Quiet Quitting: A Cultural Analysis by an American Living in France

When I first came across the phrase “quiet quitting,” I was intrigued. After learning what it means, I laughed. The phenomenon, first brought to the United States’ attention by Zaid K in a TikTok that has amassed nearly 500k likes since it was posted in July, is anything but a novelty to American expats in France.

Quiet quitting is defined as doing the bare minimum in one’s job, as actively choosing to not pursue advancement or “climb the ladder.” It is, in theory, a rejection of the hustle-culture mindset that has defined Americans since the country’s inception. France, my adopted country, is not only full of quiet quitters, but also unironically self-satisfied quitters. Any American who has stood in line for something in France and felt that mounting frustration when the size of the line correlates exactly zero percent to the speed with which a French person executes their job duties has witnessed this phenomenon firsthand. As someone who has recently begun her fifth year of residency in this country, this experience is as exasperating as it is amusing. But, for the standard American who has inadvertently spent their life absorbing the over-processed mentality that “The Customer is Always Right,” I am skeptical that the idea of quiet quitting will actually become a movement for many reasons. To start with, it is antithetical to the way Americans are taught to navigate the world.

Take, for example, my inability to procure a viennoiserie prior to boarding a train to Paris recently. I arrived at the train station in Strasbourg fifteen minutes before it was set to leave, and immediately entered a line at the nearest in-station bakery. There were just four people ahead of me. The sole woman working, had we been in the United States, would likely have rushed to fill the customers’ orders as quickly as possible, spurred by the impatience that naturally emanates from humans waiting in line. However, to be French is to be naturally inoculated against this capitalistic expectation of premium customer service. And so, I dashed out of the line without being able to grab food before my train, cursing myself and the girl two ahead of me who had ordered fresh squeezed orange juice, an espresso, and a sandwich (oui, réchauffé s’il vous plaît) – but, in total defiance of my American upbringing, not the worker. 

In France, to do your job is to be fulfilling the duties ascribed to said job. There is no general expectation in the working psyche that “going above and beyond” or placing importance on something as arbitrary and, let’s be honest, capricious, as “customer satisfaction” is worth the extra effort on the part of the worker.

Sitting in the train, even as my stomach contracted painfully around empty air, I didn’t begrudge the worker. If she had rushed to help us all, sure I’d have sat down in the train munching on a pain au chocolat – but she’d still have the same amount of time to work until the end of her shift. The basic responsibilities of a food service worker are to fill customers’ food orders, ideally with a pleasant demeanor. When it comes to external factors such as whether or not those customers are in a hurry to procure a snack or a coffee, truly, there is no baseline obligation to care. So, many French workers simply don’t. 

Perhaps this is related to why the French place such an emphasis on fulfilling social customs. The bonjour sung out as soon as one arrives to the counter of a boulangerie or enters a shop isn’t simply polite, it’s recognizing that the person whose current responsibility is to be as helpful as her job description is not, in fact, characterizable by the responsibilities that comprise her job description. This separation of job from self is natural within French culture precisely because quiet quitting is not, in fact, a revolutionary concept – it’s simply a dignified way of living. And therein lies the cultural rub. 

As much as some Americans may assert that they are “choosing” to quiet quit, the fact is that the result of quiet quitting in the US is fundamentally incomparable to quiet quitting in France; I don’t believe it’s possible for a young person to quiet quit in the US in a way that would yield the expected sense of self-satisfaction and freedom. France is a country whose core foundation was built on the heads of guillotined assholes whose spirits live on today in the people who write checks for Mitch McConnell’s Super PAC. “Capitalism” is a debatable set of values here in a way it is not in the US, and young people who feel unenlightened or unenthused by the prospect of working to work may simply choose to not do so, while retaining an ability to access healthcare and financial assistance (both provided by the government) such that one’s life satisfaction is not necessarily determined by their work. And this, I think, is the true essence of quiet quitting. 

To quiet quit in the US has been defined as doing the bare minimum, fulfilling your job expectations and nothing more, perhaps even consciously underdelivering where you might be capable of displaying more than is required of you, simply on principle. The Harvard Business Review appears to recognize this as a self-preservation effort by workers, with Anthony C. Klotz and Mark C. Bolino last month writing that, “… while going above and beyond can come at a cost for employees, in a healthy organization, these costs are typically counterbalanced by benefits such as increased social capital, wellbeing, and career success.” But what, exactly, defines a healthy American organization? The answer has two levels of “it depends.” It depends on who you’re asking – the business or the workers. But it also depends on what level of worker you’re asking. If we could assume executives and general laborers had the same definition of a healthy American business, we wouldn’t need human resources departments. 

Many Americans don’t get it: the strength and economic capital that an American company gains as its profit margins increase is directly proportional to the amount of economic capital of their workers and users.

In France, labor laws imperfectly (for of course there is always more work to be done here) function to recognize employees as individuals with rights, rather than a homogenous asset, i.e., “human capital.” The staggering strength of America’s most economically dominant companies (e.g., Amazon) is actually indicative of the weakness of its workers, whose very autonomy is limited to the decision to quiet quit, and to celebrate quiet quitting as revolutionary, but not actually to quit. 

If Americans understood that the core problem with our work culture doesn’t lie with the pervasive idea that one should always be striving to go “above and beyond,” but is actually in the subsequent idea that those who go above and beyond are entitled to everything they can claim, our political landscape might actually reflect something from which stronger workers’ rights might be sowed and later harvested. In this scenario, the Republican Party wouldn’t be perceived as the party of fiscal responsibility and savvy economic managers that they have undeservedly held in our political discourse for generations, but instead for what they are: arbiters of weak or nonexistent labor laws that facilitate the flow of wealth for a minority of people who will never see people like me and you as anything but what we are when we work in the Land of the Free: human capital. Essentially, it’s high time that we stopped conflating the concept of “earned” with “claimed” past a certain income threshold, particularly when what is being claimed is human capital – AKA human beings.

So, it’s understandable that the trending answer to all of this is to quiet quit – saying you’re going to do something is always, after all, always easier than actually doing it, and buffers mental health in the short term. But, as Hamilton Nolan notes in The Guardian, “… it is important, very important, that young people today who have become disillusioned with the bullshit lies of capitalism know that there is a better way. That way is to organize.” Principles about how work should be get you nothing without the discipline to forge them into unified demands – in other words, to create or join a labor union. This collective action takes place in the steaming mess of reality, and also requires that Americans do something that we are not very good at: exercising at length a willingness to place the collective before the individual. 

In France, quiet quitting is a viable approach to life because a history of placing the collective before the individual has yielded a present reality in which industry strikes and weekly protests ruler-rap governments with capitalistic inclinations. A basic right of French society is to be able to find enjoyment in one’s life. If that enjoyment isn’t found in work, then worker protections, government subsidies, and accessible healthcare (read: the organization of society) ensure that people have the time to find their enjoyment outside of work, full stop. 

There is a danger with real costs (career stagnation, often before it’s even really begun, and a perpetual sense of depressed dissatisfaction come to mind) to Americans’ inability to situate the concept of quiet quitting amongst its ideological forebear across the ocean.

You don’t even need to have an academic or deep understanding of how things work over here, you just need to know that in societies that can and do accommodate quiet quitting, the socio-cultural skyline is shaped by individuals who placed the collective before themselves. Until Americans begin to exercise nuance in our emphasis on the individual, quiet quitters in America will simply find themselves identified as the dispensable cogs in a machine perpetually redesigned by companies and politicians such that their most unproductive workers and least desirable constituents are not merely disadvantaged, they are marginalized.

Sources

When Quiet Quitting Is Worse Than the Real Thing (hbr.org)

American workers are burned out and tired. There’s a solution: unions | Hamilton Nolan | The Guardian

Background reading

The economics behind ‘quiet quitting’ — and what we should call it instead : Planet Money : NPR

Quiet quitting is a trend taking over TikTok and possibly your workplace : NPR

Is Quiet Quitting Real? (gallup.com)

What Is Quiet Quitting and Who Is It For? – The New York Times (nytimes.com)

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