Today’s young employees, however, are far from the first population to go through a period of sudden disillusionment about the role of work in their lives. Indeed, a look backward reveals that knowledge workers in every previous generation seem to have experienced a similar pattern of work crisis followed by reconceptualization.

This passion-centric perspective attempted to thread the needle between the extremes that the boomers had experienced: get a job, they told their kids, but make it one you love. Seek self-actualization, but also care about making your mortgage payments.

This was the decade of the blog-fuelled minimalism movement, which argued that if you simplify your life, you can simplify your career, leaving more time for other meaningful pursuits.

For older employees, these conditions created a professional crisis. For Gen Z, which had so thoroughly mixed work and self, this suffocating grimness hit at a more personal level. It became clear to many that they needed to separate their personhood from their jobs. It is this transition that generates much of the angst exhibited in quiet-quitting videos. “Your worth as a person is not defined by your labor,” a defiant Zaid Khan concludes in the original quiet-quitting TikTok.

What matters is that Generation Z is waking up to the fact that the unnatural melding of self and work induced by an adolescence lived within online spaces isn’t sustainable. They’re finally—thankfully—ready to ask what should come next.

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