Quiet quit and its potential perils
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Before last week, I had never heard this expression, but among people who work remotely over the internet, it is fairly common. For example, if you haven't seen or heard from a colleague for a long time, you might say to him, "Yo, bro, I was wondering whether you quiet quit."
What does it mean?
(ambitransitive, idiomatic) To cease overachieving at one's workplace to focus on one's personal life; to do only what is reasonably or contractually required. [since 2022]
Quiet quitting is a workplace behavior where employees only do the bare minimum at their jobs.
In the early 2020s, quiet quitting gained attention as a trend, mainly due to social media. Some, though, doubt its prevalence and whether it's really new.
Data on the behavior includes Gallup's 2023 "State of the Global Workplace" report, which stated that 59% of the global workforce consisted of quiet quitters.
Managers have had varied reactions, either tolerating the phenomenon or firing employees they thought were not putting in more effort, enthusiasm, and time than absolutely necessary. It has also led to related terms such as quiet firing—making a job so unrewarding that a worker will feel compelled to quit.
Quiet quitting has moved past the workplace to personal relationships, such as marriages.
This type of behavior is easy to develop in any business that is carried out largely online and remotely. Because of the nature of the industry, however, it is especially prone to happen in telecommunications.
Individuals on network teams may be located in diverse places, yet undertake complex tasks requiring close coordination. For instance, a six-member team may be spread across South Carolina, Louisiana, Dallas, etc., yet be responsible for making intricate installations in Georgia, Florida, or elsewhere. Often, their main task is to ensure that tens of thousands of "nodes" are correctly and securely connected to all the tens of thousands of nodes in the rest of the network. To me, at least, it is mind-boggling that each node is designated by a specific string of numbers and a precise GPS coordinate.
A given network team may be tasked with the physical installation of specific piece of hardware for handling the switching of all the calls / communications / transmissions that pass among the countless nodes in the network.
In any event, the geographically separated members of the team must be able at specific times to tell each other when repairs need to be made or new equipment installed, and they must put in the requisition orders necessary to carry out such work.
All of this communication is carried out among the members of the team by messaging, e-mail, conferencing (video and otherwise), and so forth.
So long as the work gets done and the system is constantly maintained, it's not so important who is doing it and where they are positioned, not to mention that the team members back each other up with built-in redundancy so that the network continues to function even if there is a temporary breakdown at a given node.
The team members may not be conspicuous at all times, so long as their duties are fulfilled. In other words, they may "quiet quit" for a while, but if they are ever truly absent in a way that endangers the smooth operation of the system as a whole, their quitting will no longer be quiet.
Selected readings
- "The language of phone numbers" (11/2/12)
- "Metatranslation" (12/17/16)
Mai Kuha said,
January 1, 2026 @ 1:54 pm
I'm sure many will come here to comment that "quiet quitting" under that Wiktionary definition can reasonably be called simply "working", i.e., meeting all one's responsibilities adequately, and that it seems noteworthy only due to occurring in a toxic culture of overwork.
It seems useful to distinguish it from being absent from work. On a related note, "mouse jigglers" exist now.
Gregory Kusnick said,
January 1, 2026 @ 4:01 pm
Formerly known as "slacking".
Roscoe said,
January 1, 2026 @ 8:20 pm
Or “goldbricking.”
Anubis Bard said,
January 1, 2026 @ 9:34 pm
As the US enters its late Soviet phase, I can't help but recall the old sovietsky description of their economy, that "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us."
Richard Hershberger said,
January 2, 2026 @ 5:00 am
There is no necessary connection between quiet quitting and remote work. Remote merely removes the necessity of looking busy. The proper response, whether remote or in person, is for managers to have some way to sensibly measure whether the employee is getting their work done. Look at the managerial complaints about remote work and it often amounts to they have no idea how to tell if the employee is working, and so use face time as a proxy.
Jerry Packard said,
January 2, 2026 @ 9:08 am
My memory is that it came about around 4-5 years ago from China with terms like terms like 躺平 (tǎng píng – lying flat), meaning rejecting overwork for a simpler life, and other slang like 糊弄学 (hùnong xué – muddle-through-ology).
Robert Coren said,
January 2, 2026 @ 9:48 am
This concept seems to me to be related to what is called "working to rule", a form of labor protest short of a strike in occupations (teaching and policing come to mind) where exceeding the strict requirements of the job is the norm, and if everyone sticks to the "rules" the system approaches breakdown.
David Marjanović said,
January 2, 2026 @ 10:14 am
Known, and often used as a threat, over here as Dienst nach Vorschrift.
Jason said,
January 2, 2026 @ 12:59 pm
Hardly a new concept of course. Near-synonyms include "go-slow" (used to be a common form of industrial action in Australia), "time-serving", "minimum effort", "bare-compliance", and the "illusion of activity".
Carol Lisker Kennedy said,
January 2, 2026 @ 4:41 pm
I think the concept has been around a long time, but probably gained momentum when lots of people were working from home in 2020, due to their fears about Covid-19. Suddenly you were allowed to work from home, or attend school from home, and it was a short step from that to "quiet quitting", i.e., doing as little as possible while pretending to work (or attend classes).
When I was a school librarian and was a union member, a similar concept was called "working to the contract". Meaning, you are not out on strike, but you are doing the bare minimum to fulfill your contractual agreement with your employer, and not one more thing. If the contract says you leave the building at 3:00, you leave on the dot of 3:00, not one minute later, for example. If a colleague or a child asks for an extra favor, and it is not specified in the contract, you say no.
This is the first time I have come across the expression of "quiet quitting", however.
katarina said,
January 2, 2026 @ 5:16 pm
There's "shirking", as in working vs shirking. Google
translates "shirking" into Mandarin
tou1lan3 偷懶 "stealthily lazy".
Chas Belov said,
January 2, 2026 @ 9:23 pm
@Jason: I wouldn't consider "illusion of activity" to be a synonym. "Quiet quitters" actually work, they're just not going beyond the minimum requirements; the phrase is a misnomer by bosses who want the workers to do more work than the boss is paying them for.
Philip Taylor said,
January 3, 2026 @ 4:21 am
Carol — "If the contract says you leave the building at 3:00, you leave on the dot of 3:00, not one minute later" — a former colleague did that as a matter of course. He would wait outside the building in which we both worked until exactly 09:00, and would leave on the dot (or colon !) of 17:00, even if that meant leaving an e-mail or a computer code fragment only partially composed.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
January 4, 2026 @ 5:23 am
I remember being in a bookshop in Melbourne 15 minutes before closing time. A worker approached me to warn me they would be closing in 15 minutes and I said it wasn't a problem. Imagine my bemused surprise when they started switching the lights off some minutes before that time, and on the dot of 18:00, all the workers were already waiting for me at the door, visibly impatient, their handbags in hand, ready to leave.
Or, on another occasion, during a coffee break at a conference, I approached the tea people for a refill one minute after the scheduled finish time and they bluntly refused.
I know workers' rights etc. but it creates a hugely unfriendly climate.
John Busch said,
January 4, 2026 @ 8:31 am
Some friends taught me a similar term that applies to people later in their careers. Retired In Place. Biding one’s time until the very last 5:00.
Chas Belov said,
January 5, 2026 @ 5:56 pm
I was trying to think of a reply to @Jarek Weckwerth that would not be rude. Since this is Language Log, I think I need to express this as a comment on subtext, and not as a comment on M. Weckwerth.
Whenever a staff member says to me "We close in 15 minutes," &emdash; and they have &emdash; I try to take it as having the subtext of "Please be so kind as to finish whatever you're doing as quickly as you reasonably can." which I suspect is what they indeed mean.
I do tend to be fairly literal, so picking up subtext can be a challenge for me. That said, this is one particular subtext I tend to grok.
Philip Taylor said,
January 6, 2026 @ 6:23 am
An anecdote (in response to Chas' comment above) which I may have recounted previously — I was shopping in Germany on a Sunday afternoon, and at about 14:30 took my basket to the till. "I'm sorry", I was told (in German, of course) "but we can't serve you after 14:00". "Oh", I said, "then why did no-one tell me this when I was clearly wandering around the aisles putting things in my basket ?". "Oh, that is permitted", the assistant replied, "it is just that we cannot accept your money or sell you the items in your basket after 14:00".
Jarek Weckwerth said,
January 7, 2026 @ 11:58 am
@ Chas Belov — That there was a subtext was completely evident. However, there are two possible scenarios: (1) In some countries/establishments, "closing the shop at X hrs" means you are not allowed to enter after that time, but you will be allowed to complete your shopping within a reasonable amount of time if you are already inside. In that kind of situation, your subtext of "finish as quickly as possible" is exactly what is meant. (2) In other establishments, the subtext is "We strictly don't do absolutely any work whatsoever beyond X, and we will leave the premises at time X because we don't get paid for switching off the lights at time X:01". That was what happened in the two situations I described, and I simply wasn't prepared for that.
I don't think my unpreparedness calls for a rude answer at all.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
January 7, 2026 @ 1:12 pm
After some more reflection on the tram ;) I think the question is 100% linguistic: What do the opening times posted on the door (or wherever else) mean? In other words, what does it mean for a commercial establishment to be open? I would submit the default meaning is "open for business" rather than "having an open front door and staff present". And "business" means being able and willing to sell things to people. If you must leave the premises on the dot, it means you must complete all the end-of-business tasks before that time. Which means that you are not in fact open for business in the last X minutes. Which means that your declaration of opening times on your front door is, well, not entirely truthful for customers unfamiliar with the second meaning (a.k.a. a lie, if you're not charitable).
(BTW, on reflection, there are more scenarios than I suggested in the previous post, but I've written enough already.)
Philip Taylor said,
January 8, 2026 @ 5:06 am
"Opening times" can cause problems in real life, Jarek — I found that on the Google-my-business listings for Maison Cà Phê and Hội-An at the Westberry I was able to indicate that both would be closed for the period 22-Dec-2025 to 10-Jan-2026, but when I attempted to do something similar for the Westberry Hotel I found I was unable to. Google informed me that
and even when I pointed out that I needed to inform potential clients in advance of the imminent closure, Google were unable (I won't be so uncharitable as to say 'unwilling') to assist — "You'll just have to mark the business as 'temporarily closed'", they said, which is rather like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted …
Jarek Weckwerth said,
January 9, 2026 @ 2:13 am
Well, in some sense this is similar to my Australian experience since surely it was someone else, not the workers themselves, that decided what "opening times" mean and how they should be communicated.