On Quiet Quitting and the Sunday Scaries

Readers have been telling me about Quiet Quitting and, now, the Sunday Scaries.

I didn’t have much to say about Quiet Quitting because (a) I didn’t know there was any alternative to it and (b) because it’s a stupid name.

Quiet Quitting is apparently the idea of attending your work as usual but “checking out” and doing as little as possible with minimal enthusiasm. You probably meet your contractual demands well enough not to get fired, you turn up to meetings, but you generally just drift through the day in a zombie-like haze. I’m pretty sure that’s nothing new and is in fact most people’s experience of office life. It’s basic survival because to engage in the crap you’re supposed to be doing is mental death. And nobody decides to Quiet Quit; it just happens automatically because of boredom and being asked to do things against your will.

The name, “Quiet Quitting,” annoys me because reporting to work in a zombie state is anything but quitting. It’s doing what you’re told no matter what. If only I were the Mayor of Naming Things, this would be called “The Obvious Result of Wage Slavery” while “Quiet Quitting” would be reserved for the act of finding the guts to leave your job without ceremony or fuss.

So that’s Quiet Quitting dealt with. What next? Oh yes. The Sunday Scaries. This is the experience of feeling anxious on the weekend about returning to work on Monday. Once again, it’s not new and the name is stupid. The name is stupid because it’s willfully infantile (with a similar numb-nut cadence to “the terrible twos” or “sporty forty” or to those banal workaday hashtags like #ThursdayThoughts) and therefore makes light of something ruinous to our quality of life.

The bottom line is that if you’re off work and not currently on the clock, you should be able to live freely in those scarce and hard won moments. But that’s impossible because the psychic toll of work is so great. Having a job is like having someone standing behind you all the time and clanging two iron poles together: you can’t relax under those circumstances. You think about work all the time: at weekends, at night, on vacation, at Christmas, on your birthday, on a hot date, on the toilet, and in your dreams.

The Sunday Scaries have at least been investigated somewhat and the finding is that they:

regularly affect more than two-thirds of Britons who report work stresses, lack of sleep and looming to-do lists as the primary causes of anxiety before the start of the working week.

The worst affected were young adults with 74% of those aged 18-24 experiencing what psychologists call “heightened anticipatory anxiety” as the weekend comes to a close.

So almost everyone then. Well done, Civilisation. We’ve built a world where almost nobody can enjoy their hard-earned downtime for fear of being cattle-prodded back to work again. We’re not compensated for this stress and we shouldn’t have to endure it.

When they experience the Sunday Scaries, people apparently resort to social media, TV, and comfort eating: all things that exacerbate the problem of low quality of life and delay any hope of escape.

A psychologist who probably means well says that instead of wasting your time and brain in these ways, you should:

try getting active, which can help you to burn off nervous energy, writing down or keeping a diary of what you are doing and how you feel at different times to help identify what’s causing anxiety and what you need to do to help manage it. Small things can make a big difference to our mental wellbeing.

Anything but try to change your actual circumstances. Anything but try to escape your job or the consumer treadmill that benefits from your misery.

Luckily, the UK government is on hand to help. Yes, the same government who want to increase work and crack down on “slacking.” So they have a ridiculous (and naturally very cheap) campaign in which people can visit a website for:

a personalised “mind plan” giving tips to help deal with stress and anxiety.

Allow me to be the first to say, “ew, gross.”

This government aren’t there to help you, folks. They’re there to cajole you back into the workforce and, when you complain about the misery of it, they’ll find a cheap way to shut you up.

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Tired of hearing the same old crap? Read The Good Life for Wage Slaves for survival tips and then learn to escape with Escape Everything! (aka I’m Out).