Anti-work trends have always abounded on social media. The haters will say we don’t want to work, but we’d question why we can’t just work in the way we want to.
Quiet quitting, acting your wage, and applying for lazy girl jobs have emerged in recent years, since many of us were forced to work from home due to the pandemic. Unsurprisingly to everyone who has lived the hybrid or remote lifestyle since, this life-altering event also fundamentally changed our perspectives on work and work-life balance.
But as many are (still) being asked to return to the office with increasing regularity, it’s given rise to a new trend that has us rethinking the way we’ve traditionally shown up to the workplace, whether it be physically or virtually. Introducing: quiet vacationing.
Quiet vacationing is when you take a holiday without telling your boss. You don’t take annual leave, and you still log on for your meetings and complete all of your work on time, but instead of sitting at your cluttered dining table to work from home, you instead work from vacation.
Our millennial writer @brooksallison_ shares his take on “quiet vacationing”. #FallonTonight pic.twitter.com/GEaR9dqU3l
— The Tonight Show (@FallonTonight) May 23, 2024
For some people who are quiet vacationing, they’re working the same hours they always have — just in a new location and with the added benefit of aperitivo hour and leisurely mornings spent sightseeing. For others, it combines elements of the three other recent workplace trends that came before it on TikTok, with a holiday as the cherry on top. It took quiet quitting’s minimal effort, act your wage’s refusal to go above and beyond your job description, and lazy girl jobs’ low-stress deliverables.
Combine these together and there’s really no reason you couldn’t spend the European summer wearing a cute sundress on a farm stay in Italy while making the same money you do at home.
Admittedly, quiet vacationing is easier when you aren’t expected to be online between nine and five, but people who are, are still doing it. The argument is simple: if you’re getting all of your work done, then why does it matter where you’re doing it from?
There are a few reasons people on TikTok are choosing to quiet vacation. According to research conducted by Roy Morgan in December 2023, just over 50 per cent of the Australian workforce (that’s 7 million people) is owed two weeks of annual leave and 10.5 per cent of paid workers have more than seven weeks of leave sitting in the bank.
The truth is, many people feel nervous to ask their bosses for time off. How many of us have been hit with a “must be nice” when asking to take time off for a holiday? Or worried that our bosses think we don’t take our jobs seriously enough if we dare to take some R&R. And even when we do take leave, for many people who are able to perform their work duties outside of a traditional office, there is often an expectation that they still be reachable.
I am of the school of thought that if you’re on leave, you fully log off. But I also know I’ve raised a few eyebrows in the workplace when I’ve admitted that I delete my emails and Slack off my phone before a one week holiday, to break the mindless muscle memory that sends my pesky thumb hovering over the Slack app icon multiple times a day. The pressure is real.
Of course, with a trend as harmless as this, there are also plenty of naysayers. According to some CEOs and bosses, quiet vacationing could be seen as double dipping on annual leave entitlements, and some people on social media have raised that for tax purposes, working in the location you’ve told your employer you’d be, is quite important.
But for the most part, people are just trying to carve out a little tiny smidge of work-life balance by spending a week touching grass in their off-time. If we consider that quiet vacationing actually doesn’t equal time away from work, but rather, time away from the home, then what really is the issue?
“This is what I mean when I say you all talk too much… this is not content. Stop it, please.” says one TikToker, who explains that first we thought tech jobs were great and then we were made redundant… then we started posting about how lovely it was to work from home, and that was taken away too.
“How much easier can we make it for these companies to get a leg up on us — what have we learned? We’ve learned nothing.” So perhaps, the problem doesn’t lay in the actual quiet vacationing, but with the people who are posting about their quiet vacationing and ruining it for everyone else by drawing attention to it.
For legal reasons, we can’t recommend that you quiet vacation. I mean, unless… just do it quietly, please.
Read the original story at ELLE Australia.
