Abstract

“Quiet quitting” is often seen as a poor attitude to work, or simply a lack of enthusiasm; but in anonymous online posts about work, people present it differently. They see it as a justified reaction to being consistently overworked and suffering burnout, and they employ talk of burnout to excuse lessened effort, avoid being labelled ‘lazy’, and place the blame for the pressure they’re under on their managers, their companies, and the way work generally is organised. The study uses Discursive Psychology – an approach which regards psychological terms as public tools for doing things in interactions, especially in situations where how believable someone seems and their moral standing matter a lot. The research is based on a qualitative collection of fifty posts, in the style of confessions, from public internet discussion boards. The analysis employs a coding system influenced by DP, which looks at the actions people are performing, how they manage what’s at stake for them, how they present evidence, and the moral reasoning they base on categories. The posts reveal repeated patterns of behaviour: writers use disclaimers and try to lessen the risk to their self-image; they list symptoms and how much they’re overloaded; they work to make their statements factual by using numbers and ‘receipts’ – documentary proof; and they morally re-present the situation, through talk of boundaries and fairness. These ways of acting make burnout seem real. They allow “doing less” to be understood as sensible self-care, and not as personal fault. So, quiet quitting becomes a way of being accountable, of trying to agree what counts as proper behaviour at work, given the increasing demands now made.