Quiet quitting

Khan's video was brief and direct. "You're not outright quitting your job," he said, "but you're quitting the idea of going above and beyond. You're still performing your duties, but you are no longer subscribing to the hustle culture mentality that work has to be your life." The phrase resonated immediately across social media, triggering a wave of response videos, news coverage, and corporate commentary.

The behavior the term described was not new. The German phrase Dienst nach Vorschrift, meaning service according to regulations, had long described workers who performed exactly what their contracts required and nothing more. In Chinese, the concept of tangping, or lying flat, had emerged in 2021 as a protest against relentless work expectations. In Japanese corporate culture, the term madogiwa zoku, or window-seat tribe, described employees sidelined into inactivity. Each culture had found its own language for the same withdrawal.

Gallup's 2022 research categorized U.S. workers into three groups: engaged at 32 percent, actively disengaged at 18 percent, and not engaged at 50 percent. The "not engaged" category, which Gallup described as workers who show up and do the minimum, aligned closely with what quiet quitting described. The data suggested that the phenomenon affected the majority of the American workforce.

Khan later reflected on the limitations of the approach. In a 2023 follow-up video, he said he had actually quit his job, finding that disengagement at work produced its own form of anxiety rather than the liberation he had expected. He concluded that poor management, not individual laziness, was the root cause of the disengagement he had described.