Quiet quitting, Bartleby, and the Protestant work ethic, pt I

 Is the phenomenon of "quiet quitting" a positive shift in American's relationship with their work, workplaces, and employers? My immediate reaction is negative, but I wonder if I need to rethink this.

Even though I'm often less productive than I feel I "should" be, I have a pretty high self-imposed expectation for showing up and doing my job. When I was a kid, I think I had perfect attendance for at least 4 years of elementary school (and most years in middle- and high-school, too). I was lucky not to be sick often, for sure, and my family was too poor to pull my sister and I out of school for non-school trips. But the expectation for showing up was also deeply instilled in me by my parents. That was partially because my dad, at least until I was 12 or so, was self-employed, driving his own logging truck into the woods every morning (often leaving the house by 5). If he didn't work, he didn't get paid. There was no health care, no paid time off, no sick days--no social net to catch him or us if he didn't put in the time. Similarly, until my mom finished her bachelor's degree (also when I was around 12 or 14) and was able to get salaried jobs, she worked mostly in hourly jobs with no benefits.

My life now--working for a university where the value of benefits is worth about 50% again as much as my paid salary--is one that allows me a very different relationship to time-on-task. It turns out that the work ethic I learned in my formative years runs pretty deep: "showing up" is part of how I gauge my self-worth, both in ways I'm proud of and in ways that I increasingly recognize as problematic.

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