As of August, the number of job openings plunged from 11.2 to 10.1 million, the largest one-month drop since the start of the pandemic, though they remain well above pre-pandemic levels.
Wages increased by 5 percent from a year ago, as many large employers are reducing or freezing hiring. And job openings in leisure and hospitality, which still has 1.1 million fewer employees than before the pandemic, eased to 1.4 million in August from 1.99 million at the end of 2021. Quiet Quitting has gained currency among 20-somethings who are desperately trying to create boundaries between work life and real life. The idea behind the movement is not to actually quit your job, but to stop going above and beyond at work, because according to Zaiad Khan, an early adopter of the phrase on TikTok, “Work is not your life. Your worth is not determined by your productive output.”
To state the obvious, COVID-19 finally proved to millions of office workers that trudging into a physical work space was a time suck and perhaps, a productivity killer. Yet if you were lucky enough to work from home, the boundaries became blurred, leaving many overwhelmed and suffering from work/Zoom fatigue.