There’s not much Serena Williams can’t do. Win tennis matches? Raise a family? Run a thriving venture capital firm? Be an international symbol of grace and strength and resilience? Easy-peasy.
But dare her to say the word “quitting” — as in “quitting tennis” — and you’ll see her struggle. Prior to this year’s U.S. Open tennis championship, from which she was knocked out in the third round after two thrilling matches, Williams said she was leaving the sport she’s dominated for decades. But it won’t be easy, she admitted. In fact, she couldn’t even find the right word for it, picking up and then discarding terms such as “stepping away” or “transitioning” that just don’t quite do it for her. “Maybe the best word to describe what I’m up to,” she wrote in a recent essay in Vogue, “is evolution.”
She’s clear about this much, however: Whatever that perfect word turns out to be, it definitely won’t be quitting.
Thus Williams is at least partially a practitioner of the hottest new alliterative trend since mindfulness meditation: quiet quitting. Stories on the concept are showing up everywhere, from The Washington Post and The New York Times to The Wall Street Journal. It’s a frequent Twitter and TikTok theme. Quiet quitting is “taking social media by storm,” noted the Post’s Taylor Telford, and it doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. In Great Britain’s Spectator, Stephen Daisley writes that it means doing “whatever is asked of you provided it’s lawful, reasonable and within your contract. Do not one thing more than that.”
To be sure, that doesn’t sound like the hard-charging, indefatigable Williams at all. Indeed, the only similarity between one of the greatest athletes in history and some sneaky slacker who’s playing Wordle in her cubicle is this: a reluctance to say the word “quit.” Williams’ avoidance of it is no doubt fueled by the same basic bias that has turned contemporary workers into quiet quitters. We see quitting as failing. We see quitting as losing. We’re supposed to be gritty and persevering — and quitting looks impulsive and weak. Backing away seems shameful. Moving on is for cowards and sissies. And so we pull our punches, modifying the word “quitting” with “quiet,” hoping to remove the sting by making the phrase sound almost cute.
As the author of a forthcoming book on our strangely blinkered cultural attitude toward giving up, I’m bemused by the rise of quiet quitting. It’s treated like a cool new concept — when it’s neither cool nor new. It surges through classic literature, energizing works such as Herman Melville’s novella “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” first published in 1853, which tells the story of a mysterious clerk who does less and less until finally he’s doing nothing at all. “I would prefer not to” is Bartleby’s signature reply to any request made by his employer. Bartleby is the original quiet quitter. Spoiler alert: It doesn’t end well for him.
Why are we so resistant to the idea of quitting? As I argue in my book, the prejudice against giving up — even when it’s clearly the best option — really began to pick up steam during the Industrial Revolution in Victorian England. An enterprising Scot named Samuel Smiles published a book titled “Self-Help” in 1859. A series of biographical portraits of engineers and builders, the book extolled the virtues of drive and self-sacrifice, claiming that success is exclusively a matter of hard work — with no assists from noble birth or lucky breaks. That was a nifty way of distracting people from income inequality and social injustice.
And the message still resonates. In 2016, “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance” by Angela Duckworth was a bestseller. Sticking with something that’s hard — even if it’s not what you want to do or be — is an index of character, these books claim. To be called a “quitter” is the worst of insults.
So here comes quiet quitting, enabled by an economy that’s going gangbusters. You can do less and less these days before a supervisor even considers a reprimand; chances are, she couldn’t easily dig up a replacement for you. Instead of making the effort to decide what you truly want out of work — and life — and setting off to find it, you can just loaf along, watching the clock, bragging to your friends about how cleverly you’re hoodwinking the boss. The prejudice against quitting is simply the latest iteration of an old and dubious idea that posits success as a solo act, totally dependent upon individual effort — and not the result of a complex array of factors such as sex, race, income level, and physical and intellectual endowment. As long as we judge poverty as a moral failing, we can justify turning our backs on those in need — because we can always claim that they brought it on themselves by not working hard enough. By quitting.
Yet quitting is a vigorous, definitive act, a bold and life-affirming choice. Often there’s nothing noble — or even very smart — about the avoidance of it. Quitting is a positive, not a negative. So instead of tiptoeing around it, instead of hoping nobody in charge notices that your nose has been nowhere near a grindstone in, like, forever — why not simply leave a situation that no longer suits you? Quitting isn’t capitulation. It’s strategy.
Deep down, I think Williams gets that. She may have trouble saying the word “quit” — and so would any elite athlete, including Roger Federer, another tennis legend who recently announced his retirement — but she knows what she’s doing. “I need to be two feet into tennis,” she wrote in Vogue, “or two feet out.” No half measures for her.
No matter what Williams calls it, she’s all in on quitting — because she understands that it’s the perfect portal into tomorrow.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Julia Keller is a former literary critic and staff writer at the Tribune who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005. Keller is the author of “Quitting: A Life Strategy: The Myth of Perseverance — and How the New Science of Giving Up Can Set You Free,” which will be published in April by Grand Central.
