Meaning
Doing only what your job description requires, working your contracted hours, and refusing unpaid extra effort, without actually resigning. Despite the word 'quitting', no one leaves the job. The term is contested: critics frame it as disengagement, supporters as boundary-setting against exploitative work culture. Informal and politically loaded: read either as healthy boundary-setting or as disengagement depending on the speaker. Regional use: General English; originated in US online discourse.
Origin
The phrase went viral in mid-2022 on TikTok in the United States; a July 2022 video by user @zaidleppelin arguing that worth should not be defined by productivity is widely credited with sparking the wave of mainstream coverage (NPR discussed the phenomenon in September 2022, and Gallup estimated that roughly half of US workers fit the profile). Wikipedia notes there are no verifiable sources establishing who coined the phrase, and that its surge followed a TikTok video inspired by a Business Insider article; the parallel Chinese 'tang ping' (lying flat) movement from April 2021 is often cited as an influence. A widely repeated attribution to an economist at a 2009 symposium circulates with thin sourcing and should be treated as unverified. The underlying behaviour, doing the bare minimum, long predates the label, as in the 1999 film Office Space.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- quiet quit
- quiet quitter
- quiet quitting phenomenon
Usage Examples
- After years of unpaid overtime, she started quiet quitting and leaves promptly at five.
- He isn't slacking; he calls it quiet quitting and insists he's just doing his contracted job.
- Managers worry that quiet quitting spreads quickly across a team.