What experience in the workplace radicalised you?
...and then what happened?
Have you become anti-work? Or anti-your-specific-job? Have you been tempted to quit? To do a radical career change? To start fighting for universal basic income? To turn to crime? To quiet quit?
If the answer to any of these questions is ‘yes’, here’s a follow-up: what was the tipping point? What was the moment that made you go fuck this?
Or, to quote a tweet that’s been getting a lot of traction on Twitter/X, what experience in the workplace radicalised you?
When I saw this tweet, the word ‘radicalised’ made me lean away. Radicalisation sounds serious, a tilt into extremism. But then I thought about the cultural conversation about work - the outrage at young people wanting to work less, the horrified reaction to four-day weeks and flexible working - and realised that what many of us consider normal is, to many others, a fairly radical way of thinking. It’s radical, to some, to not place all your value in your productivity at work. It’s radical to push back against presenteeism. It’s radical to declare that your job is not the most important thing in your life.
Scrolling through the quotes of the tweet gave hundreds of dismally relatable triggers. Stories of people being refused time off after losing someone they loved, of moments of blatant racism, of sexual harassment, of working hours endlessly for no reward or recognition. As I went through these tales, I kept wondering: and then what happened?
What comes after someone is ‘radicalised’ against their job? In my experience, people either stay in a role and start giving less of a shit, or they leave, hoping that the next job won’t be so awful. Often when someone leaves, they don’t just depart the job but the entire industry, so disillusioned by their career path.
What’s rare is that someone reacts to this radicalisation by revolting, by fighting to make things different. And that makes sense - few of us can choose to simply not work and instead battle for justice (rent to pay, bread to buy, etc etc), and, frankly, the process of being ‘radicalised’ at work wears you down; when you emerge from optimism into reality, you’re far too depressed and exhausted to start a revolution.
Therein lies a major issue, of course. Let’s follow the cycle. A workplace or an entire industry is messed up. Someone new joins said workplace or industry and happily works there for a while, but then discovers the true horrors and decides to do one of two things: to stick it out or to cut and run. If they stick it out, nothing changes. If they run, they might hope that in an exit interview they’ll inspire the workplace or industry to do things differently (we all love a lengthy exit interview where you finally list off all the terrible things a manager did, right?), but this is unlikely to be the case. What’s more likely is the workplace or industry views this as inevitable churn and hires a new face, keeping them for as long as possible until they, too, get fed up and the cycle continues.
Both sticking around and leaving are fairly pessimistic approaches. Begrudgingly staying says: “this is just what work is like, I’ll have to keep going”. Leaving says “there’s no hope in this getting better, so time to flee”. An optimistic response might be to take your concerns up the ladder to more senior people and suggest they do things differently. Unfortunately, the optimism required to do such a thing tends to tip into naivety and foolishness. It is hard for a small cog in a machine to make a difference. Attempting it might, by the tiniest chance, be successful, but the small cog is more likely to be crushed and broken down. And, really, if you’re a small cog, you’ll be asking: why do I have to be the one to keep pushing for change? I’m small and I’m tired and I just want a nice life.
Another optimistic response is to hope that the next role, the next industry, will be better. Sometimes it is! But sometimes it’s not. That shiny new job has had the same cycle as your old one. Nothing is different because nothing is changing.
How do we break the cycle, then? By having an approach squarely in the middle of optimism and pessimism. Of being neither anti-work or blindly hopeful, but instead believing that work can be better… if things are done differently.
But - and this might be an obvious point, but stay with me - it can’t only be the smaller cogs who hold this belief. If so, nothing happens. The cycle continues. What we need is for people in charge, who are established and have power and can afford to push back on the way things are done, to recognise the issues and push for change. We need bosses and HR directors and anyone else further up the ladder to read these quote tweets, to really see and to really hear. They then need to give a shit; they need to understand that the actions they’ve allowed to happen - whether that’s overloading a junior employee to the point of burnout or allowing a senior member of staff to belittle their team - have an impact, not only on their turnover and the quality of their employees, but a human impact, and that this matters.
We need people in charge to open their minds to the idea that work can be different, that change is possible, that we don’t have to do things the way they’ve always been done. These people might not get radicalised by their workplace firsthand, perhaps because they’ve risen up the ranks and out of the spot in the hierarchy that’s more likely to feel the impact of bad practices, so I urge them to tune into what other people are saying about their experiences. I hope that anyone with the power to change their workplace, their industry, or the very structures of work, actually listens to the complaints of anti-work types and really takes in the misery of burnt out employees getting pushed out of jobs they love, rather than dismissing them as lazy quiet quitters who simply don’t want to work anymore.
To anyone reading this with a smidgeon of power, I encourage you to read through the responses to that tweet. I would also advise looking through exit interview reports. I’d ask you to talk to someone junior and listen when they raise concerns. I’d urge you to think about the bad parts of work and consider how you might be allowing these things to happen. I’d urge you to ask yourself what you can do to make work better.
And to smaller cogs, the best thing to do is to look after yourself. To keep sharing your stories and keep flagging what’s going wrong, but to protect your peace while you do so. The world of work can get better, but it’s not on you to fix it all by yourself. And while you wait for the people above to listen, do whatever you need - whether that’s quiet quitting or actually quitting - to stay afloat and okay. A job is not worth self-destruction, even if in the pursuit of making work less destructive.
For anyone curious, some of my 'radicalising’ moments at previous workplaces would be:
When I suggested that someone shouldn’t be allowed to shout at their colleagues and was met with a bewildered look and ‘but that’s just how this industry is’
When someone I managed asked for time off because a family member had passed away and I was advised to push them to come back more quickly
When a CEO took me and another girl to Soho House for pizza and drinks and then said multiple things that were so lacking in basic intelligent thought that I realised you could be paid the most for knowing the least
The multiple times I heard of people I worked with being signed off sick due to stress and burnout
Having panic attacks in the toilets
Delivering good work and hitting targets and meeting all the other expectations… and receiving no praise or gratitude, but any small thing going wrong being picked up on immediately
The pandemic! All of it! Working from home and it being totally fine, then being expected to be in the office full-time despite there clearly not being a real need!
When I got told off for asking a colleague to please stop loudly making jokes about sexual abuse
Work-related reading recs:
I’m quoted as an expert in this Stylist article about being ‘too nice’ at work, so you should read it
And another great read on Stylist about perfectionism at work
Interesting article on the idea of taking ‘unhappy days’ off work
Cal Newport reckons we should pop out during the work day to watch a film. I’m into it.
I was going to say something similar to this “The pandemic! All of it! Working from home and it being totally fine, then being expected to be in the office full-time despite there clearly not being a real need!” - when I realised that ‘doing my job’ and ‘going to the office’ were two separate things. Which means I can say sentences like ‘out of doing my job to a satisfactory level, going to the office, and having a healthy life outside work, I can do two of those two three things, but not all three’