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.

.... picking this post back up a year-and-a-half after the part I wrote above:

I don't remember when I read Bartleby the Scrivener. In my undergraduate years, for sure, and certainly too young to understand it well. What I do remember is that Bartleby is hired into by a lawyer to help with copying legal materials (ie, scrivening). And, I remember, Bartelby sometimes just met work requests with a polite declination: 

"It was on the third day, I think, of his being with me, and [that] I abruptly called to Bartleby. In my haste and natural expectancy of instant compliance, I sat with my head bent over the original on my desk, and my right hand sideways, and somewhat nervously extended with the copy, so that immediately upon emerging from his retreat, Bartleby might snatch it and proceed to business without the least delay. In this very attitude did I sit when I called to him, rapidly stating what it was I wanted him to do—namely, to examine a small paper with me. Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving from his privacy, Bartleby in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, 'I would prefer not to.' "

There is, I am sure, a more nuanced reading of the text that I failed then to grasp (and am not going to trouble myself with now--I prefer not to!). For me the story is about someone who does what they do vocationally and sometimes simply declines requests to do what others -- even Important Supervisory Others! -- ask them to do. Someone who can do his job with competence and who yet can push back against the logical requests of others. 

I have mostly tried in my work life not to be a Bartelby. And/but, the longer I participate in machina academia, the more often I think that maybe Bartelby had it right--that one, sometimes, maybe, should be guided by some Greater Stars that lead to polite but implacable resistance. (Resistance is the right word here, I think, even if Bartelby's preference was passive. It was still a refusal, a 'no.')

What does this have to do with now? I think, coming out of the pandemic (when SOPs were shelved for many of us), there's been a chance to look at some of the systems and to recognize more bald-facedly that they aren't producing enough good, for enough people, in ways that allow enough dignity and enough fairness to continue simply saying yes. 

For me the realization isn't exactly new, of course, but somehow the pandemic was a more visceral exposure to big theoretical claims I'd already understood. And/but/yet: I still want to get up in the morning and put on my pants and show up, and I still am as baffled by Bartelby's employer when someone says (in so many different ways that one can say it), "I prefer not to."