Meet the workers who 'acted their wage' at their 'silly little jobs' and made life their 9-to-5 this year
Juliana Kaplan
- The pandemic and post-vaccine era have led to a massive rethink of work for Americans.
- Some are quiet quitting, or acting their wage, and others are recontextualizing their jobs.
For workers, the past two years have been a whirlwind — and a fundamental reexamining of what work means.
And 2022, in particular, has been marked by several workplace trends that demonstrate how people are feeling about their jobs. "Quiet quitting," "acting your wage," having a "silly little job," and treating your personal life as a full-time job fascinated Insider readers.
It goes back to 2020, when the low-wage work that became increasingly dominant in the wake of the Great Recession was suddenly rebranded. The in-person workers who kept grocery stores and warehouses running were "essential" "heroes." But as the pandemic dragged on, meager pay increases didn't.
At the same time, laid-off workers — some of whom saw work as intrinsic to their own identities — were flung out of the workplace. Expanded unemployment benefits meant that some jobless Americans received higher and more steady incomes than they ever had before.
Once vaccines became widely available, Americans were ready for a rethink of work, even if the workplace wasn't ready for them. The result over the past year and a half has been workers quitting at near-record rates, unionizing across previously untouched industries, and redefining the role work plays in their lives.
Insider has spoken to Americans as they rethink work, grapple with structural barriers to doing better, and push for better. All of their perspectives — from those acting their wage to younger workers shaking up workplace norms – show an appetite for a workplace changed by and for workers.
Some workers are 'acting their wage'
Sarai Soto's TikTok skits on the workplace have become wildly popular. The 30-year-old content creator portrays characters pushing back on overbearing workplaces by "quiet quitting," or acting their wage. It's like an instruction manual for workers looking to establish better and firmer boundaries — and one that clearly resonates.
"I can't tell you how many messages I receive of people being like, okay, I know your content is funny and provides this comedic relief, but I'm telling you, although it's exaggerated, I've been through those exact same scenarios," Soto told Insider.
Meanwhile, Billy, a warehouse worker in Ireland, has enacted his own version of acting his wage: He makes work work for him. One way he did that was through listening to the entirety of "Das Kapital" as an audiobook, instead of just listening to music during work.
The youngest workers see their lives as a full-time job
Since joining the workforce, Gen Z's brought their own values — including a strict work-life balance — to an already pandemic-disrupted economy.
Their resistance to the norms of work aren't necessarily new; millennials have been trying to push beyond cushy workplace perks for better balance, and so have their predecessors. This time, though, popular sentiment seems to be backing Gen Z up. It left some older workers happily jealous.
"Older generations, if they could wrap their mind around it, they would be able to be a lot more fulfilled and be able to have hobbies and do different things," Avery Monday, a 21-year-old influencer-marketing manager told Insider. "My hope is for them one day to also take part in that and enjoy it, because every generation deserves a good work life balance."
Read more: Gen Z treats life as a full-time job and work as a side gig. Other generations are jealous.
Jobs aren't your whole world anymore — they're silly and little now
Americans have always had a lot to deal with outside of work, and those pressures have only intensified over the last few years. The pandemic added a new challenge: Simply surviving. The overlapping crises of the pandemic, war, and everything getting more expensive has weighed heavily on workers.
The result has been a recontextualization of work, exemplified in the meme phrase "silly little job," which originated in 2020.
"Early pandemic, everything felt like silly little X, as the world was so out of control around us," Amanda Brennan, a meme librarian and senior director of trends at XX Artists, told Insider. "It's like, how do you do your silly little tasks when it feels life or death?"
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