Working from home has made the post-covid work scene a very quiet one.
Work is either paid or unpaid (but has remunerative potential) activity that we do as means of employment. There are two main assumptions about the meaning of work — the conventional assumption and the expanded conventional assumption.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, work, in a conventional sense, is an “action or activity involving physical or mental effort and undertaken in order to achieve a result esp. as means of making one’s living or earning money”. Contrary to the conventional assumption, the expanded version exposes work to include paid and unpaid jobs. In this article, I take work to mean that which takes up an individual’s effort, energy and time and provides remuneration to the individual.
Besides the benefits that work brings in terms of remuneration and sustaining the livelihood of individuals, work is also meaningful. Meaningful work here entails the socio-economic benefits that work brings to human life.
I have argued elsewhere that work is meaningful to individuals as it allows them to express their identity and participate in a cause that is meaningful to their lives. Work contributes to the essence of a human person. For some people, they find meaning in life through their work. For example, when I was employed as a philosophy contract lecturer at the University of Johannesburg, after my first week, I was anxious and sad that it would end after seven weeks. This was because I began to find purpose in life in my work besides the payment.
However, even though I have considered work to be a meaningful endeavour, phenomena like “quiet quitting,” which gained traction during Covid-19, have called for questioning whether there is still meaning in work post-Covid. I argue that many workers are still faced with the traumas of Covid-19, thereby finding it challenging to find meaning at work. I also contend intuitively that some workers believe that technologies might automate their work. As a result, they have become less engaged with their work. These two problems could be significant causes of quiet quitting.
The term quiet quitting was first used in 2020 by Bryan Creely, a career coach in Nashville, Tennessee. After being laid off from his job as a corporate recruiter at the beginning of the pandemic, Creely became a content creator, giving career advice on TikTok and YouTube. His contents were well received by those rebelling against “toxic work environments” and had decided to put minimum effort into their jobs instead of quitting.
Creely writes: “Those of us who grew up in a hustle culture, where you have a constant, incessant need to work, work, work — and work becomes the main priority of your life to get ahead — I think that has a seismic shift over the last year to year and half … are you somebody that has quiet quit on the job?”
Quiet quitting has gained prevalence since Creely’s first usage of the phrase.
In simple terms, quiet quitting is a phenomenon whereby people tend to put in the bare minimum at their workplace without quitting their jobs. The World Economic Forum juxtaposed quiet quitting to Gen-Z after the concept became prevalent through its insistent usage by the above generation. While this may be true, I argue that quiet quitting, as a phenomenon, can be associated with all generations without scapegoating any. It is a phenomenon that arises from the meaninglessness of work and has become prominent in post-Covid and the advancements of automated technologies.
Covid-19 could be one of the leading causes of quiet quitting. And after Covid-19, quiet quitting has become more common. According to a research paper I published, Rethinking Remote Work, Automated Technology, Meaningful Work: Making a Case for Relationality”, I argue that the move to remote work due to lockdown measures caused by Covid-19 and the proliferation of automated technology caused meaninglessness in work.
This is because there was a lack of relationality in the workspace, given the remote working environment. Individuals, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, who prized the values of relationality and physical collegial relationships were left desolate and depressed, being unable to foster interpersonal relationships with their colleagues. Here I go further to say that the effects of Covid-19 on people’s mental health could be causing individuals to quietly quit in their work environment post-Covid. How so?
The pandemic came with so much stress, affecting workers’ mental health. This stress was caused by the feeling of isolation and the intensification of work. Some individuals were burnt out while trying to keep a work-family balance. Other people felt isolated from their colleagues. Some workers worked more than their required hours. These effects strained workers’ psychological well-being, which could have resulted in quiet quitting.
The possible high death rate could also cause quiet quitting and meaninglessness towards work. This could be tied to the notion that some people began experiencing the meaninglessness of (in) life, leading to the meaninglessness of work, which then gave rise to quiet quitting. For example, there is a possibility that if I had experienced the loss of my close colleagues at work who had died while working during the pandemic, as a survivor, I could lose interest in my work because it becomes pointless working due to my traumas.
These issues have not been sufficiently dealt with and have not disappeared post-Covid. Additionally, people are still figuring out ways of coping and adjusting to the new expected “normal” without sufficiently dealing with their past traumas.
Another aspect which intuitively could cause quiet quitting in post-Covid is the threat of automation of jobs in the future. We saw how efficiently some technologies carried out some jobs previously done by humans. It is prima facie that most jobs that are susceptible to being automated in the future by technologies are jobs with the characteristics of being automated.
However, despite the veracity in the above claim, we cannot expect people to adjust their lives swiftly and not be in panic mode. People are justified to panic in places like sub-Saharan Africa, given social challenges like high unemployment. We expect individuals to begin acquiring technical skills to be relevant in the future of work within the region, yet there need to be proper structures to make this possible. Furthermore, it looks like the government is mainly journeying assiduously with young people into the future of work by equipping them with technical skills. However, these are not the individuals that constitute the majority of the current workforce.
We could ask current workers to upskill themselves, which is fair. But let us not be oblivious to the psychological stress that they could be experiencing.
Suppose that the job you love is being considered to be taken away from you and given to AI technology, and you cannot stop it. How will you feel? You may begin to find meaninglessness at work. That is because of the emotional connections you would have built with your job over the years. As a result, there is a possibility that you will begin to quiet quit.
As a way of concluding, I allude that if we agree that work is meaningful beyond economic remuneration, then it becomes possible that when individuals begin to go to work only for practical reasons rather than doing what they are passionate about because what they love doing has been, or will be, automated, the possibility of meaninglessness and quiet quitting will become an unavoidable possibility.
Edmund Terem Ugar is a doctoral student of Artificial Intelligence Ethics and Medicine/Healthcare in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Johannesburg.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.