Why this is interesting: a big part of a strategist’s job is about looking for shifts suggest and new future, and the signals that show it unfolding. This magazine is one of those signals.

This magazine, picked up at Athanaeum Boekhandel in Amsterdam on a wet Saturday evening, seems so au courant. It speaks to Grant McCracken’s Return of The Artisan. It offers an escape route — nay, 100 of them! — from a bullshit job. It’s a repost to the capitalist moral panic du jour, that of quiet quitting.

Last night on Twitter, I said:

The moral panic about folk wanting a life in which work doesn't suck all the life out of said life is quite the bonfire.

Anthony Ingram said:

The panic is, I suspect, being fuelled by companies that are shitting themselves realising their gravy train is coming to an end.

And to be sure, the WSJ and Bloomberg are pointing fingers for declining productivity at lazy employees and their quiet quitting ways.

Others attribute the popularity of the term to burnt out workers trying to reclaim some empowerment from system that demands not only an employee’s time, but a fair degree of their selfhood, too.

Derek Thompson at the Atlantic makes the interesting point that quiet quitting isn’t really about quitting at all. Instead, he argues that it’s a catch-all term that’s been birthed in to the lexicon to:

describe the colliding pressures of wanting to be financially secure, but not wanting to let work take over their life, but also having major status anxiety, but also experiencing guilt about that status anxiety, and sometimes feeling like gunning for that promotion, and sometimes feeling like quitting, and sometimes feeling like crawling into a sensory deprivation tank to make all those other anxieties shut up for a moment.

Whichever narrative you subscribe to, it’s hard to escape the feeling that something is seriously fucked up in the world of work.

I suspect it’s a long way from over yet.