Hello Internet Friends,
I was talking about Quiet Quitting with a friend last week, which was just one of those late-afternoon free therapy sessions. But somewhere between the jokes and the sighs, I realized something: I could’ve written this whole piece from my point of view.

Because what we’re living, this slow, collective detachment from work, isn’t just personal. It’s generational. It’s systemic. And yet, no one with an office job seems brave enough actually to say it out loud.

He told me this the other day, while we were both pretending to work on our laptops in silence:

I need to talk about this now, from my desk. That should say enough.

The more we talked, the more it felt like he wasn’t the only one.
There’s a quiet epidemic happening in our open-space offices and Teams channels. People sitting at their desks, barely working, half-present, and…no one really cares. Nobody checks. Nobody asks. As long as you're still logged in and paid, you're technically still useful.

Some of us are even getting paid more than essential workers who are breaking their backs every day to keep the world running.

That thought alone? It makes me sick.

He told me:

Sure, I have a few things to do. A couple of hours here and there, more when meetings start to fill up my calendar. But some days? Nothing. Just this blurry feeling of needing to look busy enough to justify my job. To justify the years I’ve put into this career. The sacrifices. The identity I built around it.

Then there are the 9 or 10-hour days. And still, the same questions echo after the laptop shuts:

Was that necessary? Was that real? Or was that just me performing productivity because I’m terrified of not mattering anymore?

I felt all of it. Like him, I’ve emotionally overinvested in a career path that promised self-expression and turned into self-erasure. What once felt like liberation now it’s starting to feel like a golden cage.

And then he said something that stayed with me:

My mum’s a cleaning lady. She ruined her body for people who never learned her name. She never asked for passion or purpose, just respect. And honestly? I’m prouder of the trust she earned from her clients than I am of anything I’ve ever made for a pitch.

That hit me.

He doesn’t feel guilty anymore. And if you’re in the same situation, maybe you shouldn’t either. These companies? They’ll keep making money whether you care or not.

Whether you quit or stay.

It sounds brutal, but it’s clarity. He’s not disengaged, he’s awake. He finally realized he can keep a job without letting it keep him.

He’s quietly quitting.

Not because he’s lazy. Not because he’s mediocre. But because he wants to live. To protect his mental health, his time, and whatever’s left of that spark that got him into this mess of a creative industry in the first place.

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After the pandemic, I burned out. Not in a big, dramatic way. It was subtle. Creeping in like a virus. Slowly turning everything grey. I lost access to emotion.
Life got boring and flat. Nothing landed. I wasn’t sad or happy, I was just…blank. I was feeling a sort of alienation from myself, from my desire to become a good designer or to progress in my creative career. I just cared about my 9-5 to get money in my wallet, and repeat.

And even now, I’m not suddenly the vibe manager in the room. But I’ve started to identify how I feel. And to limit what doesn’t feel good for me.

I used to think the fire I had in uni, in the early days of my career, was gone forever. Everything I built was washed away by a situation I couldn’t control.
That stillness? It killed my self-esteem. I ended up in this loop of impostor syndrome, I’m still clawing my way out of it.

But I don’t want this post to be only about me and my friends.

Let’s talk about some facts. Because this is bigger than my burnout.

According to the 2024 Mentally Healthy survey, almost half of the people working in creative, media, and marketing roles show signs of anxiety or depression. It’s not a coincidence that these numbers are particularly high among millennials.

And it’s not just random, this is generational. Deteriorating mental health is especially common among people born in the 1990s, and to a slightly lesser extent, the 1980s. If you were born before that, statistically, you’re doing better. The younger the generation, the heavier the weight.

It’s not about age. It’s about the world we were handed.
We came into adulthood during recessions, ecological anxiety, unaffordable housing, and a gig economy disguised as “freedom.”

We were told we could be anything if we just worked hard enough. Then everything broke. We were promised everything if only we worked hard enough. If we found our passion. If we made it our job.
We weren’t just encouraged to love what we do, we were told our job should be who we are.

Anne Helen Petersen calls it out for what it is: the great millennial burnout.
In her book Can’t Even, she talks about how our generation was raised to optimize everything: our skills, our time, even our personalities, until work became our whole identity.

We found ourselves stuck in a loop of unpaid internships, short-term contracts, over-education, and under-compensation. We played the game so well that we forgot there’s a difference between ambition and self-abandonment.
We said yes to everything, hoping it would lead to something.

Now we’re here, tired, underwhelmed, quietly quitting because it’s the only way to survive a system that runs on our exhaustion.

We were told we could be anything, as long as we never stopped proving it.
And when the dream job turned out to be a trap, we didn’t know how to say no.

We just… burned out.

And burnout isn’t a personal failure. It’s a social consequence.

No productivity app will fix it. No journaling habit, skin routine, or overnight oats recipe will save us from the fact that the world we entered was already broken.

Quiet quitting isn’t mediocrity.
It’s a refusal to collapse for free.
It’s a slow, gentle rebellion.

Let’s start to make it louder.

Until next time

L