Quiet Quitting and Rage Applying May Change Your Life
Lucky girl syndrome, which is the idea that you can manifest the life that you want by maintaining a positive attitude, introduces a new spin on how to get your dream job.
Many have been quick to criticize this approach, stating that simply wearing a smile doesn’t change much of anything, especially not when it comes to job security, but while lucky girl syndrome has largely been written off as delusional, it highlights the recent focus that has been placed on people earning jobs that they feel supported by and the ways that they go about achieving them.
Many new schemes for advancement in the workplace have come to light recently with “quiet quitting” and “rage applying,” being two of the most popular. Countless news outlets have even gone so far as to declare that “rage applying” is the new “quiet quitting,” creating somewhat of a contrived Gen Z–Millenial rift. Quiet quitting has been the domain of Millennials, while rage applying has been purely Gen Z, yet both are responses to burnout.
Quiet quitting is the act of refusing to go above and beyond for a job that you don’t care about and doesn’t care about you. You may have spent hours working overtime for a job that doesn’t pay you overtime or you may be earnestly and ambitiously giving a job or internship your all in the hopes that it will result in you climbing the ladder and getting promoted.
The issue with this is that it is exhausting.
Staying overtime, doing extra work (oftentimes for no extra pay), and doing the work of your peers, while maintaining a positive attitude, will eventually prove disastrous for your sanity.
So, many people have said, just don’t do it. Do your job, clock in on time, but do not do more than what is expected of you if you do not feel like you will receive anything in return.
In other words: don’t let your job kill you.
This might be strange advice to take in your 20s, when you’re expected to hustle the most, and others have pointed out the privilege, inherent, in the refusal to do back-breaking work, but mostly people point out the value in quiet-quitting. If the place you work at doesn’t respect you, or even exploits you, then quiet quitting might be the way to save yourself.
With this in mind, rage-applying is the natural next step after quiet-quitting. Rage-applying is when an employee begins applying to numerous other jobs when they feel undervalued in their current position.
Rage applying has become popular on Tik-Tok with miraculous stories coming out from people who got fed up with their jobs, applied to 15 other places, and ended up in a new position with a salary that is $15,000 higher. For many, rage applying can mean the difference between working for hourly pay versus working for yearly pay.
However, rage applying is what happens only when frustration with your job translates into real action. Writing perfectly-tailored cover letters is a time-consuming and soul-sucking process and finding a new job usually requires reaching out to any and all connections in your chosen industry as a way to give you an edge in the application process. These are the necessary evils of applying, much less rage applying, to new positions. Being committed to the process of finding better employment means confidently applying to places, regardless of how timid you actually feel. Don’t allow yourself to get demoralized throughout this process with the understanding that applying to jobs is a numbers game, fraught with near-constant rejection. This is about carving out the life that you want for yourself during the most flexible time in your life: your twenties.
The theory that “if you do what you’re passionate about, you’ll never work a day in your life” remains good in theory, but hard to accomplish in real life. Lucky girl syndrome and other ideas of manifestation have been taken to task for promoting unreasonable expectations for how a person can passively obtain the life that they want, but the combination of not forcing yourself to work a mentally-draining job and applying to places better suited to your needs, remains the current way to go. With both approaches being treated as fads, it is impossible to know the future of careerism, but in the meantime gen-zers and millennials will be rage applying and quiet quitting for the foreseeable future.