Issue 9: Happy New Year

I can still wish you a Happy New Year in February, right? Sure I can. Soft Labor is a “slow trend” report, after all, behind on everything by design. So, Happy (Gregorian, Lunar) New Year. 

I am having a rather extraordinary start to 2023: I recently left the Pratt Institute, where I directed the Institute’s first Digital Communications team. New projects abound and old ones, including this one, are emerging again. (Holler! Or, holler here!) So many folks in my early-middle-aged milieu are taking it day-by-day in similarly liminal states: In between roles for given reasons or trying to figure out how to exit long-held positions gracefully. Running in post-pandemic (endemic?) place. Ready for something new. 

On Quiet Quitting: In a tight little piece written for the New Yorker’s 2022 end-of-year issue, Georgetown associate professor of computer science Cal Newport traces the brief lineage of “Quiet Quitting” — definitely the best-named (and most feared) trend to emerge from recent discourse around the state of work. I have remained dismissive of the concept, which I perceive through the lens of class — precisely who has the luxury to “quietly quit” anything, after all? — but Newport effectively defends Gen Z by neatly framing the phenomenon in generational terms. Every generation, he asserts, has experienced their own ambivalence surrounding the concept of work and the “reconceptualization” that follows each crisis has been, if anything, generative. Read this one if you missed it: Having written books with titles like “Deep Work” and “Digital Minimalism,” Newport is an adept chronicler of the distinctly American work ethic. (And this is the TikTok video that originated the trend, FYI.)