Last night, a YouTube video showed up in my feed which piqued my curiosity.

I have never watched any of this bloke’s videos so this was the first one I watched where he shared his thoughts about ‘The Great Resignation’. I am unsure of the evidence of some of his claims that many people are quitting and that there are many jobs to go around because I’ve been hearing the opposite especially when some great people cannot find any work aligned to their expertise and appropriate pay and conditions.

Maybe it’s different in ‘merica.

Seems nowadays companies are asking for people who can do EVERYTHING and get paid a pittance.

Nevertheless, he talked about the concept of ‘quietly quitting’. It’s in effect, ‘mentally checking out’ of your work.

It’s the type of work you do when you do the minimum, nothing more, nothing less; and you do what is expected, enough not to get you in trouble.

In effect, you’re not going above and beyond.

You’re not offering anything additional to what you’re doing.

You’re not taking on extra work.

You’re only working to the hours set out in your contract, nothing more, nothing less.

After all, working for an employer is a transaction. They’re paying you for a service as set out in the terms of a written and signed contract.

Many Australians have this concept down pat frankly. No surprise there.

I thought about my own situations around work in the past and I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t ‘quietly quit’ before. I have, many times.

Switched off completely.

Went silent.

Put my status on as “offline” if I was working from home or if I was in the office, work somewhere else away from my team.

Never offered solutions, advice, or feedback, never shared ideas.

Never responded to posts or emails.

Hid away in different meeting rooms not to be found.

However, I couldn’t sustain it for long because something ‘dies’ in you when you do this.

Your personality disappears.

You become a robot.

You disconnect from the “why” of your work.

You also become invisible.

(I don’t like to be invisible but one of the later lessons I learned in life is that the invisible people and managers are usually the ones who keep their jobs the longest, AND/OR stab you in the back).

In the military, we used to call these people, “the grey men”. Watch out for grey people in the working world. They are not team players. They’re hiding in plain sight. There’s a difference between a manager who’s quietly quit versus a team member who has.

My experience is that the former has in effect, put the rest of the team in that position. So look out for managers who are in this state, in order to start afresh with helping the team overcome any issues.

Anyway, I don’t like being a grey person.

It’s the most disheartening position until something gives and you need to make a choice – to stay and be like an automaton in a job that sucks the life out of you. Or to go and try something else.

In the past, I didn’t stick around. I was outta there having usually secured my next job however, in recent times, that’s changed. I think it could be an age thing where I realise what I can change and what I can’t. Besides, I have been in enough jobs to realise that nothing much changes between them. For example, most of the L&D roles are all alike.

So you’ll really need to find something exceptional (and that is done by changing professions, fields job types, or enterprise types) in order for that cynicism – that greyness – not to set in.

In the past, I used to run around like a headless chook worried about stuff and if anything went against my ideas, I’d start looking elsewhere.

I’d make noise. I was the OPPOSITE of grey.

Now, I’m a bit more philosophical about it. I’m not wedded to any of my ideas, I’ll go with the flow, and do what everyone tells me/asks me to do nor will I lose any sleep over it because what I do within it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things – it has very little if anything with my identity anymore. Besides, I’m in the point of my life where I’m transitioning to retirement.

So the bigger question is not what I should do within my work – it’s what I should do outside of it. That’s the million dollar question and one in which I know many people are also asking which may be the reason for them quietly quitting. After all, working for someone else is simply a mechanism to pay their bills nothing more, nothing less.

Maybe they’re in their current work because they can’t face the bigger question of what they should be doing.

PS. I’m tapping this out on my computer but I’m a bit light headed as I’m also drinking a glass of red wine. If nothing is making sense, blame the wine. I’ve got dinner on in the oven, waiting for the oven clock to ‘ding’ and sipping on a nice pinot noir while writing this out. Nice Monday eh? (Well it was, because I started my day out with a 3km run, 10K steps and some qigong. Lovely – all until Andrew showed me his new tattoo that he got today ….eye roll).