Thoughts on Quiet Quitting As Someone From a Civil Servant Family

I wasn’t brought up with the idea of giving your all to some ungrateful corporation, and find the notion of managers whining about quiet quitting to be amusing.

If one thing belies the name, it’s that people are getting awfully loud about the notion of “quiet quitting”. You know, this batshit crazy idea that you go to your job, do what you get paid to do, then go home to your family, out with your friends, or whatever you do to just plain have a life.

Personally, I think that “quiet quitting” is really just going a step beyond that and doing even less than bare minimum to keep your paycheck because these people have made it abundantly clear that they do not care if you live or die. Your body won’t even be cold yet and they’ll already be looking for some exploitable replacement.

You get the loyalty you give, bitch.

Treat your workers like they’re something you scrape off the bottom of your shoe, that you can swiftly replace like a bottle of shampoo from Target, you’re just going to get whatever you have coming to you. It’s not that hard to grasp!

With that out of the way, I’ve been far removed from the average workplace since Obama was still in office. I’ve long been deprogrammed from the capitalist worship of The Job and things that bleed into the entrepreneurship sphere like bragging about how little sleep you get because you were working all the time. This is how I’d prefer to keep things.

Rather, I’m thinking about what we’ve accepted as normal as Americans. It’s not that dissimilar to how child abuse survivors reach adulthood and get out into the world believing that you have to “earn” love and other fucked up concepts that were normalized for us.

And workplace abuse and accepting pay you can’t even survive on seems to be the norm, along with addressing said abuse as “Just get a better job!” Okay Karen, better not complain about how there’s no one to serve you at Chili’s then.

I grew up with the idea that a “good” job is supposed to support you and a small family after college and provide a defined-benefit pension, health insurance, several paid federal holidays plus PTO, and more often than not, union protection.

This is what my parents had after they were done with school. My mother had a bachelors, so did my dad, and he didn’t get his master’s until 50 and his job paid for it. (Whereas I bee-lined to grad school at 25 because The Great Recession took out so many entry-level financial jobs that never ever came back.)

The above is what numerous relatives of mine had whether they worked for the City of New York, or New York and New Jersey state governments and whether they attended college, grad school, or not.

It’s what my grandmother had when she had to be sole breadwinner for the family after my grandfather became disabled in a workplace accident and went to work for the rent control board. You know, in those “glorious” 1950s where women in the workforce were paid less on the assumption she was a tranquilized June Cleaver at home?

Government employment has long been the only way that women, particularly women of color and long-term single women, have a solid means of achieving the same financial stability as a white man could just for showing up. This was accurately portrayed with Patty and Selma at the DMV on The Simpsons. It was definitely the only way my grandmother could get any stability and equity, and she still got a pension from the City even long after she lost cognizance in her eighties.

With the exception of a few extended family members who were small business owners, the majority were career civil servants regardless of education level. Many did incredibly well with City jobs by 2020s standards despite not going to college — when CUNY was still free, no less!

While my dad did the same thing that a lot of people do in a capitalist society and basically make his workplace his entire world, he and the rest of my family did not LIVE FOR their jobs.

They went to work, did their jobs, and went home.

That’s it.

No team-building exercises or droning on about mission statements. Sure, there was some mandated training and refresher courses with optional educational resources but it didn’t dominate your life.

My dad moved up ranks around the time I turned 10, and he suddenly had the kind of benefits I later learned only exist in freaking Europe.

He was home by 6 every night.

He and my relatives didn’t have the 90s equivalent of stupid LinkedIn posts about how it doesn’t feel like work when you love what you do. LOLSOB in game developer over here: yes, it’s still work even if you like what you do. Your brain knows the difference. You just don’t feel your soul sucked away on doing something you patently hate for some ungrateful corporation.

It’s also worth noting that you didn’t have to go to eight goddamn job interviews just to find out the job went to someone else all while you worried about if you didn’t follow up at all, or you followed up too much. That alone should be fueling quiet and loud quitting alike.

My family was gobsmacked at how normal this is in the corporate world, along with the utter theft of your time and life.

I remember when I was finishing up my accounting degree right before the Great Recession struck and my advanced accounting professor talked to us about our job options. So many schools, even nontraditional public colleges like the one I attended, over-emphasized working at a Big 4 accounting firm which I had absolutely no interest in doing, let alone competing with thousands of other people for these jobs.

When my professor said there were plenty of stable options at mid-size firms as well and that you should take a job at a small firm even if it doesn’t offer benefits so you can move ahead, I raised my hand and said “What about government jobs? I saw posts with the Department of Buildings and the IRS that pay as much as mid-size firms but you get actual benefits with a pension and a union.” [Author’s Note: social media was in infancy at the time and we also didn’t have much discussion about unionization back then unless you were in a trade like a plumber or electrician, so it was pretty novel to talk about this with white-collar jobs.]

My professor responded, “That’s a great point. Everyone here should consider government jobs too because you’ll get to see your family.”

She proceeded to tell a story about a former student of hers who worked his way up to a respectable post at KPMG, and started a family after he was secure enough in the position. When his daughter was five, he came in to see her one night after work. She screamed her head off because she thought he was a total stranger.

This little girl didn’t recognize her own father. And no, she didn’t have a cognitive disability. Dude was literally never around.

I had many dominoes that fell with respect to Childfree Defining Moments, but this was definitely one of many I had at school. Y’all seriously telling me I’m delusional or that I’ll change my mind about not wanting kids, but you’re going to have kids you never get to spend any time with because crunching spreadsheets at Deloitte is so much more important?

And this is why America has this “children are the expensive pets of today, not the leaders of the future” mentality. Because then people would stand back and say “Why the hell is that normalized, that you can only afford to have kids if you never see them?”

Look, I don’t want kids, and I don’t think I should have to dedicate my life to work because of that fact. But I will forever defend your right to your own time and family. If that’s quiet quitting, let’s get fucking louder.

Well, toadlets. My plan was to work a government job until I had enough cash saved up and years in the pension plan to qualify before I pursued my dreams of being an indie developer.

This was before we had indie darlings like Braid, Super Meatboy, Stardew Valley, and the other breakout innovators of the 2010s, so I knew it would take money and patience but I wanted that pension to fall back on.

That…didn’t happen after the 2008 crash where even a lot of government employment contracted, then declined in quality in turn just as private sector jobs did.

Despite passing federal and city civil service exams with flying colors, my applications were just logjammed then I got screwed out of a good IRS job on a dumb technicality with the timing of the vacancy post versus when I graduated. It was subterfuge by a bright bag of falling hammers who signed official government correspondence with a heart.

Nearly all the relatives I had in City ranks and anyone they knew who could’ve cut the red tape? Dead, retired, furloughed. I had to scrap for every damn thing as so many entry-level financial jobs in both the public and private sectors never ever came back.

I did not get the stability I was promised by getting that stupid accounting degree, then a SECOND one, instead of going to film school as game design programs didn’t exist yet. It was more temples made of papier mache and other false facades that Millennials were promised.

But while there were wonderful things about finally going all in on the games and writing career I always dreamt of, I began to see the culture of entitlement that people in media industries have been talking about for years. (It exists in finance too, trust.)

I was never anyone’s employee in the games industry and that’s probably how I’ve lasted so long. I’ve stood by my peers’ fights to unionize AAA and AA studios and having solo businesses like I do, or going co-op. But our industry is one that’s seen plenty of quiet and loud FIRING, so the notion of doing what you get paid to do then go home being referred to as “quiet quitting” remains laughable.

What these clowns call “quiet quitting” is literally how my family members got out of poverty, bought homes, and raised families.

Instead of toiling away for some shareholders the way their parents and grandparents fled Russia and Poland just to labor long hours for pennies, have broken needles and other supplies come out of their pay, and risk falling or being burnt to death in the futile protection of property and profit.

And if wanting a thriving wage, the right to self-determination AND the right to a union, plenty of leisure time, and to just go to work then be done with it makes Millennials and Gen Z whiny and entitled?

So be it. Employers, clients, and event organizers are not entitled to free labor and violating boundaries and we should get louder about quitting so we can enjoy the same standards of living that my civil servant family members did.