Why Do We Keep Creating So Many Bullshit Work Trends?

Now there’s “Loud Quitting?”

If you’ve been following along since mid-2020, we’ve had various work “trends” that people on cable news and sites like Forbes consistently opine about, including:

• The Shutdown of Offices
• The Great Resignation
• The Great Awakening
• No one wants to work anymore
• Quiet Quitting
• Quiet Hiring
• Quit-Tok’ing
• Loud Quitting (this is new)

Most of these concepts are vaguely backed up by stats and are more the result of people needing to meet deadlines and fill airtime.

Here’s a new newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen:

Bed Rotting and Loud Quitting

Pretty early on in there, she writes this:

My general take, and what I told Molla, is that these terms are a means of making a few pretty bewildering years in the workplace into something legible, or at the very least understandable. That’s what “The Great Resignation” did in 2021: it gave a label to the feeling of take this job and shove it, I’m exhausted, even though we now know that the vast majority of people who actually did resign (and not just feel like resigning) were mothers who couldn’t find childcare, service workers finding better jobs, and older workers retiring.

That is the right take. It’s just a way to (a) fill time and (b) try to explain to people who just fart their way through life and hope to get paid every two weeks what exactly is happening.