What Is Quiet Quitting Really? Not Lazy. Just Listening.

What if quiet quitting is the most honest thing we can offer our over-responsible, perfectionist, searching selves?

What if it's not quitting at all but regulating,

healing, giving in amounts that are sustainable and controlled by you?

I've spent over 25 years looking at organizations through a leadership and HR lens. I've studied the engagement surveys, designed People & Culture roadmaps, hired incredible folks and watched them succeed, and chase the next thing. I've led variety of growth and change projects, mediated conflicts, sat in boardrooms, and helped design & scale values-based cultures. I know the methods, the newest trends, the workplace research.

I respect all of it.

And I find myself, increasingly, done with it.

Not in a bitter way. More like the character in the film Adaptation, the one who was deeply, almost obsessively passionate about fish, until one day he simply wasn't. And then he discovered orchids. Rare native orchids. The ghost orchid.

I'm done with the organizational lens because I'm genuinely, increasingly more absorbed by the individual one.

By what is actually happening inside the person, each of us, beneath the behaviour, beneath the resignation letter that never gets written.

So when I look at quiet quitting, I don't reach first for the data. I find myself asking a different question:

What if the quiet quitter isn't checking out but checking in?

What the Research Says About Quiet Quitting

The numbers are striking. According to Gallup's 2025 State of the Global Workplace report, 62% of employees worldwide are quietly quitting, doing the bare minimum, detached from our roles. The economic cost: $8.9 trillion annually. Gallup's diagnosis: poor management. Fix the manager, fix the culture, re-engage the employee.

Recent research adds nuance.

A 2025 Wiley study describes quiet quitting as a "conscious recalibration of the psychological contract". A paper in the Journal of Human Resource Development (2025), titled significantly "A Return to Humanism," challenges the dominant negative framing and asks whether quiet quitting might, in some cases, serve the individual's wellbeing.

A philosophical analysis in Philosophy of Management (Springer, 2024) draws on Honneth's recognition theory to argue that quiet quitters aren't disengaging from life, they are seeking worth and recognition elsewhere.

A content analysis of 672 TikTok posts found empirical support: participants reported that their sense of self-worth was no longer defined by their job, and they were redirecting energy toward family, hobbies, and personal growth.

The organizational lens was never the whole picture.

What I Actually See

I had a conversation recently that I keep thinking about. Someone told me they had started quietly quitting. They had been walking for some time with a question:

What do I actually want?

As we talked, something became clear. Their tolerance for misalignment had dropped. They had begun to really feel: I can't do this anymore. Not this way. Something has to shift.

So they started doing the bare minimum. A strange feeling for perfectionists and maximizers, those of us who hold themselves and others to the highest standards.

Deeply disorienting. Me, lazy?

But this has nothing to do with laziness.

It's happening because we are beginning to hear our own voice.

In this person's case, the conditioned, over-giving self was loosening its grip.

Values were shifting and clarifying. Something truer, for this point in life, was coming into focus. And yes, there was fear. And yes, there was clarity. Both at once.

What looks like quiet quitting from the outside may be a healing signal from the inside.

The Conditioned Self and Its Grip

Many of the people I work with, leaders, high performers {the quietly exhausted}, have spent years optimizing themselves for external approval. We all learned early that our value was conditional: on output, on agreeableness, on being indispensable.

This is what the Springer paper captures through Honneth's lens: employees conditioned to invest emotionally in their jobs, to treat work as the source of identity and self-worth, face a particular harm when that investment goes unrecognized.

The quiet quitter, the research suggests, is often someone who has decided to stop performing wholehearted investment in a context that no longer deserves it.

From the outside, this looks like withdrawal.

Not a Problem to Be Fixed

I want to be careful here. I'm not romanticizing disengagement.

Some quiet quitting is burnout, and burnout needs rest, support, and sometimes clinical care.

Some of it is the result of genuinely toxic environments that need to be named and addressed. That's where my Organizational Development and People & Culture colleagues are doing essential work.

But some of it, is a person, you or me, in the early, disorienting stages of becoming more of the authors of our own life.

Maybe we're checking in: to our own values, our own limits, our own sense of what a meaningful life looks like now.

That process deserves a different kind of accompaniment than an HR intervention.

It deserves curiosity.

It deserves someone who can hold space for both the clarity and the fear.

"The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek." — Joseph Campbell

It's not necessarily a problem to be fixed. Could be a threshold to be crossed instead.

Invitation

If you're held by that strange, luring mix of clarity and fear, I invite you to connect.

Here is how I work:

1:1 Coaching: transformational, depth-focused. Clients often notice real shifts by sessions 3 or 4. We work in packages of 6 meetings to integrate the learning and make sure the change sticks - book your free Strategy Session ► here

The Understory: a monthly online support and exploration space for people navigating exactly this kind of threshold ► book here

From Exhaustion to Presence: an annual retreat on Vancouver Island (more information and Expressions of Interest ► here)

What if, instead of quitting, we learned to rest?

And if you are leading someone who is quietly quitting, what if they are reflecting something that is also true in you? Something kept in shadow. Something you crave.

What if quiet quitting is self-love?

Reach out. This is a fascinating exploration, and there is a lot to gain.

---

Hi, I’m Monika, Strengths Coach and facilitator. I help individuals and groups cultivate resilience, emotional intelligence, and well-being through strengths-based coaching. Passionate about transformative and creative leadership, I empower leaders to drive meaningful change within themselves, their organizations, and beyond.

I hope you’ll visit often, and I look forward to connecting and working together!