A seventeen-second TikTok video named a behavior that Gallup said described half the workforce.
In July 2022, a twenty-four-year-old software engineer in New York named Zaid Khan posted a seventeen-second video on TikTok. Over footage of city streets, he described a concept he called quiet quitting.1 The video accumulated more than 3.6 million views. Within weeks, the hashtag #quietquitting had reached hundreds of millions.
Khan's definition was specific. Quiet quitting did not mean leaving a job. It meant declining to perform beyond the written requirements of the role, refusing to subscribe to the expectation that work should occupy more of a person's identity than the employment contract demands.
The phrase resonated because it named something Gallup had already been measuring. The organization's 2022 State of the Global Workplace report found that only twenty-one percent of employees worldwide were engaged at their jobs.2 Gallup classified workers who were neither engaged nor actively disengaged as quiet quitters and estimated they made up at least fifty percent of the American workforce.3
The data suggested that quiet quitting was not new behavior wearing a new name. It was a long-standing pattern of disengagement that had found, for the first time, a phrase that people recognized as their own experience.
Khan himself later abandoned the practice. In a follow-up video, he described growing paranoid about being discovered underperforming and eventually quit his job entirely.4 He concluded that poor management, not individual withdrawal, was the real source of disengagement.
The phrase drew criticism for being a misnomer, for relabeling basic boundary-setting as a form of resignation. NPR reported that many workers objected to the term, arguing that performing one's contracted duties without volunteering additional labor was not quitting anything.5
In China, the concept bailan (let it rot) had emerged among young workers before quiet quitting entered English. In Japan, madogiwa zoku, the "window-seat tribe," had described sidelined employees doing minimal work since the 1970s. The behavior quiet quitting described was neither new nor uniquely American, but the phrase gave English speakers a name for it at a moment when pandemic-era exhaustion made the naming feel urgent.