¿Am I quiet quitting my life?

Recently, it became quite hip on the internet the term “Quiet Quitting”. Innumerable posts online since some viral tik-tok put it in the mouths of the media and entrepreneurs who quickly came to blame their workforces for “quietly quitting” their jobs. i.e. doing the minimum. Au contraire to last year’s “the great resignation”, “quiet quitting” represents what the accidentally wise Homer said: “Lisa, if you don’t like your job you don’t strike! You just go in every day and do it really half-assed.”

Despite the fear-mongering and the over-exaggerated reaction to the sudden realization that you can suddenly die by Covid or its supposed “vaccine”, I consider myself, for better or for worse, among the people who started examining their lives during the isolation of the various “quarantines” that allowed for some the possibility of questioning the meaning and direction of our ephemeral lives instead of having them all squeezed out for dimes in a pension that never comes.

Some have chosen to quit their menial jobs altogether in the apprehension that they could get more meaning from having a better work-life balance, starting their own businesses online, spending more time with their families, and not wanting to waste more time commuting or bearing ‘toxic’ bosses and customers.

Instead of just quitting like in the «Great Resignation», «Quiet Quitting” means doing what you are supposed to do by contract, but it’s curious that the media and some managers have quickly blamed their workers for not going the extra mile –or “ponerse la camiseta”– as if that meant “quitting” while keeping their jobs. Quiet quitting is not the same as work avoidance –as some have quickly concluded. “Quiet quitting” is setting up healthy boundaries with your employer, boundaries that have been blurred especially with the omnipresent vigilance of technology in private spaces and working from home.

However, there’s one boundary that remains violated is our value as a workforce. From the top of my head, Aristotle, marx and many others have pondered the question “What’s the value of work?”. No matter the answers, essentially, we’re all human resources exchanging our attention, our time, our life, and energy for wages that allow us at least to survive long enough to work enough to repeat the process until we’re replaced by newer human or technological resources.

Whatever the system or institution in place, we must be useful to someone like the State, the Community, the Employer, the Family, or the Customer in order to be discarded. Bitter truth. For most, it’s preferable to be used than/then to be discarded. Well, the majority of people prefer the security of belonging, before the freedom to be part of the dregs of society! It’s ingrained in our nature to seek to belong to something. The alternative means death to our primate brains. “Work or die starving, you wage slave! What are you gonna do? Beg in the streets, od, go to prison? Be thankful you have student loans, rent, and taxes. “Taxes are the price we pay to live in a civilized society”.

Tomorrow marks one year since I started working from home as an HR Rep. It’s like a call center but for the internal employees of the company instead of external customers and resolving their payroll and PTO inquiries, basically. I used to tell myself in the past that working in the BPO industry would be a temporary solution to unemployment and student loans. Four years later I am almost certain this may be the best job I may ever have since it pays even better than some entry-level and senior positions in the public sector in what used to be my profession, without the stress nor the ass-kissing. 

To cope, at least I don’t have to attend banking calls anymore of dindus chimping out “WHERE IS MUH MONAYYY!!!”. This means nicer comms, but still, it’s answering calls and tickets. Some coworkers have chat also, but I prefer getting calls because at least that way I can multitask my attention on different things, while during a chat it can be very extraneous talking with a lot of people at the same time and giving each one all your attention. You cannot escape an incoming chat; a call sometimes just ‘hangs up’. That’s a way of how I do a “quiet quitting” that is no way “healthy” as working within the boundaries of one’s contract. I know. I’m the worse workavoider for writing this during work hours with an employee on hold. That’s a no-tolerance behavior that could get anyone fired. Let’s not forget: «Efficient workers get punished with more work».

While in other BPOs and call centers, they are returning back to the office after the pandemic, I feel grateful at least that It’s a flex schedule. I’d prefer to stay home and not have to go to the office to see the faces of coworkers and managers twice per week, but nothing is perfect. I almost quit for this (and for the lgbtq+ friendly culture that pervades everything, but that’s a topic for another day), but after some thought, it’s not that bad for the pay compared to similar customer service positions, which is what I basically do, but for employees, the internal customers of a company.

There’s a second job that I never mention in my LinkedIn nor in my CV, because both contracts have an exclusivity clause. So, I “work” at nights at a BPO for a campaign to support passengers traveling on an airline who have purchased or are planning to purchase the Onboard Wi-Fi plans. I put “work” between “” because the job basically means not falling asleep at night in case a ghost call, a chat, or an email requesting a refund needs to be processed or not letting the computer shut down. I have never received a call besides “ghosts” and mostly there are one or two chats per week at night requesting some kind of troubleshooting or refund, and emails are very easy to respond to by using templates and processing the refunds. Usually, I can simply watch a movie, read a book, or fall asleep beside my girlfriend before the 5 am alarm to log out and say goodbye to the people clocking into the day shift.

One downfall of this life rhythm of juggling one HR job by day and watching over the pc at night that has enabled me to earn at least four times the minimum wage in Colombia is the constant tiredness. Despite the salary not being much by international standards, it’s at least enough to move out and rent an apartment near our jobs, and equip it with home appliances bought in the Día Sin Iva. However, I have pondered if this compensates for carrying almost a constant mini headache for feeling tired almost all the time during my day job in HR and having to sleep during the little time I have free in order to not lose my mind to sleep deprivation.

All this without the social status of working in my career, but with the comfort of knowing that when my shift ends it ends and I don’t have to respond to anybody after hours like my gf. In law, you know when your shift starts, but not when it ends. My girlfriend lives by this rule and she has started to envy my position, in which, despite not introducing myself in my résumé as a lawyer in the public sector, at least I don’t deal with the stress of bureaucracy and legal responsibility. That’s something I don’t crave anymore, especially since I have isolated myself from school friends and university acquaintances who may be very successful in their careers in the public and private sector, while I abstain from mentioning what I do to the acquaintances I seldom meet nowadays when everybody still thinks I’m abroad or simply doesn’t know about my life.

Coping is a way of “quiet quitting”. All my uses of “at least” and trying to see the good in what I conform to serve as a psychological narrative to not feel as much of a failure as I used to. I had thought that not working in the career I studied at the university was some kind of failure, like not staying abroad another, not having a hotter gf or exchanging good relationships for some mediocre fuck have been various failures on my part that used to torment my mind blaming myself for my prior mistakes. 

Coping is to “quiet quitting”, what suicide is to the “great resignation”. If I started again to grieve and regret the potential I could have become and the opportunities I have lost, I’d simply kill myself. Now I got in my life, not an ideal career, not an ideal family, not what I dreamt while as a teenager who didn’t know how many mistakes I’d made during my life until now. Life just goes on. Now I have to live with what I have made of myself, for better or for worse, and try to improve from what I am and have right now instead of discarding what little I have achieved in the seek of some perfect impossible ideal that now, as a consequence of my past irresponsible actions, is not more than a fantasy and the inside pain of what I have lost.

Coping may present itself as safe, but it’s dangerous. Coping soon can become extremely conformist to a status quo that can be improved upon. I may prefer to stay in this job, with this gf, in this rented apartment rather than improving myself and my mediocre living conditions. It’s a dilemma that I try not to think about during my work avoidance hours and numbing myself by playing games and watching series on streaming services. Distractions to the void. Is it better to be grateful for having a void or rather to have it stare back at you?