Bed Rotting and Loud Quitting

Code Words for Worker Disengagement

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This bedrotter is way too productive (via Getty)

Back in January, Vox reporter Rani Molla asked me for my thoughts on the new phenomenon known as “quiet hiring” — e.g., when an organization fills a job position internally (or just adds it on to another person’s existing job description) instead of doing an external search.

Molla wasn’t writing about quiet hiring in particular; she was writing about what had come to feel like an obsession, starting some time during the pandemic, with coining trends in the workplace. The Great Resignation, of course, but perhaps most famously Quiet Quitting and its various offshoots (Quiet Firing, Quiet Hiring, Loud Firing, Loud Quitting, Loud Hiring, you get it).

My general take, and what I told Molla, is that these terms are a means of making a few pretty bewildering years in the workplace into something legible, or at the very least understandable. That’s what “The Great Resignation” did in 2021: it gave a label to the feeling of take this job and shove it, I’m exhausted, even though we now know that the vast majority of people who actually did resign (and not just feel like resigning) were mothers who couldn’t find childcare, service workers finding better jobs, and older workers retiring.

“Quiet Quitting” started as a way for Gen-Zers to communicate with each other the reality that you can, in fact, not sublimate your entire identity and all of your time to a job and not get fired…..that you can just treat your job as a j-o-b, not as the sole determinant of your value as a person…and that you can especially do this if your job treats you like shit.

When the idea of Quiet Quitting circulated on TikTok, it was (largely) reaching its intended audience: other young people, often still pretty new to the full-time workforce, looking for a framework for how to think about the disconnect between what they thought a job could and should do, or at what they were told a job’s place should be in their life, and their actual experience of it.

But then the rest of the internet got ahold of it. Deracinated from its original context, the so-called “Quiet Quitting” trend became a means of supporting the go-to line of a certain type of voter, owner, complainer: NO ONE WANTS TO WORK ANYMORE. Quiet Quitting was why the young hires in the office refused to put in the same sort of hours you did back in 2008 when you were lucky enough to get that job. Quiet Quitting was why no one responds to emails, why no one wanted to come back into the office, and why everyone wanted to unionize.

If you didn’t want to look closely at your own organizational practices, if you felt uncomfortable about what younger works were agitating for, if you feared changed or anything that usurped your understanding of “how business is done” — Quiet Quitting was the easy answer.

As for Quiet Hiring (downsizing + the expanding job), Quiet Firing, etc. — those don’t come from TikTok. Instead, they come from the normal sources of business jargon: consultants, analysts, and journalists. Molla traces the first use of “quiet firing” to an Inc article in September 2022, but it didn’t really take off until a CNBC journalist wrote up the findings of a work trends report and topped it with the headline ‘Quiet hiring’ will dominate the U.S. in 2023, says HR expert — and you need to prepare for it.

You! You need to prepare for it! Which means you need to read this article and figure out what it is! Again, the term is providing some form of legibility. You’re being asked to take on more in the workplace after layoffs? That’s just (internal) Quiet Hiring. A job that previously offered benefits is now performed by short-term contractors without benefits? (External) Quiet Hiring!

“Quiet Quitting” articles allowed readers to access a convenient cause (damn lazy Gen-Zers) for a pretty existential problem (work sucks). It’s also, conveniently, a way of blaming workers for systemic ills. “Quiet Hiring” deflects from organizational norms that call for eking out as much productivity (at the lowest cost) from each employee in the service of higher share prices and profits. Plus, it’s “hiring” — a positive gloss on the elimination of jobs and/or the transformation of “good” jobs into contingent ones.

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Fast-forward six months from my first conversation with Rani about “quiet hiring” to the release of Gallup’s latest “worker engagement” report, which analyzes survey data from 160,000 workers globally. Gallup has been analyzing worker engagement data since 2009, because an engaged employee is, according to their analysis, a productive employee. (“Employees who are not engaged at work or actively disengaged represent an $8.8 trillion untapped productivity opportunity for global workforces.”)

To measure engagement, Gallup asks a whole bunch of questions related to involvement and enthusiasm. An engaged employee, for example, is 23 times more likely to recommend their organization as “a great place to work.” They describe their workplace using words like “friendly,” “family,” “efficient,” and “supportive.” They like their jobs, or at least know how to perform liking their jobs.

And yet: only 23% of workers globally are engaged. That number rises to 33% in the United States but falls to 13% in Europe. Thirty-one percent of managers are engaged — compared to only 20% of individual contributors. Everyone else? Technically disengaged — and thus a problem. Gallup divides that group between the 59% of employees who are “not engaged” and thus “quiet quitting,” (it actually says this in the report!!) and the 18% of employees who are “actively disengaged” and thus “loud quitting.” (I feel like you could also just call this workers who kinda resent their job and workers who really fucking hate their jobs but are stuck there, for various compounding reasons).

What’s responsible for disengagement? Workers generally cite the culture, the pay and benefits, and “well-being” (does that mean less stress?). But Gallup points pretty squarely at crappy management, while also noting that crappy management is often the result of a company that refuses to invest or prioritize it.

I get what Gallup is trying to do here, but I think it’s a mistake to align disengagement with quiet quitting — or, more accurately, Gallup’s definition of quiet quitting addresses the manager/leader’s confusion with what’s happening in the workplace (“why does no one want to work”) instead of the employee’s confusion with the workplace (“why would anyone want to work”).

It’s a key difference, I think, and a difficult gap to cross, particularly by consultants, executives, and leaders who can’t imagine lives without work at their absolute center. If someone doesn’t love their company, if they don’t want to throw themselves at the work, the problem has to be the specific workplace itself — not the nature of an industry, or even the nature of contemporary labor.

But many younger workers — knowingly and unknowingly following in a long tradition of labor activism and more radical anti-work politics — are immersed in media (particularly on TikTok, but also on Reddit) that invites them to question the directive to “love” your job or even want to work.

Which isn’t to say they don’t still work: most of them do. But they don’t necessarily take pleasure in making profits that disproportionately benefit people who are already rich. They’re not super psyched for another day of fucking up the planet in the name of defending big oil interests. They’re not pumped to break down their bodies for Jeff Bezos. And they don’t see the capacity to work hard as indicative of moral fortitude — a dismantling that owes a whole lot to disability justice.

They also see how working all the time robs you of your capacity for much else: for community, sure, but also for doing what you actually want to do. The only viable solution is extended, mindless rest.

Cue: Bed Rotting.

Bed Rotting is laying in bed — all day, or for several days. It’s sleeping, it’s watching TV, it’s reading, it’s staring at the wall. Depending on whose videos you watch — and this includes actual self-professed bed-rotters — it’s either a form of deep relaxation or a symptom of deep depression. It’s “vegging out” only the veg has been there so long it’s growing mold. You have almost certainly bedrotted at some point in your life; I know I have.

@iamjennnzIts 7? Ok good night ✨

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There’s a lot to peruse under the hashtag; you could write a dissertation on how different users are countering it, texturing it, contextualizing it. (See: “Nurses invented bedrotting”). And in a repeat of last year’s discourse around Quiet Quitting, the “trend” has become a site of panic, condescension, or blame: the New York Post declared “Why ‘bed rotting’ is the newest hot self-care trend for lazy Gen Zers,” Well + Good warned about how it can mess with your sleep, House Beautiful wondered if it’s “really” a form of self-care.

I understand the cautions against leaning into depressive episodes. I also understand how many things that people label “indicators of depression” are also 1) forms of deep rest and 2) general resistance to the idea that every day should be filled with lists of things to do, places to be, productivity to exalt. And as Refinery29 writer Sabdhbh O’Sullivan smartly points out, the impulse to do nothing is not new — what is new (and what’s weirding people out) is the willingness to give it a repellant label.

“In the same vein as the fairly recent goblin mode or going feral, it deliberately evokes a sense of grossness,” O’Sullivan writes. “Linguistically, a duvet day feels gentle and generous, while rotting in bed conjures up a sense of decay, of life collapsing in on itself. Bed rotting doesn’t shy away from the sticky experience of staying in the same clothes all day or the lethargy that can come from lying down for hours on end.”

The grossness is the point — because, as O’Sullivan argues, it points to the bleak dichotomy of contemporary capitalistic life, in which you are either “an active member of society” or “decaying at home,” and we all know it’s a moral failure to be gross, to decay, to “not get ready,” to “let yourself go.”

Also, you know who “bed rots?” People who actually cannot get out of bed for much or all of the day — because of disability, because of age, because of Covid, because of a fragile pregnancy, or because of any other debilitating mental or physical illness. And while we don’t say that their social value has eroded, it nonetheless has. The term bedrotting screams the quiet part aloud: when the ability to work is cherished above all else, rest has to be framed as abject.

Sleep is fine (but it has to be “productive” deep sleep, no naps!!); self-care is fine (so long as it also involves buying things, resisting aging, etc. etc.); exercise is great (disciplining and regimenting the body). But truly doing nothing, not even birding, not even gentle walking, not even organizing, where’s the moral value in that?

If these trending terms about work serve to make ideas about work legible, then bedrotting is doing something remarkable — at least to its intended audience on TikTok. The world thinks rest, recovery, and general refusal of work is gross. You can — and should — do it anyway. ●

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