The "Great Revelation" Behind the "Great Resignation"

Recently I got some very powerful flashbacks to the beginning of the COVID lockdown in March of 2020. At the time I didn’t know what would happen or how deadly COVID might be, so I took an inventory of my soul. I asked myself if I was prepared to die. I definitely still preferred to live, but I was glad that I could answer that question with a strong “yes.” During the lockdown, I also rediscovered my love of philosophy. In the process, I stopped asking myself if I was prepared to die and instead asked what I should be doing with the precious time I still had left. Fundamental to this was the revelation that while I loved my work, it was a lot less important than some other things I had been neglecting.

A lot of other people who were not dusting off Nietzsche and Marcus Aurelius came to the same conclusion. There’s been a lot of talk of the “Great Resignation” and “quiet quitting,” but commentators are missing the true change, the Great Revelation. People are jumping jobs or deprioritizing them because the pandemic gave them a chance to break from their daily routines and actually THINK about what they want out of life.

It turns out that American workers, who have been squeezed, casualized, downsized, used up and thrown on the trash heap for the past forty years realized that their jobs rated pretty low on the list of things that really matter to them. Work in so many professions and industries had been made even more miserable than it was before, but most workers just didn’t have the opportunity to stop and think about it.

It wasn’t just the pandemic disruptions that encouraged this thinking, but a brush with death. Late capitalism relies on a populace that never contemplates their own mortality. It prefers that people just keep their minds on work and consumption as if life will just go on forever. Once you are aware that your time is finite and precious, you are much less tolerant of it being wasted. “Quiet quitting” is not petulance; it is the very mature and wise understanding that we need to reclaim our time.

By squeezing their workers at every turn for the past few decades, employers have brought this on themselves. They grew so used to getting fat this way that they are now flummoxed by the new reality workers are creating in this tight labor market. It’s why they cheer for higher interest rates to hobble the economy so that they can wield the threat of job loss again.

This pandemic has been a truly awful experience, from the deaths to the long-term health problems to the innumerable painful disruptions of daily life. The Great Revelation is the one sliver lining in all of this, the key to us having a better future than our crappy past. Employers and their political allies keep wanting to get “back to normal.” Workers understand that “normal” sucked and are quietly (see what I did there) pushing for a new labor arrangement.

The wisdom of the Great Revelation is not going away, it was won at too terrible a cost. Have fun with that, bosses.