:39
All right, I hope it's been everything.
00:23:52
You you were excited, but interestingly to you're given
00:23:55
the opportunity to choose with whom you're going to spend
00:23:59
those. Those hours of your time, we are
00:24:02
actually with other people. And that choice is not something
00:24:04
we've had for a long time. Yeah, right.
00:24:07
There's also, I think, you know, work itself, once you've kind of
00:24:11
figured it out, not that it's ever easy.
00:24:13
And I could say this, you know, as journalists it's it's a
00:24:15
different difficult challenge every day and you find new ways.
00:24:18
All we do is pick up the phone, write things down, pick up the
00:24:21
phone, I think that it is literally the same thing, every
00:24:23
second. Okay, it is actually the sad
00:24:25
thing. So we can we find new ways of
00:24:26
being rejected them Yeah, there's so many shades of
00:24:33
finding yourself, dispirited and reject it by doing what we do.
00:24:38
My favorite is, oh, yeah, I'd love to talk to you.
00:24:41
I'll call you right back. Right.
00:24:43
Never never again. Right.
00:24:45
At the same time I was I was brought up only to say that the
00:24:49
job remains interesting because the questions are almost because
00:24:52
they're always. Yeah.
00:24:53
And the people are different and it's you're dealing with, you
00:24:56
know, people's personalities and individual emotions and
00:24:59
motivations. Looks like that but I think in
00:25:02
general once you get fairly good at your job you kind of know the
00:25:06
actions that you need to take more or less to succeed in it
00:25:09
and there's a success and expertise with repetition.
00:25:12
Whereas when you're talking about, developing your personal
00:25:14
life or building up Hobbies, I think there's a lot more
00:25:16
rejection and instability almost or lack of certainty.
00:25:21
With those things that can be hard in its own way, right?
00:25:23
I mean, you've got to organize with other people to meet up.
00:25:26
You got to find a thing to do, you know, you may not have a
00:25:29
good time. I'm you may like you know invite
00:25:31
everyone out to go to I don't know a concert and actually it
00:25:34
sucked and you're like wow if I had just stayed home and just
00:25:38
watch Netflix that might have been more fulfilling for me.
00:25:40
At least I could somehow all corralled together in the
00:25:43
workplace. Nobody's putting themselves out
00:25:44
there and saying, let's all get together.
00:25:46
We're just trapped there so we make rest of it and sometimes
00:25:49
it's fun. This is a very dark view of the
00:25:51
world. You know, researchers actually
00:25:54
psychologists like make the differentiation of hard Leisure
00:25:58
and easy leisure. That might not actually be like
00:26:01
the actual terms that they use, but hard Leisure is, you know,
00:26:04
stuff that's actually challenging that requires you to
00:26:07
build out your skill. You know that takes a little bit
00:26:10
of failure and then easy leader is just, you know, I don't know,
00:26:14
like, taking up a hobby that you don't take very seriously or
00:26:18
maybe just going out to drinks with a friend, or something like
00:26:21
that. And they say that you where does
00:26:23
pickle vehicle? I think it would depend on the
00:26:26
person, but I'm very competitive.
00:26:28
So, for me pickleball. All wood.
00:26:30
Would you go hard? It's hard because you're the
00:26:32
circus. I get really into it, you know,
00:26:34
and I practice and I watched the YouTube videos to like perfect
00:26:37
my serves. And um, yeah.
00:26:40
So I think for me, it would be hard Leisure but I'm sure for a
00:26:43
lot of people, it would be easily, sure.
00:26:45
Yeah. There is like a
00:26:46
self-consciousness around doing things with other people that we
00:26:49
forget about. Especially if you so much of
00:26:52
your social life was the workplace.
00:26:54
It was served up to you. And I think that's something
00:26:56
that we're trying to struggle with to even as Re-enter the
00:27:00
world may or may not be going back to the office.
00:27:03
It's like, how do we have the social interactions?
00:27:06
We've been craving when there are all these risks rejection
00:27:10
people not having the time people unsure, whether or not
00:27:14
they're still close to the people.
00:27:16
They thought they were close with.
00:27:18
And then of course, the idea that we could still get polluted
00:27:21
sort of like, hanging out your background like yeah.
00:27:24
Yeah, right. Yeah.
00:27:25
How much did they do? They matter in the first place?
00:27:28
What about quiet quitting as A term because my understanding of
00:27:31
the progression here is that you write this piece about coasting
00:27:34
culture. It makes its way through the
00:27:37
world of people who read Insider stories.
00:27:39
But also just really pay attention to workplace and work
00:27:42
culture Trends and then it becomes a tick tock Trend that
00:27:46
some social psychologist or whatever reads the peace and
00:27:50
says, oh, I've been noticing this a lot too.
00:27:51
And I categorize this Behavior as quiet, quitting.
00:27:55
And then that becomes a meme and everyone's talking about it on
00:27:58
Twitter for a couple of weeks. Maybe giving you credit for it.
00:28:01
Maybe not explain to me the trajectory from that piece that
00:28:04
you wrote on coasting culture and this term that we all now
00:28:08
know. Yeah.
00:28:09
So what happened was after my story published, there's a
00:28:13
career coach on Tick, Tock and YouTube, who talked, about a job
00:28:17
that didn't exist to generation ago.
00:28:19
Go on. So here, if Don my story and
00:28:24
actually talk to him about this a few weeks ago, he said he
00:28:27
didn't like spend that much time like thinking about About the
00:28:30
name. But he just kind of
00:28:31
spontaneously came up with it by combining a few of the words
00:28:35
that were in my headline, I guess.
00:28:37
And he called it quiet quitting. And then, I guess a bunch of
00:28:40
take stalkers kind of jumped on that and made it even more
00:28:44
viral. And it was kind of building and
00:28:46
virality on Tick Tock for a few months and then it broke out
00:28:50
into the mainstream and late August or so, when Outlets, like
00:28:54
the Wall Street Journal started, talking about it.
00:28:57
So I did not come up with the term.
00:28:58
Yeah, I called it coasting. We're realizing around it to
00:29:01
right. There were like people that were
00:29:02
very upset. Oh yeah, currently found it to
00:29:05
be deeply troubled. Well, you know, I think this
00:29:07
says something about the internet there are multiple
00:29:10
stages. I think of this, and, like the
00:29:12
outrage cycle at first, you know, people were just like,
00:29:16
wow, look at this thing that like, young people are talking
00:29:18
about on Tick Tock and then like all the executives came in there
00:29:22
like what the fuck is this? Like, you know, young people are
00:29:25
so lazy. Like don't do this.
00:29:27
Always true. Goodbye, John This is what's
00:29:31
wrong about the world today. And then from there, all the
00:29:34
young people came out, and they were like, why are we even
00:29:37
calling this quiet quitting when it's just doing your job?
00:29:41
What's the quickest? That's that's so late.
00:29:43
If you're doing the bare minimum.
00:29:44
That is actually the job that is actually the job exactly.
00:29:47
You're fulfilling job, exactly. Yeah.
00:29:48
So, there's which is sort of like reclaiming that Trend use
00:29:51
the identified as starting the 80s of people being
00:29:54
incentivized, to what we thought, then of over are great
00:29:58
and to As such, I mean, I remember in the 80s they were
00:30:01
like Time Magazine cover stories about workaholism and like
00:30:05
whether or not this is going to destroy America and you could
00:30:07
argue about it was it was definitely seen it as an
00:30:11
aberration ran. And then by the time we got to
00:30:14
your quiet quitting story. It was people recognizing that
00:30:18
actually. Perhaps, it isn't every man.
00:30:19
Yeah, I feel like the, I hate this word, but I feel like the
00:30:23
discourse would have been a little bit better.
00:30:25
Had they gone with the term coast and culture rather than
00:30:29
Whether they had to put it on his like recently, but actually,
00:30:37
it's as good as it's ever. Been free speech is back.
00:30:41
It's apparently it's bad for business.
00:30:43
Free speech is back. We've saved it.
00:30:45
Actually we can talk about Elon a little bit here because I do,
00:30:49
we'll see. We'll see if we're having a good
00:30:50
time to know, we know, but I'm having a good time so let's not.
00:30:55
But you know, it coasting culture to me.
00:30:59
And even that in its of itself, I think probably implies a
00:31:02
little bit of a boss Centric attitude, which is that you just
00:31:06
heard of coasting along you're taking up time, you're not
00:31:08
really helping the company and that and of itself, you know
00:31:11
like it's not a positive thing. I doubt you spent that much time
00:31:14
thinking whether or not this had you know employer or employee
00:31:17
facing. No I did I did.
00:31:20
Yeah you did. I did spend a lot of time and I
00:31:23
did like the term coasting culture either.
00:31:25
I just couldn't come up with anything better and I think that
00:31:28
does go to show up And of the limitations of our language now
00:31:31
like because I wrote it my story like these people aren't lazy or
00:31:35
you know, unambitious or shiftless, they're just done
00:31:38
letting their employers, squeeze Free Labor out of them.
00:31:41
So it was a very like kind of pro-worker story, you know, but
00:31:44
there's no like actual word in the English language that could
00:31:48
make that seem like a good thing because we're so steeped in
00:31:51
Hustle culture. Now I think I think the thing I
00:31:54
like about quiet quitting, even though I do agree that it's a
00:31:57
flawed term in its own way. Is, you know, it's essentially
00:32:01
about quitting a philosophy and I like, kind of that rejection
00:32:05
of the way that we used to live our lives.
00:32:08
I don't know. There's something really, you
00:32:10
know, kind of refreshing and a little bit bad ass about it, I
00:32:14
think. Yeah I mean when you explain it
00:32:16
like that it makes a lot of sense but I was a little bit
00:32:20
late like a half-step late to the trend and so when the term
00:32:23
itself was making its way around whatever Twitter.
00:32:26
So me when I first saw I assumed it meant people.
00:32:29
That were leaving their jobs and work like an Irish goodbye.
00:32:34
But for quitting, right? He just stopped showing up and
00:32:37
like they just their bosses found out after paying them
00:32:41
several like oh shit would be an amazing like Tom hasn't been
00:32:45
here why we've been sending him a real quietly by the way?
00:32:48
If that's a trend. Yeah, if that's a trend that's
00:32:51
fucking awesome. Like that's a real power, you
00:32:53
know, power to the people move but yeah, I think I had the
00:32:56
reaction that a lot of whatever Millennials of my generation.
00:32:59
It, which was that, like, oh, that's not quitting at all,
00:33:02
you're just still working, you're just not working as hard.
00:33:04
And I think that begat, you know, maybe some of the backlash
00:33:07
to the backlash or whatever. But I thought that the bosses
00:33:10
reaction to it was very interesting because I saw these
00:33:13
op-eds. I think Peggy, Noonan or someone
00:33:15
at the Wall Street Journal wrote one of her kind of whatever kind
00:33:19
of lazy pieces on it and there were other kind of and you it
00:33:22
was funny for her because I don't believe she's ever
00:33:24
employed people. Like she's never really been a
00:33:27
boss that she was just kind of rejecting.
00:33:29
I saw it. As her writing that op-ed is
00:33:30
like a sort of a defense of the Reagan assist culture that she
00:33:34
did help kind of lead when she was you know Reagan's speech
00:33:36
writer which was like no no no your work is extremely
00:33:39
important. You need to be someone who finds
00:33:41
meaning in the same way that Jim.
00:33:43
I think she was like referencing the office and how like you know
00:33:46
if it weren't for work culture Jim never would have found Pam.
00:33:50
It's like lady. These people aren't real think
00:33:55
of all the office sitcoms that we've enjoyed through our lives,
00:33:58
that never would have come to fruition.
00:33:59
And had we not had a workplace Centric society which it's not
00:34:03
for email. You know, the couple in You've
00:34:06
Got Mail, never would have found another think about.
00:34:08
Yeah, that Ryan and Tom Hanks would have never connected had.
00:34:11
They not only communicated through, you know, dysentery
00:34:14
anyway, but I should bring back a lot.
00:34:18
Well, I think about my dad so doesn't AOL email address.
00:34:20
So that's the the Boomers will be there for it.
00:34:24
Oh, let's talk about the Boomers for a bit.
00:34:26
So so if it is a generational aspect to it, It.
00:34:29
I mean you were really writing about Millennials and maybe some
00:34:32
gen Z people that were kind of the leads of this trend.
00:34:35
I mean, for the boss generation that, you know, the Boomers and
00:34:39
maybe some gen-xers, their reaction was largely, you know,
00:34:42
rejecting it because they saw it as laziness.
00:34:45
I think, you know what I wanted, I thought it applied to all
00:34:48
generations, but particularly for Millennials because I think,
00:34:52
you know, we spent a long time, we spent like many years in the
00:34:55
work place, initially just so grateful to have jobs at all.
00:34:59
I think Anne and finding fulfill and a thinking that we were
00:35:04
finding fulfillment there. Yeah.
00:35:08
It was really interesting that I think happened like you know
00:35:15
kind of in the later stages of the pandemic with the really hot
00:35:18
job market that made us realize like actually like we don't have
00:35:23
to be so grateful to have jobs at all.
00:35:25
Like we could have any job we want and we can demand raises
00:35:28
and I think I think part of that was oh, so you know we can
00:35:31
demand to have an actual work-life balance.
00:35:34
I think back in like the early 2010's a lot of commentators
00:35:37
actually thought that we Millennials would be like the
00:35:40
work-life balance generation and that turned out to be totally
00:35:44
untrue because, you know, of the economic climate that we started
00:35:49
working in things were so bad that we actually didn't demand a
00:35:53
work-life balance at all. If anything, we were just, you
00:35:55
know, happy to work ourselves to death and I think that's like
00:35:59
one of the Days in which gen Z is different.
00:36:02
Now I think younger workers because they're coming into the
00:36:05
workplace in this time when they have like a tremendous amount of
00:36:10
bargaining power just because of the way the job market is right
00:36:13
now you know they're demanding things that I think for me as a
00:36:17
35 year old feels a little like, Oleg, are you sure you want to
00:36:21
be that vocal? Like is it okay to ask that from
00:36:24
your boss? But I know that a lot of my
00:36:26
younger colleagues have no qualms about that because You
00:36:29
know, they have a fundamentally different view of, you know,
00:36:33
their relationship to their employer.
00:36:36
I think that's very much shaped by, you know, kind of their
00:36:39
early years in the work place. And I wonder if that's one of
00:36:42
the things that sort of like, psychologically pave the way for
00:36:44
an Embrace of unions, like it doesn't feel like unions no
00:36:47
matter what was going on in the labor market.
00:36:50
We're really going to find a foothold and Corporate America
00:36:54
at a time when you had a generation grateful to have him
00:36:58
that I kind of convinced. It's After a finding fulfillment
00:37:00
through this work and it was making meaning and changing the
00:37:04
world in positive ways. It's like really hard to have a
00:37:07
union, which implicitly says there needs to be a wall between
00:37:10
the employee and the employer and that this is, you know, a
00:37:13
potentially very unbalanced relationship and so you need to
00:37:16
band together in order to sort of even out the scales, but if
00:37:20
we now have a generation that looks at work with more
00:37:23
skepticism and that is not willing to do things really
00:37:29
We're a generation before would have said we're just
00:37:31
opportunities to advance and learn and grow.
00:37:35
This generation sees a potential exploitive suddenly, it does
00:37:39
feel like you have the psychological room for unions.
00:37:42
Even when the jobs are paying. Well, yeah, right.
00:37:44
Well and we had sort of two parallel tracks going on right
00:37:47
now within, you know, Blue Collar work and you know the
00:37:50
email jobs because you know you're seeing this trend of
00:37:55
people at service and Retail unionizing, right all the
00:37:59
Starbucks. That have formed unions the
00:38:01
Trader Joe's at a form unions. Some Apple Stores, you start to
00:38:05
see you like Union, like movement happening.
00:38:06
So that's going on at the blue-collar level and then
00:38:09
within, you know, the white-collar level, whatever you
00:38:11
want to call these jobs, service economy versus our color.
00:38:14
Sure. Yeah.
00:38:15
Like office jobs, you're having various Trends in which people
00:38:19
are sort of wrestling with how protected they are the
00:38:21
relationship. They want to have with their
00:38:22
jobs, whether it's the quiet, quitting phenomenon, whether
00:38:25
it's people. I mean, you starting to see, you
00:38:27
know, like newsrooms obviously there's a push to have Reunions
00:38:30
there, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is on strike,
00:38:33
that's right. Yes, and then there's, you know,
00:38:36
like the Google Union was a thing that didn't really get all
00:38:38
that far, but you know, that was the kind of similar sort of
00:38:41
trend people trying to figure out how they can work among
00:38:44
their fellow co-workers to redirect or find more meaning
00:38:47
and the jobs that they have more control in the jobs that they
00:38:49
have. I mean, what do you think about
00:38:51
that? Like are these the same things
00:38:52
as it? Is it the same phenomenon, the
00:38:54
unionization happening at the blue-collar level and the sort
00:38:57
of dissatisfaction or unrest happening at the white.
00:38:59
Our jobs. I think there are some similar
00:39:02
threads, you know, both for, you know, blue collar workers and
00:39:06
for white collar workers. It's been a very, very good job
00:39:09
market and I think that that gives workers, you know, on both
00:39:13
ends of the income scale, kind of more, I think both like in a
00:39:17
more confidence. I think to demand, what they
00:39:19
want, you do not have to worry so much about their job security
00:39:23
when it comes to organizing, but I think we're like blue collar
00:39:27
workers. A big part 2 was also the
00:39:29
physical. Physical dangers that they had
00:39:31
to put themselves in during the pandemic, especially when you
00:39:34
know, PPE supplies for solo. Of course, we as, you know, kind
00:39:38
of professional office workers, you know, didn't encounter that
00:39:43
we were very safe. So, there's probably a little
00:39:46
bit of a difference as well, but yeah, I think I'll be really
00:39:49
curious to see like, where this like, momentum for unionization
00:39:53
goes in the next few years. Like, I mean, with the economy
00:39:57
turning, I don't know. If it's the momentum is going to
00:40:01
continue. I hope it will.
00:40:02
But yeah, we'll see and even as the economy turns you know and I
00:40:07
think that the last time this happened in 2008, one of the
00:40:09
things that we have today that's in a more exacerbated state that
00:40:13
it was in two thousand eight and nine is this ginormous visible
00:40:17
extreme wealth Gap. And so you know in 2008-9 is the
00:40:22
economy, went down the toilet, we saw Wall Street, take a hit,
00:40:29
And Executives, be raked over the coals, but then we did not
00:40:34
see accountability, or a loss of wealth.
00:40:36
In fact, most of the CEOs involved become wealthier than
00:40:38
ever been in the subsequent year.
00:40:40
So, now, as it's happening, you know, 15 years later, you have a
00:40:44
public remembering, how little the wealthiest Americans.
00:40:48
And that case, most responsible for the downturn had to pay in
00:40:52
any way. And now we're seeing this huge
00:40:55
wealth Gap. So, when we talk about a
00:40:56
downturn, it feels like an only uneven downturn and it doesn't
00:41:01
even seem realistic call it a downturn for so much of
00:41:03
corporate America or especially investors or people who have
00:41:07
access to huge amounts of private capital.
00:41:10
And so even though the economy could get worse, I do wonder if
00:41:16
people will continue to try to find ways to address the fact
00:41:20
that this might not feel fair to them and if you Nance will
00:41:23
continue to be wondering, all right?
00:41:25
I mean, I think like right now though the blue collar job
00:41:28
Market is still very, very good if anything you know the layoffs
00:41:33
are very concentrated and the tech sector right now where
00:41:36
workers are paid very well. So yeah, it does feel like a
00:41:40
different Dynamic than your typical recession, you know?
00:41:43
And I wonder how that's going to end up playing out over the next
00:41:47
year. Well, if you look at the
00:41:49
rationale that a lot of companies had four layoffs
00:41:51
stripe, had layoffs yesterday shop.
00:41:54
If I had layoffs, yesterday, Amazon is cut a lot of its More
00:41:59
like extraneous. What they are using extraneous
00:42:01
Workforce then Twitter but Twitter is obviously a usually
00:42:05
sweet. Yes, their argument is largely
00:42:09
that they overshot their growth expectations, that they sort of
00:42:13
bought the bullshit that during the pandemic, as things were
00:42:16
really taking off and equities were skyrocketing Good Times,
00:42:19
we're never going to end and they should hire to meet that
00:42:21
demand. And from Amazon, to all the
00:42:24
other companies that I just mentioned the cold grips of
00:42:26
reality that what they were riding on was actually.
00:42:28
Really unrealistic set in and they had to restructure their
00:42:32
guidance and their Workforce to meet where the business actually
00:42:35
is, but like you're saying it doesn't feel like the same sort
00:42:38
of recession type are business just fell off a cliff.
00:42:41
We need to lay a ton of people off so that we can save all of
00:42:45
our costs. And mostly just seem like a huge
00:42:46
projection issue which isn't a problem in.
00:42:49
These are still people being laid off, but the kind of, you
00:42:52
know, challenging Workforce Unemployment skyrocketing that
00:42:55
we would see in a typical recession.
00:42:57
I don't quite see it there yet. Yet.
00:42:59
And so I don't know what that's going to mean, in terms of, you
00:43:01
know, the culture that's been built up over the last year.
00:43:04
Yeah, I mean, I think for now most economists think that this
00:43:07
is going to be a pretty mild recession at least for us here,
00:43:11
in the US unemployment is going to go up, but probably not by a
00:43:16
whole lot. So as long as it stays that way,
00:43:19
I think it'll be, you know, relatively painless compared to
00:43:23
a lot of the other recessions that we've had in the past, but
00:43:27
I don't know. We'll see instead.
00:43:28
Go to prognosticate these things and if it were easy, I'd be very
00:43:32
rich in terms of the stuff that you've written about.
00:43:36
I mean, what do you see? You know, having an impact on
00:43:41
quiet quitting? I mean you wrote a piece like a
00:43:43
week or so ago where you talked about how layoffs will or will
00:43:47
not change a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about
00:43:49
it. Like it like it, my head.
00:43:50
I sort of Saw think, you know, everything going for my quiet,
00:43:53
quitting to like quiet, shitting your pants that you could be
00:43:56
laid off. That is not gonna that's not
00:44:00
that is not going to take off. No, I'm sorry.
00:44:03
You want to get that one trending.
00:44:04
That that was not gonna got to talk right now and take a quiet
00:44:07
shitting period. Um, I'm gonna try though, okay.
00:44:12
You know what, let's see, let's see.
00:44:14
I'm gonna take them away. So if I come back in, this thing
00:44:17
is huge. I'll be really disappointed.
00:44:19
I wasn't there to watch. Are you guys going to pay money
00:44:21
for your blue truck? Is that something you're going
00:44:22
to do? I do eight dollars.
00:44:25
Is the current price. Yeah.
00:44:26
And I feel like, I don't know, I'd rather have my nuts.
00:44:28
Like, I don't know, well, I would say like a dollar is about
00:44:32
the most. I would pick up a check.
00:44:33
That's about as much as Worth to me a dollar.
00:44:35
Yeah, I do adults. My boss is pay, then I'd be
00:44:38
happy for that but I don't think I would pay myself.
00:44:41
Oh yeah. No it's so funny like would the
00:44:44
New York Times pay for us all to have blue checks?
00:44:47
That's a huge expense, that seems insane.
00:44:49
But especially with all the reporters.
00:44:52
I mean, that's like 1 something reporters.
00:44:54
You know, every month. Yeah.
00:44:55
And you've got like, Yeah, I don't know.
00:45:00
I mean, I love to see like the New York Times about a hundred
00:45:03
bucks a month. 100 100, the New York Times today
00:45:12
one-time eight million dollar write down in order to ensure
00:45:15
the reporters remain verified on Twitter but also not just
00:45:18
reporters the New York Times itself.
00:45:20
Like we have all these accounts like the time right now, the
00:45:22
times business account, the times Tech Team account, they'll
00:45:24
have blue checks. So it would be like, do not give
00:45:28
the White House, a blue check. Like, do we have to use taxpayer
00:45:30
dollars? Wow, make sure that like the
00:45:33
White House account, the still verified and it's a government
00:45:37
contract, if you think about it, right?
00:45:39
Yeah. It's like, you know, there fuk
00:45:40
like, I would immediately start a Twitter account that was like
00:45:43
out white house but it's bubbling wh@ith buse just kind
00:45:48
of I mean, like no, I waited that's verified as the actual
00:45:50
White House. I hope I wouldn't do that to all
00:45:53
my boss is no but I mean, who you can see where that would be
00:45:56
fascinating, if the I have to count were no more war, not held
00:46:01
apart in terms of its veracity from like, all the White House
00:46:04
Coffee, count accounts that will spring up, you describe that as
00:46:08
interesting. I described that as free speech
00:46:11
and and the Bastion of free speech that we're trying to
00:46:13
defend on this letter. Letter letter letter tried.
00:46:17
Just I'm up for whatever. I'm done.
00:46:20
Criticizing any strategic decision.
00:46:22
I think they should just go ham and, and kept everything should
00:46:25
be on the table. Can you get a blue?
00:46:27
Check your, you know. So presumably a candidate can
00:46:30
have a blue check. What about a person who just had
00:46:32
a very similar name to the candidate?
00:46:34
Can they pay for the blue check and then you've got like, you
00:46:37
know? Yeah.
00:46:38
Probably Trump but then you, you have like Donald Trump or you
00:46:43
have right Donald Trump. Yeah, you know, Joey didn't I
00:46:49
think the way the checks are supposed to work now is that
00:46:53
it's the people that currently have checks that if they don't
00:46:56
pay, they'll have it. And I don't know if new like any
00:46:59
is it that anybody that would sign up for the subscription to
00:47:02
everybody here, which is gonna be exactly you want spent
00:47:05
talking about is like democratizing the check, right?
00:47:08
So, presumably, that does have that anyone can apply for it by
00:47:11
making it into a financial hierarchy.
00:47:13
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
00:47:17
So, I mean, like, if my name were Joe Biden and I were just
00:47:20
another job, I did, I'd buy a check so fast or if I was my
00:47:25
name were Donald Trump. I'd be like.
00:47:27
So bad. Yeah.
00:47:31
Now is my moment especially and policy.
00:47:34
Yeah. Doesn't doesn't come back to the
00:47:35
platform because he's sticking out with truth social.
00:47:38
So there's only one. Real Donald Trump or Donald
00:47:40
Trump Donald J. Trump is on da WN Trump.
00:47:44
I think that would actually work almost as well.
00:47:45
If you guys are ever thought about like it's hot, baby named
00:47:49
conservative, female babies. We don't know that.
00:47:52
It's not gonna take a little while to that data.
00:47:54
Yeah, we'll look back as Spike and Dawn's.
00:47:57
Aw n last popular in like the 70s or something.
00:48:01
So in our last section here, I did want to ask a bit about the
00:48:04
most recent story that you wrote because there was a really
00:48:06
interesting paragraph that I want to read here and it kind of
00:48:08
maybe sets the stage for where we are right now in the job
00:48:11
market or work life relationship.
00:48:12
So I'm going to be from your story here.
00:48:14
Even as the great resignation turns into plain old
00:48:17
resignation, I don't think hustle culture is ever coming
00:48:20
back. America's addiction, overworked
00:48:22
wasn't just about the hours, we put into our jobs, it was about
00:48:25
looking to our careers to provide our Lives with meaning
00:48:28
and Define our identities. Free temporarily from the
00:48:30
shackles of hustle culture. Millions of Americans have
00:48:33
glimpsed a new way of ordering their lives, and here's a quote
00:48:36
here. I don't think that people can
00:48:38
forget this re-evaluation that they've done.
00:48:40
Jessica kriegel Chief scientist of workplace culture at the
00:48:42
consultancy culture. Partners told me another job of,
00:48:45
pretty sure didn't exist a generation ago but anyway, we're
00:48:49
never going back to pre-pandemic Norms.
00:48:51
So I mean it's all fairly clear in that paragraph but that's
00:48:55
sort of where you think it stands even if we do.
00:48:57
Enter some sort of a mild recession, the kind of great
00:49:00
reset that. I think a lot of bosses were
00:49:02
hoping for after the pandemic. And you've seen this with like
00:49:05
Zuckerberg, you know, admonishing his employees for
00:49:08
asking about meta days and all this other shit that I know
00:49:11
bosses wanted. Yeah, that's right coasters.
00:49:15
The quiet coasters, actually. You know, I there's clearly a
00:49:18
desire among the employer class to reverse the trend that you've
00:49:22
been writing about. But you don't think it's
00:49:24
possible. You don't think our brains will
00:49:25
suddenly have to be reformatted back to hustle.
00:49:27
Culture in a way that really benefitted a lot of bosses or
00:49:30
yeah, I don't think so. And I, you know, this is
00:49:32
interesting to me because this story came out of a follow-up
00:49:36
conversation that I had with this guy who I sit down a Miss
00:49:40
Lee called Justin in my original coasting culture story.
00:49:43
And in this most recent follow-up story, he's a
00:49:47
recruiter, you know, he had skilled his hours down to, you
00:49:51
know, as little as maybe 30 hours a week before he used to
00:49:54
work like you know, 60 70 hour weeks.
00:49:57
And he was really happy with that for a while, but in the
00:50:00
late summer, he started to notice that things were shifting
00:50:04
and the job market for recruiters is genuinely bad now
00:50:07
because if you were, people are hiring now.
00:50:10
So, a lot of some of his colleagues were getting laid off
00:50:12
his performance reviews were getting harder.
00:50:14
And so he's now back to working about 50 hours a week.
00:50:19
Now kind of lost a little bit of his Swagger, you know.
00:50:22
And at first I was kind of disappointed and I was like oh
00:50:24
like you know what? Just yeah.
00:50:27
Trend. But he was saying that, you
00:50:29
know, even for him, it's see the pickle ball racket.
00:50:32
Just like the freaks. Those are the people that that
00:50:45
was hard for sure. Plus like, that was like I got a
00:50:51
workout and lonely. It's like just me.
00:50:54
Yeah, so he's back to working 50 hours.
00:50:57
Is a week, so he's up these hours.
00:50:59
But he said that he's no longer kind of like relinquishing his
00:51:02
soul, the way that he used to, he doesn't think about work
00:51:06
outside of work anymore. He doesn't talk about work with
00:51:08
his friends, he does it, you know, kind of Hawk has like
00:51:12
these companies like internal leaderboard.
00:51:14
He doesn't need to be on top anymore.
00:51:15
He just doesn't like, kind of think of himself, first and
00:51:18
foremost, as a recruiter, the way that he used to.
00:51:21
And that change in his mindset, he said was permanent.
00:51:25
And you can tell that it's permanent because he said that
00:51:27
That as soon as the economic recovery comes and things are
00:51:30
safe for him again. He's going to scale those hours
00:51:33
back down to 30 hours a week. And so, yeah, I think in that
00:51:37
way, hustle, cultures done. But right now, it's probably a
00:51:40
little too risky to be a quiet quitter.
00:51:44
I think, especially in the tech industry, so I don't know.
00:51:47
Maybe you need to like look like you're working hard again, but I
00:51:52
don't think that changes kind of the rethink that a lot of
00:51:55
Americans have had during the pandemic.
00:51:57
Yeah. So it goes from quiet, quitting
00:51:59
to perform. Well I'm gonna say that if
00:52:04
you're in a job with a lot of meetings you see a lot of
00:52:06
performative working and that was true before director.
00:52:09
Oh yeah. I think that's core to the
00:52:10
American working experience. I mean, I think a lot of his
00:52:13
working culture has really been about telling the person next to
00:52:16
you, that you're working really hard.
00:52:18
It's really the person above you.
00:52:19
It was really interesting to see during the pandemic when there
00:52:22
was not as much performative working because, you know, you
00:52:25
couldn't walk over to your boss's desk and just be used.
00:52:27
A performative how people who weren't performative workers
00:52:31
seem to do like really well during the pandemic, right?
00:52:35
And we're all working from home, you know, they seem to really
00:52:37
shine because suddenly their work, everyone was just there.
00:52:42
One was more judged on the merits of what I was rather than
00:52:45
whether or not, they'd put in the face time, which I right
00:52:48
fascinating. Totally.
00:52:49
And I think also fascinating was like, the initial realization by
00:52:53
Bosses that when things did go remote, they were like, well,
00:52:56
efficiency isn't really down all.
00:52:57
Much. It's not like we're getting less
00:52:58
out of people that sounds like a slightly separate conversation
00:53:01
just because people were so depressed and working because
00:53:04
they couldn't stop. I mean I think that's was like a
00:53:06
little bit different and might have helped fuel this desire to
00:53:10
quiet quit. Yeah.
00:53:11
Well that's possible or less. It was part of the larger Trend
00:53:14
but I think you know the question was were they right
00:53:17
that efficiency did or didn't go down?
00:53:18
Because when you saw you know earlier this year as the economy
00:53:21
began to like slightly shit the bed there was I'm really trying
00:53:26
to get quiet shitting Big working.
00:53:29
I think it's there. It's just so unsavory.
00:53:32
I'm so, so so so fundamentally icky.
00:53:35
But Continuum you keep his room. Yeah.
00:53:39
I'll keep quiet. Shitting that there was suddenly
00:53:43
like this massive realization on the part of bosses.
00:53:45
They're like actually we've been coasting.
00:53:47
There's been a lot of people that really aren't pulling their
00:53:49
weight around here and you know, maybe it was true or maybe it
00:53:52
was just like the macro effect starting to hit their business
00:53:56
and them trying to reclaim a little Control over their
00:53:58
workers lives and have a little bit that that that was lost when
00:54:01
things went remote and maybe people's did start kind of not
00:54:04
being as performative in a way that bosses really liked.
00:54:08
I don't know. I guess we'll find out later
00:54:09
hashtag quiet shitting, but anyway, yes, yes, I think, let's
00:54:15
let's I'm gonna say this. Yeah, that's what I meant.
00:54:19
Let's is probably not that. I think you, if you would like,
00:54:21
you may, I would say, let's revisit this topic, six months
00:54:26
or so occupy. Going to have you back.
00:54:28
We're going to talk about how quiet sitting epidemic has
00:54:31
finally crested as the economy has returned to normal and and
00:54:36
we've entered a new stage. What do you think?
00:54:38
The next one's going to be called?
00:54:39
Let's say quite shitting out of it.
00:54:41
What do you expect? And you give us a new term.
00:54:43
We had Taylor Lorenz on a couple months ago and Eric was trying
00:54:45
to get like what's the next term you're going to drop on fighting
00:54:48
or discourse? What do you sort of seriously?
00:54:50
No I mean my editors asked this all the time because you know
00:54:53
they want me to write more and yeah but Sing read the article,
00:55:02
coasting culture bitches. I don't know what if you're
00:55:06
down. All right, about it and then you
00:55:07
can have me back on again. Awesome.
00:55:09
I like it. I like that answer.
00:55:11
Alright yeah. Alright, thanks.
00:55:12
Thank you. Thanks for joining.
00:55:13
This is great. Yeah, thanks.
00:55:15
This is awesome. I
00:55:29
Goodbye. Goodbye.
00:55:31
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. Goodbye.
00:55:29
Goodbye. Goodbye.
00:55:31
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. Goodbye.