Where's Everyone Going?

Though I loathe to do it, scrolling through LinkedIn is sometimes inevitable, and it's not hard to see a pattern popping up amongst professionals. The so-called "quiet-quitting pandemic" has hit large companies hard over the last few years, and it seems that employee retention rates are dropping, indicating workers are feeling less and less loyal towards their employers. Along with that, some workers are feeling disillusioned with work itself, deciding to spend their delegated eight hours and then "quietly quit", no longer beholden to their boss' desperate pleas for help. As a new member of the workforce myself, I'm curious as to the causes of this pandemic and its potential solutions.

Before we begin, we must make clear that the fault does not lie with the worker in this case. The subtle yet strict rules of the hyper-productive, soul-crushing workforce, where company loyalty and absurd work ethic are valued and rewarded handsomely in time, appear to many as a relic from a bygone age, and that's okay. Prioritizing mental health and time away from work may seem scandalous to those grizzled veterans at high positions, but for most it's the mark of the turning over of a long overdue leaf in society.

The next thing we need to do is ascertain why this is happening now, and while I'm not going to present any hard evidence, there are some theories over which I have been mulling for some time now. It starts with the pandemic - the coughing one this time, not the workplace one I mentioned earlier. A few things happened in this pandemic that shifted the workplace culture with great severity. First, the line between home life and work life became inextricably blended as people were forced to work from home. Second, and in accordance with the first point, employers began to realize that normal work hours were a thing of the past; they could harass employees whenever they wanted now, as work phones and computers were always close at hand. I can take only anecdotal evidence from my own family; my father once had to commute over an hour to and from work, and so when he came back in the evenings his "work-day" was complete, free now to spend time the way he wished. Of course, the occasional international business call would catch him working later at night, but these were quite rare.

Since the pandemic, his work day began to creep in on the early morning hours, sometimes even before 7:00, and late night calls became more and more common. Many times, his company will schedule calls deliberately after work hours, forcing him to take them at the gym. This has been the case for many, many employees over the pandemic, an issue further exacerbated by employers swiftly optimizing their work from home workflow to maximize productivity.

Another key psychological impact of the pandemic was a confrontation with mortality that caught most people off guard. We were used to seeing grisly stories on the news, if we would care to look, but these could often be explained away by sensationalist reporting, and commonality between horrific events was rare. Wars seemed distant, fortunately, to almost everyone, after all. However, when the pandemic began we were barraged with constant news of sickness, death, supply chain shortages... all of the makings of a terrifying Laurence Fishburne movie. People were realizing that this was not some overblown story like Ebola in the early 2010's. This was a serious pandemic which was filling up hospitals and morgues, and the government was making it clear that it was down to the common citizen, not the soldiers or doctors, to protect themselves from what could be a deadly illness.

Of course, not everyone took it so seriously. In fact, most people became quickly desensitized by the reporting, but the effect was irreversible. People realized, as though in a Hallmark movie, that death was near to them and life was precious. It became paramount, therefore, that they should spend more time experiencing it, but for many months people were told again and again to stay indoors, halt all travel, and limit contact with everyone not living in their house. The result was a curdling of these lamentations such that when workplaces opened back up, a cloudburst was in order.

Companies salivated at the "hybrid" workflow, and while some employees certainly took advantage of the system by skiving off work at home, most people who make it to good positions at large companies have been told of the necessity of rigorous work their whole life, and so they apply that to their work from home. The competitive nature of large corporations ensures that when you're at home, a little voice nags you when you're not working, saying something along the lines of: "You know, I bet ____ is working. They never take days off. I bet the boss loves ___... You need to beat ____ and you're not doing it."

But a conflicting voice had arisen within the employees, saying instead, "You have all these dreams you've put on hold to work harder and harder for your job... You should spend some time actualizing those dreams." This voice, a product of that confrontation with mortality, puts up a great fight. Just when companies want to tighten their vice-grip on their subjects, their subjects decide to spend time elsewhere. Workers who used to spend ten, eleven, or even twelve hours at work trying to out-compete their peers were now leaving after eight or nine hours and turning their minds completely from work to boot. This puts further pressure on those select few employees who still chose to live that hustle lifestyle, burning them out and enjoining them with the quiet quitting crew before long.

And there's another facet of this latest pandemic that I should mention. During those long months at home, confronted with mortality at every turn, people began to introspect more than they had ever before done. I was one of those people. I began to read more, and read more thought provoking books. When you're constantly asking yourself what it all means and whether or not it's worth it, the nine to five struggle takes a backseat.

The last point I'll make takes into account the socioeconomic generational ladder. Now, not every family is going to follow this trend, but it applies to a lot of the younger part of the workforce and largely to immigrant families as well. Two generations ago, our grandparents worked to survive. My own paternal grandfather was born into extreme poverty in India and did what all of our parents say they did; he walked several miles to school and back with but one pair of old sandals. He was the first in his lineage to earn a PhD, and when he had his own family almost all of his money was spent making sure there was food on the table. One generation ago, our parents worked to improve their living conditions. My grandfather ensured that his kids were always fed and always had the best education, but there was little money for frivolity outside of that, at least until his kids had all become self-sufficient. My father worked his tail off to make sure we were better off than he had been as a kid. He made for me and my mom a comfortable life in the middle class, where we have everything we need and even some left over for nice things and nice experiences.

So if the impetus for hard work before was to climb this socioeconomic ladder, what happens to my generation (including Millennials and Zoomers)? Well, we work hard because we've been told it's the right thing to do, but our comfort, and of course the pandemic, force us to introspect on what really matters, and when we enter the workforce we find it sorely lacking in meaning and depth of purpose. What's left for us? Climbing further into the middle class? Why? And how, when the price of simply living is skyrocketing while wages stagnate?

That last question is particularly important because it underlies the primary issue in all of this: a lack of faith. All abstract systems, such as those propping up our society and our workplace, are built on faith. The American voter, for example, must have faith that their vote will, in some small way, change the course of the nation. The American worker must have faith that if they work hard enough and make the right networking moves, they'll be able to secure positions of power within companies and a better standard of living for their families. Yet that faith is eroding fast due to the aforementioned causes and the inherent nihilism one gets when remembering that they likely earn more dollars than anyone in their family had at their age in the past, yet are able to afford less and less.

So it seems the American workforce is teetering on the edge. Low retention rates strain companies as they try to find new blood, they strain colleagues who need to take up additional responsibilities when a worker leaves while also training new hires, and they dry up a company's knowledge-base as people keep cycling in and out of the company. Again, the workers are not to blame here; they're burned out from years, sometimes decades, of selling themselves out to a company, and they're still recovering from a stark confrontation with death.

Is there anything corporate America can do to hold on to this deteriorating workforce? Well, the complicated answer satisfies no one, but I'll give it anyway. There are things to be done, but their efficacy is questionable at best. The simplest way of putting it comes through the old phrase: Money Talks. Employees need protection against cost of living increases, and that can only come through wage increases. Raising wages, to the company's point, subtracts from the bottom line and displeases shareholders, putting negative pressure on the company's valuation and... well, a downward spiral to middling performance ensues. Another thing companies can provide comes by way of increasing faith in the system through clarity. Particularly, clarity in how a base employee can manage to make their way up the ladder within the company. It would be like going to church and asking the priest how best you can make it to Heaven. Some companies do provide detailed career roadmaps, but when push comes to shove, talk is cheap (to use another idiom), and without followthrough it does little but increase worker disgruntlement. Promotions need to be easier to see and attain. Now, if these changes are not implemented... it's likely not much will change, to be honest. The complexity - oh, there's that old dog again, of the American corporate system holds parallel to none in enormity, and such systems are usually not predicated upon such things as quiet quitting. I've hoped to be wrong before, but never more in this instance. Change should happen without great collapse, yet I fear it will be only that which spurs corporations to action.

Before I end this long tirade, I should assert that I've never managed a company and have only been working for roughly six months. To those who have read some philosophy, there are easily extractable Marxisms in this essay, and by no mistake. I maintain that working hard in the current climate, and of course making the right connections, is the most surefire way to make a stable, wealthy life for oneself and family, but at the same time one cannot help but feel sympathetic to the proletariat. Take this essay with a grain of salt; I have not swayed from believing in Capitalism, but I can likewise not turn a blind eye to its many faults.