I don't really want to actually talk about ""quiet quitting"" because it's a dumb phrase and the whole media discourse around it is just exhausting. Instead, I'm gonna talk about empathy burnout in a professional context. There are a lot of professions, mostly "pink collar" jobs predominantly held by women, which struggle with a very special kind of professional burnout where you lose the ability to feel compassion or empathy for other people and just become an exhausted and cold person.
These are all jobs that center around helping people, and which attract people whose motivation was to find a job to do good in the world. Teachers, librarians, nurses, social workers, therapists, case workers, public defenders, etc. For some of these, there is the "private option" you could have taken early in your career, which would have paid more and involved only working for rich children at a private school, private university, corporate law firm, private practice, etc. but typically it is very difficult to transition into the private option after having worked in public schools, public libraries, public defense, NGOs, etc. due to the lack of prestige associated with them. It's well-known that prestigious private universities are often more willing to hire a new librarian fresh out of grad school with no library experience at all than to hire a public librarian.
But, you didn't choose the private option as a bright-eyed young upcoming professional, because you didn't want to do your work for the benefit of rich clients, you wanted to help people. You wanted to provide your services for free to people who need them. You had what we call professional awe. You didn't see yourself as just a worker doing a job, but as a servant of good. You were in awe of your field, brave and noble self-sacrificing individuals who dedicate their lives to helping others. Just doing your job would be your contribution to the betterment of society.
And then you were thrown into the public school system. You taught oversized classes of troubled students in troubled underfunded public schools for years and watched them fight and scream and never get everything you knew they deserved; as no matter how hard you tried they still couldn't "make it." You witnessed first person how systemic factors press youth into following the same economic paths as their parents no matter how hard they try to break out. After an exhausting day of breaking up fights in buildings without working air conditioning, are you even being paid enough? Are you appreciated? Does your work even matter? The students churn through and through.
You are thrown into the public library system, as people in deep poverty get into fights over the three functioning Windows 7 PCs they need to fill out welfare paperwork that they don't know how to fill out and you can't navigate either, because you're not a social worker. You find yourself administering Narcan to people overdosing in the bathroom. You deal with sexual harassment, verbal threats of violence, and physical violence so regularly you don't even process it anymore. You try to connect people to the resources they need but you after you make that connection, those organizations are never able to help as much as advertised. The shelter is full, the program has ended, the paperwork requires documentation the patron doesn't have. You witness first-hand how people trapped in deep poverty cannot escape with the scraps that are made available and all you start to see is how stupid people can be. How illiterate, how quick-to-anger, how frustrating they can be, even though you know it is probably mental illness, probably lack of adequate education, probably lack of access to what they'd need to be better; but right now they are just so frustrating and they're taking out their anger on you. And ultimately, deep in debt, are you even getting paid enough? Are you appreciated by the city? Does your work even matter? The patrons churn through and through.
You are thrown into a crowded urban hospital. You run across the emergency room trying to attend to far too many patients. The patients have been injured for stupid reasons. They take out their anger issues on you. They insult you. They are demanding, even though it is by your hands that they are not dying. They refuse to follow your directions for their own safety. You witness first-hand how the healthcare and health insurance system is unable to provide adequate preventative care to people in deep poverty for whom the emergency room is the only place they know to turn. You can see how these health issues would have been prevented if they only had access to a dentist, to an eye doctor, to a therapist, to education, to consistent access to hygiene facilities or real food. The same patients keep coming back again and again. And are you getting paid enough? Are you appreciated by the hospital, by your patients? Does your work even matter? Why are you struggling to keep people alive who will just be back next week? The patients churn through and through.
You are thrown into working for the welfare system. You are trying to help people get through an insane overly-complex bureaucracy to get scraps of public benefits. It feels like everything is designed to prevent you from getting your clients the things you know would help them. No matter how much you explain to your clients what they need to access this or that program, they are unable to provide it. You are assigned to far too many clients to give them more than minutes of your time a day. Clients don't seem to appreciate that you are trying so hard to get them what they need and instead treat you like the person standing in their way; like you are personally denying them what they need and they take it personally. They treat you like you have stable housing in the back room and you're just refusing to check. And given all the debt you went into to get this job, are you even being paid enough for this shit? Does your work really matter? Your clients aren't escaping poverty. The entire system is designed to ensure that. Nothing gets better. You are exhausted. The clients churn through.
You are thrown into a group therapy practice. You are assigned random clients whose mental illness clearly stems from legitimately terrible life circumstances that you cannot change. You are at a loss. You know that stable housing would do more than any CBT thought distortion analysis. There is no distortion. They are right to be in despair. The world is horrible and you can't change it for them. You are assigned too many clients. They don't show up to appointments and when they don't show up you don't get paid. You don't have any time to review cases outside of appointments. Your clients drop out and there's a never-ending waitlist of replacements in similarly shit lives you can't fix because the problem is the system.
You are thrown into the courts and immediately assigned to such an insane number of clients to defend that you can barely give each one fifteen minutes a month. You are somehow supposed to defend seventy people or more at once and they're all in jail waiting for you to get them out. The prosecution seems to always win because they are given more resources than you. The jury is biased because of the race of your clients always seeming to skew towards darker skin. So many of the crimes are petty. Theft of food, baby formula, diapers. You can see first-hand how it is systemic issues and poverty which are driving your clients towards these desperate acts, how even if you keep them out of prison their life won't improve, but you know that if you fail and they go to prison, and oh how often you fail, that their life will only get dramatically worse. And you only have fifteen minutes to meet with them before they go to court. So often you are given clients that have clearly been racially profiled and did nothing wrong and are going to have their life ended due to racism. Sometimes, you are given a profoundly mentally ill client who has done something horrifying and you don't know how to defend it. all this, and geez, you are not being paid enough, and it feels like your work doesn't matter, and the clients churn through.
And what happens is your capacity to care just fizzles out. Not just about being good at your job, but about the genuinely sad circumstances of any individual. You become numb to poverty, to abuse, to injury, to violence. You used to always stop and try to give a dollar or more to people who ask on the street; and now you walk past as quickly as possible and avoid eye contact. You've spent all day trying and failing to help people, and giving this person a dollar would be easy but you just can't take it anymore, you know it won't help them anyway. You become so pessimistic about everyone's lives. What difference does it make. The world is fucked and broken. They can't escape poverty. If they could, you'd see it happening more. You'd see former students out-earning their parents, patrons starting new careers, patients getting getting healthier, clients no longer needing welfare, clients telling you they have hope again, clients staying out of prison and never coming back...
And so you get the mean teacher, who shouts at kids and doesn't seem to care if you pass or fail. You get the grumpy librarian, who shushes you and seems exhausted with you before you even ask for help. You get the mean nurse, who vents about her patients on tiktok like a high school bully. You get the cold social worker who flatly explains why your benefits didn't come through and acts like it's your problem that you couldn't get your papers together, and doesn't seem to make much of an effort to help you understand what to do next. You get the distracted therapist, who coos "mhm" and "that must be so hard for you" and never seems to offer up any genuinely relevant advice. You get the frazzled public defender who doesn't seem like they even read your case before they step up to the bench, and immediately try to get you a plea bargain before they even try to prove your innocence.
None of these people took these jobs for the money. They all have advanced degrees that could have gotten them much better paying work somewhere else, if they'd only adjusted their career path a little bit ten years ago. None of their universities paid them to go to grad school, they all had to take out big loans and go into debt to get these jobs. And you hear people asking the question:
Why did you become a teacher if you don't like kids? Why did you become a librarian if you don't like helping people? Why did you become a nurse if you have the mentality of a high school bully? Why did you become a therapist if you don't like to listen? Why did you become a social worker if you're just going to gate keep? Why did you become a public defender if you aren't even trying to defend people who can't afford their own lawyer?
And the answer is that none of those people were like that when they took this job. They loved children. They wanted to help people. They cared about strangers. They wanted to listen. They wanted to fight the system. They wanted to defend the innocent. Their professional awe pushed them to go above and beyond helping their people for year after year and to take career paths that paid less and were harder because it would feel good to do good in the world.
But the system is broken and it broken them too. Unions help a little, at least you get paid more, at least you get more time off; but what's needed most is systemic change. What's needed most is outside the scope of your job. In fact, often, every person in one of these named jobs thinks about somebody else I named as the person they really need to help them. This child needs therapy, this client needs medical attention, this patient needs medicaid, this client needs to learn how to read, this client needed a better education. So they refer people around in circles through all these professionals and none of them really feel like they can help either, because they all work in broken institutions that can't provide the service that's really needed.
and the clients ask: "who is it that's going to help me? they told me you would help me but you're saying you can't?" And they become understandably frustrated, and they take that frustration out on the worker who is trying to help, but can't help, and it just further fuels the burnout.
And the change that's needed ultimately is political. Public housing, public health insurance, public schools funding restructuring so that poor neighborhoods get as much money as rich neighborhoods, police abolition, etc.
And the kicker? Very often, these people are classified as civil servants, and local laws forbid them from getting politically involved; and they're too burnt out to put more work into fixing things outside of their job anyway. Their empathy and compassion and passion is completely depleted. They spend all day helping people, isn't that enough?
So is it really "quiet quitting" when these people give up? Or is it just a symptom of systemic failure on the part of the government and the capitalist economic system.
