Here’s a cool 10-minute audio about “Quiet Quitting.” Apparently the younger generation is tired of being pushed beyond a healthy work/life balance. Employers demand more and more of our time, which diminishes time with family and friends, and doing things outside of work.
What about you? Are you striving through your busyness toward some future career goal? Are you neglecting your important relationships in the process? Quiet Quitting is a way to examine what is truly important in your life.
Do you think there’s a need to push back against the unending pursuit of being productive?
Listen and post your thoughts. I’m curious to hear them.
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I like what was said in this. A point they mentioned was how its been a long time comming for this movement of “quiet quiting”. Its no mystery that it is here though. Its inception has its roots in employees being treated poorly job after job or boss after boss that have caused this “sudden” reaction. Too much has been expected and now people are “burnt out”. This may be the result of a lifetime of work, or perhaps gemerations of poor working conditions. It sort of reminds me of how people have generations of trauma that have not been dealt with and as a result, suicide, school shootings, and a rise in mental heath diagnoses have occured. Is it that people are suddenly more mentally sick? Or is it that we have gone too long without talking about what is really going on and what is really being felt and experienced. So sort of related to the quiet quitting. People are “waking up” to the fact that they are miserable in their work and want change. Perhaps likewise is this whole covid-19 pandemic. I personally believe that nothing is simply a coincidence. I think covid happened at a point where everyone on earth was at a breaking point emotionally and as a result, we all needed a break. We needed time to take stock of what is really important; our minds and bodies and our happiness. We live in a first world country, and yet we are all so miserable. There are people in third world countries that are happier and more loving than us. There are monks that have been taken as pow’s and are greatful. Ghandi or some other non-violence leader went to prison and claimed that they felt a sense of freedom and peace at being inprisoned because there was no more restricted they could be, yet they still had a free mind and a heart full of love. Why then do we feel upset when there is all the fresh water, food, and land we could dream of? Because there are years and generations of pain that go way beyond us that we dont know about. It plagues us every day. The wounds we endure from childhood are reopened every day, so we very rarely can come from a place of the present, but a place of the past. I unfortunately dont think covid acted as the successful wake up call we all needed, but i think it definitely shook some things up. This “quiet quitting” no doubt sounds like a step in that direction, but i think we have a long way to go until our culture and society as a whole can embrace this idea that this have happened to all of us that are out of our control. The students of columbine didnt ask to have there school shot up, yet, nuntheless it happened. And now there are emotionally scared people walking around that dont understand why that shooter did what they did. All they can do is try to make up reasons in their heads and keep going about their lives. So they walk this earth hating that person, or being scared of them, or sad and then they are a victim the rest of their life. They never get to understand what happened to that person in their life that caused them to act out and shoot up a school. Its much more complicated than people being “good” or “bad”. Without this knowledge, we are stuck. I hope our culture and world can continue to get unstuck and grow. I want to learn to be more and more free of fear and the trappings it causes. So thanks for this blog series and all the work you do Arno. The more people can be free of fear, the more we can have a free and open heart to share love with everyone. Buddhism teaches that fear is the root of all sufferring, so lets learn to overcome fear and overcome sufferring together.
Hi Ben, Thanks for your thoughtful post. You’re really looking at this from a broad perspective, which I think gives us a better understanding of what is actually going on. We all seem to be striving toward a goal we haven’t consciously thought through. We seem to be in an awareness movement and people are waking up to what is most important. At least some are. Many are just struggling to make ends meet.
Thanks again Ben. a