Quiet quitting and caring

[…] As jobs push people to be automatons and often offer little in the way of respect, it’s easy to quietly quit.

But perhaps, they’re not paying you enough to not care.

Spending your days, day after day, not caring is a tragedy.

They might not deserve your focus and effort, but you do.

Via Seth Godin

While Seth is right—I’ve absolutely found that caring at a job can lead to “making your own luck” and being appreciated and ultimately rewarded.

Quiet quitting comes from corporate culture that grinds individuality, dampens craft, and focuses on numbers above all else.

I’ve found a bunch of ways to push back—ways to care. For several years I hid a tiny t-rex in the designs I made. Only I knew where it was, but it added a tiny bit of joy.

Other times I had to find areas outside work to hone my craft and push myself in ways that lit up my world. This came in the form of fiction writing, drawing, or baking breads.

Even at the most constrained jobs, I found ways to make things special. Once, while chucking corn from a conveyer belt into a chute, I made a game out of throwing as fast as I could. It was a way of working through the boredom in my mind—counting the individual corn was a bit much.

But all that said, that doesn’t mean we should keep working in obscurity at a job that has zero forward movement, zero reward or respect for our abilities.

While I agree with Seth, and have seen opportunities open purely from putting myself out there and caring—I can’t help but feel there’s something shifted in the world, and wonder how many people will make their way into life through strength of will.