I quit

Most readers will probably fall somewhere between our house-hold’s extremes of embracing and rejecting paid work. But while Silicon Valley has been violently taking up the grindcore ethos for the past year or so, quitting has become very on trend elsewhere. Covid sparked a ‘great resignation’, as people stuck in lockdowns reconsidered their relationship to work and quit their jobs in droves, enabled by temporary expansions of the social safety net. Then there was ‘quiet quitting’, where you still showed up to work but didn’t offer any additional enthusiasm, time or effort. The fact that just doing your job was seen as a sort of ‘quitting’ helped expose the expectation that we invest both unpaid overtime and unacknowledged emotional labour in work.