In July 2022, a 24-year-old engineer named Zaid Khan posted a 17-second video that gave a decades-old idea a viral new name. "Quiet quitting," he explained, wasn't about actually leaving your job. It was about refusing to go "above and beyond" when your employer wasn't paying you for it, doing precisely what your role required and nothing more.

The phrase struck a nerve. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report has recorded employee engagement at some of its lowest levels since 2014, with only around a third of workers describing themselves as genuinely engaged. Among Gen Z specifically, engagement was even lower, while burnout rates in that age group ran noticeably higher than the workforce average across an 11-country survey.

The backlash produced its own micro-trends. "Bare minimum Mondays," coined by entrepreneur Marisa Jo Mayes, encourages workers to deliberately do as little as possible at the start of the week, easing in rather than sprinting from nine a.m. Critics call both trends a symptom of quiet disengagement dressed up as self-care. Supporters call them a long-overdue correction to decades of unpaid overtime being treated as normal.

Either way, the underlying question predates the hashtag: what, exactly, does a job actually owe an employee, and what does an employee actually owe a job back?