“Quiet Quitting” is the new term for losing the enthusiasm to dedicate your life, your free time, and your soul to your job. “Nothing new” is what you will read if you search the term, and that is true. People have been doing this forever. It really is a practical way to get your life back and not starve to death or live on charity.

I think everyone who has ever held a job has quietly quit one job or another. Causes can range from harsh management and a sense of not being appreciated to just boredom and being stuck in a position. For many people, those around them can make or break a job. When the people fade and fail, then enthusiasm wanes. Other times, the excitement and interest in a job changes when the job changes. Duty calls, though, and we often slog on although we are not especially happy with the ongoing situation.

Changing a job can help this, bring in new faces, more money, a new environment. Sometimes this change alone can help a person renew, and leaving a toxic environment for one (hopefully not toxic) with a better atmosphere. Our work is often tightly bound up with a sense of self and self-worth, but work also helps us hide from other responsibilities or problems we just don’t want to face.

One thing is just yourself. You can hide from yourself if you are always working. What happens when you suddenly have to face yourself and learn who you are, who you have become? It can be exciting, or depressing, or confusing, or any other number of things. You can also hide from people around you, such as your kids or wife or husband or other family members, friends, and neighbors.

Ultimately we need to look at ourselves and find values and reasons within our daily lives beyond the job – or return to the job to continue hiding.

“Quiet Quitting” doesn’t just happen at work. It happens in marriages, friendships, and all relationships. People change, people get tired of patterns and abuse or neglect, and it seems the older we get the less patience we have for life’s crap. The idealism and hope of youth vanish as we see the world change and we learn more of reality. Life pulls no punches, and some of us are in easier situations than others, but we still all have to deal with life and its disappointments.

I think this may be when the quiet quitting can begin. Disappointment after disappointment, ongoing environmental degradation, polarizing politics, wars, inflation, income problems, etc., can cause many of us to retreat. We can also lash out at those around us when upset rather than looking to a loved one for support. As well, we also need to look within for a way to move beyond our own sorrow or displeasure with the way our lives are going or the way the world is moving beyond our control.

I am retired – I have time for myself, perhaps too much of it. I have time to look at the world around me and not be pleased. I see people I care about far more differently than I did before I had all this time to think. I have time to ponder. All of this does at times make me want to walk away from everyone and everything. Hobbies and interests are one way to hide from all this, but what is the value if there is no value within? And this is when acknowledgment of dark thoughts needs to become the vehicle for change and renewal.

Quiet quitting can be a form of restoration of the self and the soul. I don’t think it is an easy process to find new things which give value and meaning to one’s existence, but life is all about growth and change, at all ages and phases in life. Life does punch you in the face a lot! Roll with the punches or fight back? Adapt? Change direction? Flounder and wander around in the dark, seeking the answers from various sources?

Hmmmmm.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

     S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
     A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
     Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
     Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
     Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
     Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
     So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
     And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
     And should I then presume?
     And how should I begin?

          . . . . .

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? …

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

          . . . . .

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep… tired… or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
     Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
     That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
     “That is not it at all,
     That is not what I meant, at all.”

          . . . . .

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

T.S. Eliot