[00:00:00] Welcome back to Corporate Fuckery, stories of Survival, psychological Warfare, and choosing what's best for you. I'm Lauren DeGolia certified success coach, subconscious strategist, astrologer technologist, and former corporate insider turned truthteller. Today we're tackling a buzzword that refuses to die.
Quiet, quitting. But here's the truth. If you're a high achiever, you're not quietly quitting. You're actually. Quietly cracking. The internet wants you to believe that quiet quitting is rebellion. Employees finally saying no to hustle culture and doing only what's required.
But if you're wired like me, driven, ambitious, conditioned to equate performance with worth, you're actually not doing less. You're just layering resentment on top of the same workload, which means you suffer more because for high achievers, quiet, quitting isn't about working less.
It's about working the same [00:01:00] while silently, seething and news flash. That's not a boundary. That's camouflage. Quiet quitting is often a sign. You've outgrown your role, but instead of addressing that truth, you get caught in one of these slippery slopes.
Number one, doing just enough to get a good performance review. Number two, prioritizing survival work while tamping down emotions like a game of whack-a-mole. Or number three, feeling guilty about what you're not doing and mad that you're in this situation in the first place.
At companies like Microsoft, where growth mindset is a core value. The toll is brutal because the demand for work doesn't slow. It actually increases. So you're stuck navigating chaos, juggling priorities, leaving work undone, and then gaslighting yourself for not being enough. And here's the kicker. Quiet quitting isn't just happening in cubicles.
It shows up everywhere, individual [00:02:00] contributors, VPs and even CEOs. So this isn't about job title, it's about alignment. Quiet, quitting might look like a strategy, but in reality, it's resentment in a nicer outfit. And now there's this new buzzword. Have you heard of it?
It's called Quiet Cracking Business Insider defines it as being unhappy at work, but feeling unable to leave workers. Describe it like this. I just go in every day and try really hard not to break by lunchtime. Another one cries on her commute to work or in the bathroom between meetings. Someone else reports snacking all day just to manage their anxiety
Or hyper fixating on bad memories or experiences both inside and out of work. And lastly, feeling stuck because the paycheck feels safer than the unknown. In the Business Insider Survey, 154 out of 163 people said they had experienced quiet [00:03:00] cracking. That's 95% of respondents almost.
Everyone. So this isn't rebellion. It's actually collapse. And the core of it is it's your nervous system breaking down under pressure while trying to look polished on the outside. And for women especially, it often gets masked as being reliable or team oriented.
You know the one that can always get stuff done, but the truth is it's over functioning at your own expense. Here's the thing. You can probably see yourself in all of those stories. One woman described driving to work every morning and crying in her car before walking in to start the day. She held it together for her coworkers, but on the inside she was unraveling.
That's quiet cracking, and if I'm honest, I have almost two decades of quiet quitting attempts and quiet cracking survival stories. I spent every day at my desk at Nordstrom fantasizing about quitting my job, [00:04:00] letting my inbox reach critical capacity, and calling it busy, swearing to God that I was going to do the minimum, and people would feel the impact of my disengagement until I finally cracked.
See episode two in season one for more on that. But here's the secret that I learned in that season and in the one that has followed. Quiet, quitting is actually an invitation to learn how to regulate your nervous system because it manifests from a unique intersection between Maslow's hierarchy of needs and your quest for success.
The thing is your reptile brain wants to keep you safe. Pay the bills, keep the lights on, but your soul is suffocating, feeling unseen, unappreciated, unaligned, and it's nearly impossible to logically reconcile those layers. That's why I do the work I do at the subconscious level because worthiness, boundaries and validation aren't solved by another spreadsheet or [00:05:00] performance review.
They're rooted in identity and if you find yourself somewhere between quiet, quitting and quiet cracking, it likely feels that you only have two options to stay miserable or give up everything.
That's the facade, that's the trap. That is corporate fuckery. We've talked a lot in today's episode about the toll on you personally, and you're not crazy. It's completely real. But what about the impact to your reputation, your team, and your culture when you're checked out? People notice even if you think you're covering it well. Colleagues feel the lack of energy managers start questioning your engagement team dynamic shift. One person just doing enough creates permission for others to follow or resentment from those still overfunctioning.
Kevin Ford, one of the workers in the Business Insider article admitted. My work performance dropped.
[00:06:00] This isn't good for my employer and it's not good for me. And here's the hard truth. Survival mode doesn't stabilize productivity. It actually erodes it. Because you spend more time managing guilt and resentment than doing the work, you're more reactive instead of proactive, and your creativity and innovation flatline because your brain is stuck in protection mode.
And for leaders, the ripple effect is even bigger. When high performers check out, trust erodes. If she doesn't care, why should I quiet? Quitting isn't laziness. It's misalignment and quiet. Cracking is even more dangerous because high achievers look like they're holding it together, but underneath they're eroding even faster.
So what do you do if you find yourself in this situation? First of all, I invite you to consider that quiet, quitting or cracking isn't a problem to fix. Think of them as signals and ask yourself one or all of these five questions to help [00:07:00] evaluate where you are and what you need. Number one, identity check.
Has my job become such a core part of my identity that it feels like losing myself to even imagine shifting it? What would it look like if my job was something I do instead of who I am? Number two, alignment. Check. If I'm honest, does this role still serve me or am I clinging onto it because change feels too scary or the market feels too uncertain? Number three, capacity check. Have I felt this way before in my career? And if so, what would upgrading my nervous system and emotional toolkit make possible, not just now, but for my future self?
Number four, mental load check. How much energy am I spending managing guilt resentment or whack-a-mole emotions compared to the actual work itself? What is the real cost of carrying this load? And number five, future vision check. If nothing changes in the next six to 12 [00:08:00] months, how will that impact my peace, my relationship, and my long-term goals?
And what would become possible if I didn't make a change? And just for funs a bonus micro tool. The next time you catch yourself thinking, I just need to get through the day or week pause and ask yourself, what would make today feel a little bit more peaceful even while I do my work? That small shift tells your nervous system.
It has options, and that's where the real change begins. Again, these aren't prescriptions, they're invitations, and the sooner you stop ignoring them. The sooner you stop suffering in silence, quiet, quitting, and quiet. Cracking aren't personal failures. They're natural byproducts of a system that was never designed with your humanity in mind, but waiting for the system to change will keep you cracked.
The opportunity isn't just swapping jobs or waiting for leadership to suddenly get it. It's learning to navigate your own [00:09:00] internal dialogue to decide how you regulate, how you prioritize, and how you define what truly matters to you. Because here's the truth. Quiet quitting and quiet cracking doesn't mean you're weak. They mean you're ready. Ready for alignment, ready for clarity. Ready for peace that isn't dependent on your next performance review. That's how you reclaim your power in a system that was never built for you because the cost of staying cracked isn't just your career, it's your peace.
It's your presence, it's your power, but the opportunity is everything.
And that opportunity, it changes your life, it changes your legacy, it changes this system, and it starts to change the whole damn universe. And we are just getting started.
