Checking Out: The Rise of Worker Apathy and Social Withdrawal
Article by Rob
The disruption of the power process within industrial society has largely been assuaged by the fact that the average individual is being provided the basics of modern life in exchange for simple obedience. With their need for food, water, and shelter being met, there is no strong incentive for many people to judge the chains weighing down their autonomy and freedom, let alone the incessant erosion of the wild, natural world. As long as the masses are placated with surrogate activities, the gears will keep turning; the lights will stay on; garbage will not pile up near homes (but only in the wealthy countries), and industrial society will keep expanding. Discontentment is bubbling to the surface, however. “Quiet quitting” & "lying flat",[1] NEETs & hikikomori, these are just some of the manifestations of a disruptive (for the system) movement of people mentally or physically “checking out" of society. To these individuals, their techno-industrial provisions leave them starved. Why improve or participate in a system that can't provide what they really need? Participation through employment is clearly not adequately satisfying the power process for these people. Any goals that those who are disaffected might want to set for themselves are becoming lofty dreams or are already forbidden by industrial society. The disruption of their basic biological imperative leaves them no choice but to do as little as possible as members of society.
Quiet Quitting
Doing the job laid out on one’s job description and no more seems like the rational thing to do when one is employed (if you can get away with it), but this has been stigmatized in recent times and dubbed "quiet quitting." Industrial society thrives when its employees treat their job as a surrogate activity. This drives innovation and increases efficiency, affording the techno-industrial system the surplus energy and resources it requires to continue growing. Of course, the propaganda machine labels people doing the bare minimum "losers" and is dismissive of their point of view. On the question of worker engagement, the system cannot yield ground for long before it finds itself in crisis. If innovation slows, so too will efficiency gains, and, in turn, technological expansion.
No longer enchanted by climbing the career ladder or gaining status at work, quiet quitters have grown to hold a near majority position in the global work force.[2] The virality of “quiet quitting” content is most likely a consequence of long-standing worker frustrations that have reached a critical mass rather than some recent shift in the attitude of the average worker. Investigation into the causes of quiet quitting seem to point to poor management, bosses not keeping their workers engaged, not empowering employees, etc.[3] The system only cares about what it can measure, and it seems that the system let this lackadaisical work style fester, lacking the proper tools to detect its emergence. Perhaps it was imperceptible since technological progress has been increasing net efficiency—a quantity that can be measured—despite the quiet quitters detaching themselves from their jobs, dispassionately operating the cutting-edge tools of their trade.
It could be that the world is captivated by the ideas surrounding “quiet quitting” because people sense there is a real need to address this prevalent attitude for the sake of progress. Or, the meme simply came at just the right time to be amplified and soon forgotten. Whatever the reason, the explosion of posts about quiet quitters, lazy girl jobs, "bare minimum mondays,” etc. on TikTok can be seen as a much-needed outlet for worker frustration.[4] Patrons of any business can easily see the related patterns of behavior stemming from worker disengagement: slowness of action, stubbornness, or aloofness. And, even if this behavior is masked in front of paying customers, it’s apparent in anyone’s own workplace. We’ve all seen that co-worker scrolling through their feed a bit too much, deadlines constantly being pushed back, or even email chains that go on way too long with no resolution. The rejection of work as a surrogate activity to fulfill the power process leaves these people searching for meaning elsewhere.
Lying Flat
Frustration with professional life is evident, not just in the west, but China as well. "Tang ping", or "lying flat", predates the western counterpart and was coined during the time of the zero-covid policy measures. Much like quiet quitting, those choosing to lie flat are prioritizing their own psychological well-being as opposed to seeking fulfillment through work-place excellence or consumerism. Although, it should be noted that the types of sacrifices to that end can be as great as abandoning the formation of a family as it is not economically viable for them in some circumstances. What their actions amount to is nothing more than pursuing more suitable surrogate activities in the form of hobbies. The ideas surrounding “tang ping" were disruptive enough to move Douban, Zhihu, Tieba, and other Chinese social media platforms to censor the term.[5] The culture surrounding this idea was more dangerous to the system since it led to the emergence of another term, “bai lan”, meaning "let it rot". This sort of meme goes a step further than espousing that one should solely do what is expected of them and actively entertains resigning oneself to their lot in life with spite toward the degradation of wider society. “Let it rot” inspires a negative stance towards society as opposed to the passive stance that “lying flat” conjures.
My understanding of “Bai Lan” is if my boss tells me to do something, I will ask if I can do it tomorrow. Or can you ask someone else to do it. Or can I not do it? That sort of thing. I wouldn’t be doing my job happily. If I run out of options, then I’ll do it myself. Even if I do the task, I’ll just do it, I won’t do it well.[6]
“Bai lan” is a continuation of the “lying flat” attitude, instead of doing the bare minimum, the meme calls for purposeful and disruptive inaction, bordering on sabotage. This can possibly be seen as a pipeline into another segment of society that has already "checked out.”
NEET
Those who are not currently in education, employment, or training are known as NEETs. The International Labour Organization found that 1 in 5 people between the ages of 15-24 can be considered a NEET globally and that this status tends to persist in their later years.[7] The onset of depression symptoms in the school-to-work transition of people’s lives tends to drive them into becoming NEETs.[8] From this, we can infer that the increasing modes of power process disruption can be creating NEETs. The acute hopelessness people feel as they fail to lay a foundation in their academic life are compounded and evolve into chronic low-mood states as they fail to establish a career or a “respectable” living. They become social outcasts as they’re ensnared in a hopeless doom loop of social immobility.
Hikikomori
Japan has designated the segment of society that is not working or going to school and socially isolating themselves as stricken with a condition called hikikomori.[9] This condition can be seen as a consequence of the continuous disruption of the power process. On its face, they check all the boxes of a helpless and depressed person. These people can only survive on the backs of their parents or loved ones, have no personal or professional aspirations, and are merely living out a life akin to those of the mice in Calhoun’s rat utopia experiment dubbed the “beautiful ones.”[10] The system’s response will need to come soon in light of the “2030 problem,” alternatively the 80-50 problem, where the checked-out individuals will need to somehow find a way to reintegrate into society because their aging parents will begin to die. With no one left to provide for them, the estimated 10 million hikikomori will either become someone else’s problem or be forcibly rehabilitated.
The System’s Response
Obviously, productivity and efficiency are core tenets of the techno-industrial system, so the necessary scientific work to find the technical solution is already under way.
As you read this and think to yourself about your work style, you might have realized that either you or definitely someone you know has been a quiet quitter or has been lying flat all along, long before these viral phrases were first uttered. Richard Johnson, a professor of management at the California Institute of Advanced Management, highlights that quiet quitting is not all that new and that the only thing that has changed is, ironically, that the phenomenon is not “quiet” as of late.[11] The fact that half the work-force is passively disengaged from their work and viral memes socially validating this stance will force the system to act or else risk this unproductive attitude being adopted by a critical amount of people. After all, some people need to continue innovating for technological progress to continue. That progress requires workers going above and beyond the bare minimum.
The problem of workers producing bare minimum output can be attacked in several ways. One way is with an increased amount of surveillance. It’s obvious that people behave differently while being watched. The reason quiet quitters remained relatively undetected for so long is that they operate in the “safe zone” of worker output, not too high as to draw resentment from peers and not so low that you get attention from the boss. Surveillance can be conceptualized as raising the lowest horizontal line in the “Production Graph”. To raise the upper line, understood as the maximum output a worker or group of workers produce, employers need to employ different techniques. Some people derive a sense of enjoyment from their work, as Johnson admits, and tend to generate more than what is expected of them. This can be reframed as people taking their employment as their surrogate activity. These workers see themselves as “building a cathedral” as opposed to the ones safely nestled in the productivity bounds who would probably describe themselves as workers “just laying bricks.”
Outside of converting the people merely collecting pay checks to “build their local church”, so to speak, into full converts dedicated to the goals of their organization, there isn’t much management can do other than offer monetary incentives for performing at a higher level (increase the upper limit on the Production Graph). Hopes that one can do so stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of the state of the average human in industrial society, especially in recent times. Quiet quitters may indeed be partly motivated by feelings of under-appreciation, as Johnson states, but we shouldn’t overstate that motivation compared to the workers’ quest to achieve some semblance of a work-life balance and their general disillusionment with being wage slaves. The disruption of the power process is too great to convince these people to care. The social engineering performed on a company’s human capital to make them feel a moral obligation to produce more will only serve to overextend those who already share the goals of the company. And whatever tools are developed from the scientific studies in the field of organizational behavior to prevent people from mentally disengaging from their jobs, they will be of little use on people without jobs.
“Human capital” is how the system understands us; what can we provide to it and how little do we need in return? NEETs and hikikomori pose a challenge to this perspective since the nature of welfare is usually contingent on a person eventually returning to work if they are able. These individuals, usually maintained by others, will become irrevocably useless in industrial society with the ever-shifting techno-landscape and their lack of experience or skills.[13] Addressing this population with early-intervention and training efforts have become questions of securing the system’s future functioning with an aging workforce. Researchers are very busy finding out how to target and rehabilitate these people,[14] in reality, finding out how to make them tolerate intolerable conditions.
Whether the reengagement effort will come in time is questionable when you analyze the situation in terms of self-propagating systems. Sure, a person with a low level of intelligence can tell you that the world needs people to work for it to function as it does today. One with normal intelligence can even tell you that we need workers to replace the others as they die or retire. The system, however, doesn’t “think” in this manner. Its constituent parts act on a highly competitive field, vying for their own propagation no matter the cost. This ruthless commitment to survival on the part of these self-propagating systems—long-term consequences be damned—leaves room for a critical amount of disengaged workers and social leeches to manifest. The consequences could be very painful.
The rise of ”quiet quitters”, NEETs, those “lying flat”, and hikikomori. can be seen as a logical consequence of the disruption of the power process and is, at least, on the radar of the system. The surprising proportion of the population that can already be considered passively disengaged from their work indicates a long-standing disruption. That a significant portion of the population has reacted by withdrawing from society entirely warrants system intervention if we are to have ever-growing efficiency and organization in our global society. Of course, we reject these ends and any system-provided plan. People thrive and best satisfy the power process when they have the freedom and autonomy to act on the life-and-death matters of their lives. The techno-industrial system is incompatible with this most basic need.
___________
NOTES:
[1] From the Chinese slang term “Tang ping”
[2] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/403598/need-answer-quiet-quitting-start-culture.aspx
[3] Mahand, Thalmus & Caldwell, Cam. (2023). Quiet Quitting -Causes and Opportunities. Business and Management Research. 12. 10.5430/bmr.v12n1p9.
[4] In this way, we can see that the techno-industrial system indeed does have a tool to gauge things that are less quantitative than it needs them to be. Social media is a tool for people to give anyone a peek into their social or inner life, including the system itself.
[5] Yuan, Shawn (2022). Silent resistance against social pressures in China. The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, Volume 6, Issue 1, 11 - 12
[6] CNA (2022). China’s slacker Youths: Why They went From ‘Lying Flat’ to ‘Let It Rot’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ7S-nKmAr4 (emphasis added)
[7] International Labour Organization (2019). Young People not in employment, education, or training. ILO/Sida Partnership on Employment Technical brief No. 3
[8] Veldman, K., Reijneveld, S. A., Hviid Andersen, J., Nøhr Winding, T., Labriola, M., Lund, T., & Bültmann, U. (2022). The timing and duration of depressive symptoms from adolescence to young adulthood and young adults' NEET status: the role of educational attainment. Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology, 57(1), 83–93. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00127-021-02142-5
[9] Hikikomori can be thought of as a special case of the NEET, one who is Not in Education Employment or Training. The term refers to both the phenomenon and the people themselves.
[10] Calhoun J. B. (1973). Death squared: the explosive growth and demise of a mouse population. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 66(1 Pt 2), 80–88.
This term was used by Calhoun to describe a subset of mice within an experiment dubbed “Universe 25” where a population of mice was provided more than enough food, water, and shelter within an enclosure. The population of mice quickly reaches a peak and promptly collapses well before resources are ever exhausted. On the “beautiful ones”, Calhoun states: “They never engaged in sexual approaches toward females, and they never engaged in fighting, and so they had no wound or scar tissue. Thus their pelage remained in excellent condition. Their behavioural repertoire became largely confined to eating, drinking, sleeping and grooming, none of which carried any social implications beyond that represented by contiguity of bodies.”
[11] Johnson, J. R. (2023). What’s New About Quiet Quitting (and What’s Not). The Transdisciplinary Journal of Management.
[12] Ibid.
[13] The issue is not limited to those without jobs. Advancements in automation and AI are predicted to force 100 million workers in 8 countries that comprise half the global population (1 in 16 workers) to switch occupations by 2030. Low-wage workers will see the largest share of displacement which implies that there will be a difficult adjustment period while these people are retrained. See: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work/the-future-of-work-after-covid-19#/
[14] Stea, T. H., Bertelsen, T. B., Fegran, L., Sejersted, E., Kleppang, A. L., & Fyhn, T. (2024). Interventions targeting young people not in employment, education or training (NEET) for increased likelihood of return to school or employment-A systematic review. PloS one, 19(6), e0306285. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0306285
Copyright © 2025 by Wilderness Front LLC. All Rights Reserved.