Do you fantasise extensively about quitting your job? Promotion and career growth feeling like a distant dream? Emails piling up so high that inbox zero sounds like a fantasy? Succumbing to a wave of depression every time you set foot in the office?
You may be ‘quiet cracking’. It’s the hot new employment trend that has employees feeling distinctly not cool. While also an under-the-radar issue, in many ways it’s the polar opposite of the old craze for ‘quiet quitting’.
Quiet quitting involved agency. It was a mood and a movement amongst workers rebelling against the demands of jobs at companies that didn’t hold up their end of the bargain in terms of progression, pay and security. A silent rebellion of refusing to take on anything outside your job description, taking your full hour at lunch and logging out on the dot. The hero of the moment was the ‘Lazy Girl’, women who sought out well-paid jobs that didn’t take up too much of their time and energy.
Then there was ‘loud quitting’ — resignations with flair and panache that erupted when people reached the end of their rope. Even if people didn’t shout about it, The Great Resignation during the pandemic years saw people handing in their notice and re-evaluating their careers. But in 2025, no one with a crumb of financial responsibility would walk out of even a half-decent gig. Have you seen the job market out there?
Far better to stay in the job you have, even if that means silently cracking up at your desk
Business leaders’ enthusiastic adoption of AI has eaten up swathes of positions, while any vacancy that goes up on LinkedIn has over a hundred applications within an hour of getting posted — with most of those CVs and cover letters likely written by AI, too. Interview processes that seem designed to crush the soul with endless rounds and tasks only to end in a form rejection email. Then there’s the ghost jobs, phantasms spewed into the ether by corporations trying to conjure up the idea they’re growing and hiring but will only waste your time and energy.
Far better to stay in the job you have, even if that means silently cracking up at your desk. Quiet cracking was coined by American training company Talent LMS, who surveyed 1,000 workers across US industries and discovered “a persistent feeling of workplace unhappiness that leads to disengagement, poor performance, and an increased desire to quit”. Except, given the tight job market, no one wants to risk quitting, quietly or otherwise.
Quiet cracking isn’t just another Gen Z trend. If anything, younger employees have demonstrated they have much better boundaries around their work/life balance than Millennials and Gen X. But everyone, regardless of where they are in their career, can’t help but feel uneasy in the current economic and political climate.
A lot of the unhappiness identified by Talent LMS centres on fears about employees futures at a company, with 38 per cent of survey responders worrying about economic uncertainty, 31 per cent stressed about their workloads, 27 per cent fretting over poor leadership and unclear direction, and 25 per cent freaking out about layoffs.
It’s hardly a conducive atmosphere to being a productive worker when you’re worried about not just keeping your job but the job even existing in the near future. And then if you survive the next round of redundancies, that means even more work piling up on your fractured plate. It’s basically burnout 2.0, all the stress of an unstable work environment with the added instability of the world around us.
Much like you would hug the face of a cliff if the other option meant freefall, people are holding on tight to the jobs they have
Quiet cracking goes hand-in-hand with another new buzzword: ‘job hugging’. Much like you would hug the face of a cliff if the other option meant freefall, people are holding on tight to the jobs they have. A white-knuckled grip to the grind has replaced any idea of job-hopping your way to a promotion and a better benefits package.
Alongside coining it, America has become patient zero for quiet cracking. Their tech companies are continuing to conduct big layoffs, and of course there were the huge cuts made to government jobs when Elon Musk and his DOGE crew were in full swing. Just last month, US President Donald Trump fired the head of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics for making him “look bad” with the latest figures from July that suggest their labour market is slowing.
The US is often a bellwether for our own economic and cultural trends, and things aren’t looking too rosy in Blighty. Concerning figures from the Office of National Statistics show unemployment growing and wage growth slowing. Job losses are rising, especially in hospitality and retail. Hiring intentions from British businesses have hit record lows.
As ominous cracks in our economic foundation ring out, workers are suffering in silence. Obviously, this is terrible for productivity. It’s hard to get work done if you’re overwhelmed by your workload, grouchy about feeling undervalued, and/or spending your time haunting the jobs boards.
A workforce that is quiet cracking will only undermine our economic foundations further. But few people at the top seem to be noticing. Labour is blathering on about getting a lazy country into more work, when most people are desperate to stay in the work they have in order to survive the cost-of-living crisis.
I was heartened to see Mark Price, former Waitrose boss, come out to bat for workers’ rights to be happy the other week. “If people are happy in their jobs,” he said, “they don’t leave, you retain knowledge, you have lower levels of sick absence, all of which leads to more profitable and more effective organisations.” His solutions are simple: pay people fairly, make them feel valued, and give them flexibility to run their lives outside of work.
All great points that businesses should be rushing to implement to secure their long-term futures. But unless the wider economy and the job market picks up, there’s only so much individual companies can do to paper over the cracks.
India Block is a columnist at The London Standard
