Millions of Americans have quit their jobs over the past couple of years. Millions more have “quiet quit,” which is a new label given to the inertia of people collecting paychecks but doing the bare minimum or less at work.
Under the headline “A Nation of Quitters,” Andy Kessler noted in his Wall Street Journal column that there are 3 million fewer workers than there were before COVID hit in early 2020 and 11.2 million job vacancies.
Open a newspaper or website and you see articles trying to plumb the mystery of what has happened, endeavoring to explain why America’s get-up-and-go spirit got up and left.
I thought about this while rereading British politician Harold Nicolson’s three-volume collection of diaries spanning 1930 to 1962. He records a similar malaise in post-war Britain, which, like America today, perceived itself to be in decline.
In an entry for March 11, 1946, the diarist meets Robert Barrington-Ward, editor of the Times of London, at lunch at the Beefsteak Club, and they discuss why “our working people will not work.”
Barrington-Ward’s view was that people had “nothing to buy with what they earn”; rationing didn’t end in Britain until 1954. But that’s not an explanation for the Great Resignation in America now. Despite supply chain breakages, there is still plenty on which to spend our money.
Nicolson’s harsh aristocratic view was less exculpatory. He said, “The lower classes are for some curious reason congenitally indolent. … Only the pressure of gain or destitution makes them work.” Americans are not congenitally indolent, being hitherto an exceptionally industrious people.
But something profound has happened. Various influences have combined to push many of them into indifference toward, or revulsion from, employment, earning, and the accumulation of wealth.
Part of this stems from a desire for a supposedly healthier work-life balance. A member of Generation Z told me recently, “I don’t see why I should work above and beyond if I’m not paid above and beyond.” Whether this attitude is or isn’t misplaced in a young person early in her career, it is undeniably different from what one saw in the 1980s, when people would leave a jacket at their desk overnight to give the impression they were working late.
There is no question President Joe Biden’s policies have affected this attitude. His government has offered subsidies for not working, lax credit, protection against landlords who want their rent, and against lenders who want student loans repaid, stoking a sense that there’s little point lifting a finger. Even shriveling stock prices discourage hope of getting ahead. Slacking seems the way to go.
But the biggest impact on Americans’ view of work, the meteor that hurtled from outer space and smashed so many long-standing assumptions, was COVID. It shut the economy down. People stopped going to the office and in many cases have yet to return. They were told their work wasn’t “essential,” that the businesses they built were expendable. Children stayed home from school, so parents had to, too. Meetings, dinners, and vacations were canceled. Cinemas, restaurants, gyms, sports events, and even golf courses for a while closed down.
These aren’t all about work, but they and other normal activities that had been moorings of daily life suddenly disappeared. At a stroke, they were cut loose. This loss of bearings came when a sense of national decline made it harder to take; twice as many Americans in 2019 thought the nation would become less important as thought it would become more important.
It is often remarked that no one’s last words are to wish they’d spent more time at the office. But most people still define themselves by their work. When they are introduced, they ask, “What do you do?” by which they mean, what is the line of work that delineates who you are?
Even though the economy was able to pick up where it left off, so that even Biden says the COVID emergency is over, the aftershocks of the pandemic still judder through our culture and society. What had seemed solid and permanent was apparently fragile and not to be trusted.
I say “apparently” because some things are more apparent than real. The old moorings, though jolted violently by COVID and the capricious, nearly vandalistic response of overweening government, can and should be recovered. For they were not plucked randomly out of the air but arrived over many generations as solid foundations for a life of security and confidence.
We are in a period when first principles need to be restated. This is so on such matters as free speech, which is under attack as rarely before in modern times. But it is also so in a necessary relearning of the habits of work, effort, and energy that lead to prosperity and are best calculated to relieve our current sense of unease.
As Nicolson said 75 years ago of conservatives and what they could do to win back public trust, the arguments “must be lucid, consistent and very incessantly formulated; and … must be directed away from big business to the ordinary habits of thought of the middle classes.”
