Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

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jacob
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Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by jacob »

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2022/ ... one-global

A bunch of different reasons given here as to why the Gervais Clueless turn Gervais Losers. As far as I'm concerned, it comes down to a lack of meaningfulness associated with careers. There has been a social/cultural evolution in terms of how careers are seen.

Fundamentally working for others as a salaryman is a kind of contract between the employer and employee. This contract has spoken stipulations but also unspoken ones. The unspoken ones are the interesting ones. If the employee is looking for psychological awards such as meaning, respect, and recognition, but the employer doesn't effectively provide then, the employee would default to the contract which is just "work for time" or "work for pieces". Previously, employees could be counted on to go above and beyond because culturally it was considered a duty to not only work but to work hard. Part of this was conditioned on working harder actually making life better. However, once everybody was rich enough, it became about working smarter.

Employers were the first to recognize that working smarter [from their perspective] meant treating employees more like cogs that could be substituted and hired and fired at will rather than a lifelong contract as a "career worker". What we see increasingly is employees catching up to this and---being rich enough---they start treating the employers similarly, only doing the minimum to stay employed while applying their energies, focus, and meaning elsewhere.

It was a big mistake to throw meaning out of the window and turn careers into mere jobs measured in dollars.

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Ego
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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by Ego »

Instead, they are doing just enough in the office to keep up, then leaving work on time and muting Slack. Then posting about it on social media.
I can think of a few people who derive meaning not from their hard work but from maintaining the facade of being a person who works hard. They have done it for so long they are incapable of not playing the role.

Boomers especially are experts at keeping up facades, so it stands to reason that their children would not only mock the facade, they also figured out a way to create their own meaning through the mocking, by way of social media. Facade and anti-facade-facade.

The sweet spot is finding a place where we do not need to pretend to work hard and not need to pretend to be a slacker.

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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by jacob »

Ego wrote:
Sun Aug 07, 2022 1:24 pm
Boomers especially are experts at keeping up facades, so it stands to reason that their children would not only mock the facade, they also figured out a way to create their own meaning through the mocking, by way of social media. Facade and anti-facade-facade.
I have noticed that the favorite protest of the youngest generation (Z?) is to be (appear) always tired or sleepy. Showing up pretending to be barely awake. This GenX finds dealing with that infuriating. It's probably good I did not become a professor. Being tired is the last vestige of personal autonomy for children whose helicopter parents have preplanned their career and interfered with their lives since before kindergarten.

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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by candide »

When it comes to teaching this group, it got to the point that it was much harder to get teachers to want to teach Advanced Placement classes, which used to be the prime gig that everyone would be elbowing for.

It is really sad to see a 16 year olds that already know they have sold their soul to maximize every chance of getting into Harvard. And while you can feel that pity, it won't stop the kids from being joyless, moody assholes, and reduce you to "the help." Where there used to be curiosity there became a sense "just tell me the minimum I have to do in order to reach my goal, peasant."

There is a reason I now teach all the way down in 6th grade. I also get to avoid almost all their political awareness, too.

ETA
But, yeah, dirty secret as this nation goes down its death-spiral, many of the best teachers are avoiding the "best" students. Combine that with how any state that has a teacher shortage also has an administrator shortage, many of the people who are smart and disciplined enough that they could have been a good teacher leave for administration. It's a total lemon market. Or, as I like to say it, parents, teachers, and administrators are in a race to see who can ruin education the most, the quickest. But, yeah, hanging around the sleepy gifted is not worth the effort for a teacher.

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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by ducknald_don »

It's hard to have much sympathy for the employers, they mostly brought this on themselves by treating their staff as disposable serfs. Of course this isn't a new thing, it can be traced back to the Reagan/Thatcher years when corporations started shedding staff in large numbers. Personally I'm quite pleased to see the shoe on the other foot although I doubt it will last for long.

After 16 years of working for people who clearly didn't share my values I gave up and started working for myself.

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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by Sclass »

@candide - wow. I’ve had a feeling about this but you put it down in words. Well put. I wonder if it is as bad as you say.

It was like an arms race for achieving credentials that has gone from bad to worse since I was a teen.

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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by theanimal »

Are people really replacing meaning from their job with something else? My impression is that people aren't getting meaning from their job but aren't doing much to find alternatives either outside the stereotypical consumer outlets. A general sense of apathy.

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Viktor K
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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by Viktor K »

That article mentions a person going from her middle management marketing job and finding (I assume) fulfillment in her own business.

I would imagine your impression is accurate, @theanimal, maybe less so on this forum. But, maybe if people aren't finding fulfillment in their 40 hours/week, that may spring up at least some extra desire to find it elsewhere.

If there's a "movement" of feeling apathetic at work, maybe it will spread to consumerism. They seem closely related to me, but I am optimistic.

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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

candide wrote:
Sun Aug 07, 2022 1:57 pm
It is really sad to see a 16 year olds that already know they have sold their soul to maximize every chance of getting into Harvard. And while you can feel that pity, it won't stop the kids from being joyless, moody assholes, and reduce you to "the help." Where there used to be curiosity there became a sense "just tell me the minimum I have to do in order to reach my goal, peasant."
As someone who knows/mentors/teaches a bunch of 16-year-olds, this is exactly how they act. I'm not even that old (Millennial), but this has been my experience with most teens I've tried to mentor. The successful ones have this dead inside attitude, and the unsuccessful ones just live on their cellphones.

As for laying flat, I view it as a passive aggressive social response. People respond by being passive aggressive when they're put in situations where they can't show normal assertive behavior. It's essentially what people in positions of low power do because they don't have the alternative to act directly. In terms of employment, it's not difficult to figure out why employees would start acting passive aggressively when faced with unchanging corporate bureaucracy. Given the direct approach of being a good employee pays only dubious benefits, the incentives drive passive aggressive behavior of doing the minimum.

Of course, the risk of this is you learn to be passive aggressive/inactive in all aspects of your life, not just work (see the Gen Z example). See this:
theanimal wrote:
Sun Aug 07, 2022 2:53 pm
Are people really replacing meaning from their job with something else? My impression is that people aren't getting meaning from their job but aren't doing much to find alternatives either outside the stereotypical consumer outlets. A general sense of apathy.

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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by Riggerjack »

It was a big mistake to throw meaning out of the window and turn careers into mere jobs measured in dollars.
Maybe better expressed as:
"Throwing meaning out the window, to create jobs where there used to be careers" has generated short term gains that have been completely harvested. It can't be harvested again, and the remains are less than the previous whole.

From the long term perspective, this can be seen as a mistake. But none of the live players in this drama recognize long term perspectives. Didn't then, don't now. And they were well rewarded for this short term hack.

Thus, this is a success, not a mistake. It is important to recognize the incentives if one is interested in change.

Which then leads to a more interesting framing:

"Now that meaning has been so thoroughly strip mined-from the salary man, what opportunities does this open up?"

Or

"Since the incentives that worked for previous generations are currently ineffective; what other incentives could come into play? How do we generate/activate these new incentives?"

Or maybe that is only interesting to me. :geek: :D

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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by luxagraf »

I would just like to say that that that opening line there was solid. went a bit downhill after that. I have noticed this from a slightly different angle: customer service in shops. if a person in under 30, 100 to 1 odds they either a) won't know the answer to my question of b) won't even be motivated to respond.

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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by zbigi »

luxagraf wrote:
Tue Aug 09, 2022 7:37 pm
I would just like to say that that that opening line there was solid. went a bit downhill after that. I have noticed this from a slightly different angle: customer service in shops. if a person in under 30, 100 to 1 odds they either a) won't know the answer to my question of b) won't even be motivated to respond.
Lol, this is what customer service looked in communist Poland, and how it still looks now to some degree. During Communism, people couldn't really be fired, plus shopkeepers had all the power (some of because the goods were rare, so if you weren't nice to them, they just wouldn't sell them to you for arbitrary reason). The whole communism era was an excercise in laying flat. Two saying marked that period:
1. "czy się stoi, czy się leży, dwa tysiące się należy" ("whether I'm standing up or laying flat, they have to pay me two thousand" - 2k zł was a typical monthly salary at the time).
2. "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work for them".

People were largely checked out at work to the degree that would put Gen Z to shame (my grandmother said that it was normal in her factory for workers to sunbathe on factory grounds during nice days). However, instead of escaping to video games and weed to drown the feeling of emptiness, people focused on families, wholesome hobbies (gardening, home improvements) and trying to survive in general (just buying stuff in stores was a major task, as stuff was not available a lot of the time).

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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by guitarplayer »

Haha @zbigi, so good. I think I need to break the vow of silence about my nationality and state that I am from Poland, too. And this is to share this: my dad is retiring this year from his now rather stressful corporate job in the energy sector. The company used to be a state owned conglomerate under communism, and now that I chat with him he occasionally recalls fondly how they used to go mushroom picking in the surrounding woodlands during shift for 5h at a time when there wasn't much going on. That being said, they did manage to get some work done while powering a good chunk of the country.

Also, I really enjoy reading your entries about life in Poland now and back in the past so please continue this. Life has funny turns and twists and I am still in good touch with my folk+thinking of moving back on the continent sometime anyway; I consider your entries a decent info re current affairs over there.

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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by jacob »

zbigi wrote:
Wed Aug 10, 2022 2:30 am
However, instead of escaping to video games and weed to drown the feeling of emptiness, people focused on families, wholesome hobbies (gardening, home improvements) and trying to survive in general (just buying stuff in stores was a major task, as stuff was not available a lot of the time).
I'm interested to know if and to which degree science and math and especially chess was pursued as an end to itself (as an intellectual outlet) rather than as a means for generating more scientists and engineers?

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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by zbigi »

jacob wrote:
Wed Aug 10, 2022 10:17 am
I'm interested to know if and to which degree science and math and especially chess was pursued as an end to itself (as an intellectual outlet) rather than as a means for generating more scientists and engineers?
Highly unusual, i.e. I've never even heard of anyone like that [1]. What's also interesting, the people in Poland don't largely have "hobbies" per se. They may putter around in the garden, constantly fix their old (and only!) car or go fishing, but they rarely think of it as their official hobby, as people in the West do. I suspect the Western approach may be a fallout of the protestant work ethic, where even the things people do for fun have to fall under something that can be framed in terms of productivity ("he's working to get better at his hobby").
Also, Poland, like some other countries, have a lot of people who are already kind of living in the (dark) future, i.e. they don't work and have a guaranteed low income for life [2]. Their options for entertainment and consumptions are limited, and some are bitter about that, but most seem not that bad, especially women. Their days are filled with money-saving activities (ERE-style) and, importantly, social connections, esp. with extended families. I think this these two things differentiate them from e.g. the stories about Swedish or Japanese elder people, who lock themselves up for years in their apartment, order takeout (that they can afford), have no contact with anyone and are only found dead after the smell reaches neighboring apartments.

[1] And BTW chess mania was strictly a Soviet Union thing - the Soviets created it to breed champions and prove their "intellectual superiority" over the US - a Polish champion would actually be a slap in their face, so they never made chess big here.

[2] These are largely people who got a meager early state pension when the large post-communist companies restructured and shedded a ton of unnecessary workers.

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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by zbigi »

guitarplayer wrote:
Wed Aug 10, 2022 10:12 am
Thanks, I'm glad you're enjoying it and that I'm helping you reconnect with the fatherland :)

Re: mushroom picking at work, my grandma did the same! When she work in ammunition factory in the sixties, she'd do the minimum daily quota and then just go pick mushrooms in the forest behind the factory, instead of staying to make more bullets. There were bonuses if you made more of them, but she preferred the mushrooms :)

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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by xmj »

Riggerjack wrote:
Tue Aug 09, 2022 5:08 pm
"Now that meaning has been so thoroughly strip mined-from the salary man, what opportunities does this open up?"

Or

"Since the incentives that worked for previous generations are currently ineffective; what other incentives could come into play? How do we generate/activate these new incentives?"
Those are great reframes. My personal conclusion so far has been:
- If capital income is taxed at lower rates than labor income, reorganize income to be the former.
- If in BigCo jobs the best paid people tend to be staffers from consulting firms . . . don't work inhouse @ BigCo.
- If you can earn well in one place and spend a lot less in another, arb the shit out of geography.

My lessons tend to be perfectly mercenary and not quite in line with Loserdom.

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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by Campitor »

From the linked article: “The search for meaning has become far more apparent. There was a sense of our own mortality during the pandemic, something quite existential around people thinking ‘What should work mean for me?.."

I think this underlies most of the motivation of the lying flat movement. I find that most people don't contemplate mortality viscerally. People live as if death is a mirage on the horizon.

The pandemic changed that. People for once, on a global scale, felt that they could die in a horrific manner: sucking for air like a fish in a stagnant pond. With this realization came contemplation. What do I want to do before I die? Who am I? What do I want?

No one on their deathbed ever said "I wish I had spent more time in the office" or "I'm sure glad I endured the misery of my pedantic and misanthropic boss."

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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by white belt »

xmj wrote:
Thu Aug 11, 2022 12:56 am
Those are great reframes. My personal conclusion so far has been:
- If capital income is taxed at lower rates than labor income, reorganize income to be the former.
- If in BigCo jobs the best paid people tend to be staffers from consulting firms . . . don't work inhouse @ BigCo.
- If you can earn well in one place and spend a lot less in another, arb the shit out of geography.
I'm curious, what are some geo-arbitrage capital income generating strategies you've come up with?

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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by xmj »

white belt wrote:
Thu Aug 11, 2022 10:15 pm
I'm curious, what are some geo-arbitrage capital income generating strategies you've come up with?
Any consulting business if you're in a lower-cost area than your clients, where you pay out most of the profit as dividends - no payroll/social security taxes on those. Preferably cross-border.

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