Generation Z (millennials) may have coined the phrase ‘Quiet Quitting’, but it was Generation X who perfected it, and did it so quietly that we didn’t need to give it a name.
The debate over quiet quitting is between an older generation who was raised with a different view of what success means, and millennials who measure success by the quality of life and aren’t willing to go above and beyond in the workplace to the detriment of their personal life and happiness.
I am going to poopoo the idea that ‘Quiet Quitting’ is the idea that people just go to work and don’t do anything and get paid for that. While those people exist, and always have, that isn’t really what ‘Quiet Quitting’ means, regardless of what some on TikTok say just to go viral. Quiet Quitting means you will give 100%, but you won’t give 110% at work, pulling extra time and extra responsibilities outside of your job description, while sacrificing your own personal life. Yes, companies hate workers who don’t strive for the title ‘corporate suck up’, so they will slam them as lazy, although they are doing the job they are paid for.
Following the greatest generation, those who lived through The Great Depression and WW2, Baby Boomers had a lot of pressure to make the sacrifices of their parents not be in vain. There was a lot of pressure to take advantage of the economic boom, climb the corporate ladder, and toe the line. The American Dream was to have a successful career, get married, buy a house, have children, and put a couple of cars in the driveway.
The children of Baby Boomers, Generation X, witnessed the results of this type of success and started to question if there was more to life. Nearly half of all marriages failed. Families were in debt. Parents worked endlessly, television was a babysitter. Is sacrificing your personal life for a career and ‘success’ worth all this?
My ‘Quiet Quitting’ is a little different. It wasn’t a protest against going beyond expectations. Mine was about reclaiming my time and life from long working hours. A quiet plan that was years in the making.
I started as a young adult as a real ‘go-getter’. I lied about my age, with permission from my parents, to get my first job at 14 years old. I started working a few hours a week as a dishwasher at a local restaurant that my family had frequented on Sundays after church. It was the fanciest restaurant in the city. It was locally owned and my parents became close with the owner, so getting the job was effortless.
I worked hard, no one would ever accuse me of being lazy. I was curious about everything happening in the restaurant and would watch everyone doing their jobs, soaking in everything I could. Then, one day, my big break. A fry cook, the lowest level of cooks in a restaurant, had not shown up for work. I eagerly volunteered to wash dishes and be the fry cook, I promised I could keep up with both tasks. And I did.
Before long, and within two years, I was running the kitchen at a 5-star restaurant. Guests would request to see the Chef so they could give complements, and out walked my skinny 16-year-old self.
I continued working at the restaurant through high school but still hadn’t decided what was next for me until the owner of the restaurant offered to pay for my education if I chose chef school. I wasn’t absolutely convinced that being a chef was my career path, but I couldn’t say no to free education, and a chance to see if that was really my calling.
Later, I landed a job as a restaurant manager with a large national brand. Not somewhere that would use chef training, but the pay was great and the restaurant business was all I knew.
I climbed the ranks of the company quickly, and before long I was a regional manager overseeing 20 restaurants. I moved fast through the company and became a corporate motivational speaker, giving speeches at corporate retreats to other managers on how to be better managers and make more money for the CEO and upper management. My job was to motivate people to want to work harder and longer hours for very little personal return on their investment.
After growing tired of long hours and trying to convince other people in the company to work harder and longer, I knew something had to give. I was waking up at 6 am for work and not returning until nearly midnight, and repeating again six days a week.
I made the drastic choice to leave the company and I became a waiter at another restaurant chain at 26 years old. I wanted to moonlight as a self-taught web designer with the hopes that I could earn enough to become a freelancer. I would wait on tables for the lunch shift and be home by 5 pm to teach myself web design until 2 or 3 in the morning.
Within two years, I was better than most web designers who studied formally. I started doing a few free jobs to get my name out. Then, I started to gather large national clients, corporations, and famous personalities. By the age of 30, I was out of the restaurant business after ‘quiet quitting’ for nearly four years. I was never lazy and I never slacked off at work, but I was quietly planning my quitting by preparing myself for the life I had envisioned.
I was never lazy, and if I were incompetent, I would have never been able to pull off quiet quitting. It takes more grit to quiet quietly than it does to stay in a job you don’t like just so people perceive you as ‘successful’.
Quiet Quitting led to living in Mexico
It’s not easy to work outside the 9-5 corporate work cycle in the United States and not struggle. I left a great paying corporate job working 60 hours a week with great benefits to demoting myself to a waiter, and then a self-employed freelance web designer. And my bank account knew it, but that was the entire purpose, to find a life worth living that wasn’t dictated by work, money, and everyone else’s definition of ‘success’.
I needed a plan.
I started to look at cost of living in other parts of the United States, all just as expensive as the next. Then, by chance, I discovered an article about Mexico. I was 30 years old and had never left the country, I didn’t even have a passport, but the idea was intriguing.
Over the next couple of years, I planned my move to Mexico and started to scale back on material items I had hoarded over the years. I sold everything I owned except my clothes and my laptop.
At 35 years old I took my clothes, laptop, and newly received passport and drove to the border with only my Garmin GPS (sorry millennials, you don’t know what those are) and no idea what was beyond the border and with the Spanish vocabulary no greater than hola, taco, and burrito.
I entered Mexico through Laredo, Texas, the scariest place I have ever been. I went through Monterrey, Zacatecas, and Guadalajara, and eventually ended up in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where I had chosen to be my home in Mexico.
I had some money saved from the sale of everything I owned, but I knew I needed to start finding some local clients, and fast. I started the door-to-door salesman routine, hitting every business in the tourist zone offering great deals on websites, even a few free sites to get my name out there. Businesses in Puerto Vallarta were very receptive, and before long, I had dozens of local clients, plus a client list from the United States.
Today, I am 50 years old and I don’t work more than 10 hours a week. I spend my days traveling, I have been to every state in Mexico. I have taken full advantage of my life that only started after quiet quitting.
After ‘quiet quitting’ I have discovered different cultures and places. I have learned two additional languages. I have volunteered to help people in need after two devastating earthquakes in Mexico. I have even eaten bugs, something I didn’t even do in Chef school.
My life is anything but incompetent or lazy, it is fulfilling.
The world needs those people who desire to climb the ranks of Corporate America, or capitalism. But don’t think that those who choose Quiet Quitting are just lazy or incompetent kids that don’t want to work. They are people who use their energy and competence in a different way, let them, we need them too!
Generation Z (millennials) may have coined the phrase 'Quiet Quitting', but it was Generation X who perfected it, and did it so quietly that . . .
