Shadowing Practice: Why QUIET QUITTING is the BEST THING GEN Z ever Did - Learn English Speaking with Video

Let me give you two scenarios.

In scenario one, you have Tom.

Now, Tom has worked at a company for 10 years now, and he's been nothing but loyal and hardworking.

He comes in 30 minutes early and he leaves an hour late.

He doesn't just get his work done, he helps his team out and he gets a little bit extra done to help his boss.

He's been one of the most productive employees for his company for a decade now.

now Tom the last four years he's been really trying to push himself to prove

that he's management material in this company the extra hour he's

staying late he's not being paid for the 30 minutes early

he's coming in he's not being paid for he's going above

and beyond and hustling trying to prove that he's an asset to his company

and Tom's been given raises he's given 5% raises

and he's given a pat on the back every every two years now just last year Tom's manager announced

that he was going to be retiring

and for the last year Tom has really been hoping

that he would get that promotion but what happened is

when Tom's manager quit the owner of the company brought in

a manager from outside from a different company to come manage

here Tom had given 10 years of his life to a

company coming in early leaving late only to find out that he wasn't getting this promotion to management.

Now in scenario two we have Tim.

Tim is also a good worker but he wouldn't consider himself to be the hardest working person in the office.

Someday Tim comes in early and leaves late

but for the most part he does what he's supposed to do and he comes in on time and leaves on time.

Now Tim he likes to keep things moving so he switches jobs every two years.

He doesn't want too much repetition in his life he wants to constantly be evolving and changing.

Now Tim has never gone for a management position before in a company, but on his last job switch, he was able to get into a management position with his long work history.

Every two years when Tim switches jobs, he gets a significant pay bump, typically about 10% every two years.

And now that Tim is in his newest job as a manager, he got a significant pay boost that he wasn't even expecting.

So how much effort do you put into work?

Because right now the phrase quiet quitting is exploding on social media.

That's right, TikTok videos with millions of views urge you to do your job, but don't let it take over your life.

Basically, you are not really quitting your job.

You're just doing exactly what's in the job description.

Quiet quitting is just doing the job you were hired to do within the schedule you've been given to do it.

It's everything that goes against what we've been taught.

If you're a quiet quitter, you're a loser.

You're un-American.

Quiet quitting is a trend that started on TikTok and quickly took over the internet.

Quiet quitting in its simplest terms refers to meeting the minimum requirements of your job and not going beyond that.

You're checking all of the boxes in your job description, but you're not going that extra mile.

You're working your 40 hours a week, but not a minute more.

People have also referred to quiet quitting as coasting, acting your wage, or just working.

Yeah, that's right.

People are quiet quitting.

They're just going to their jobs

and then just doing the job from from nine to five

and then and then

and then hold up that's just working that's work you're like

that's work as you can imagine this has really served to

further the divide between business leaders in the working class the

working class has essentially taken a step back from a lot of the pressures

and expectations that have historically mostly benefited companies and their leadership

when you look at the lines being drawn it's clear that quiet quitting isn't a left-right issue or even a geographic issue.

Quiet quitting is a class issue and to a lesser extent, a generational issue.

Now, the vast majority of people that support quiet quitting tend to be people that work nine to fives, they have a boss, and they don't have a big voice in their company.

And typically, the people that oppose quiet quitting are the executives, management companies, basically people that need employees to work under them.

Now, what I've seen anecdotally is there tends to be a

broad amount of support between generations for the idea of quiet quitting.

Typically, if you're working class or you were working class at some point in your life, you have some level of empathy with quiet quitters and basically the frustrations that they're talking about.

But what you do see is when there are those opponents or those outspoken people against quiet quitting, they do tend to skew a little bit older.

Now, the fact that this movement started on TikTok

and it's predominantly happening in the tech industry leads me to I believe that it started with younger people, Gen Z and millennials.

Yes, there is broad support.

We're seeing support from older people that do agree with quiet quitting, but it seems to me like this movement really just started with the kids saying the quiet part out loud.

It seems like for the first time, young adults are really standing up and saying, hey, we have a problem here.

And a lot of older adults that have been through it are saying, yeah, we recognize this problem.

We've seen it too.

Now, I don't think it's a coincidence that quiet quitting really picked up after COVID and after the great resignation.

I can only speak to my own experiences working at a restaurant, but after COVID hit, I saw a lot of my best coworkers leave

and suddenly the expectations just kept getting bigger

and bigger on remaining staff to the point where you would have one person doing what used to be two people's jobs.

And it's not like our pay magically increased either.

We were getting paid pretty much the same, but we were expected to do twice the work.

Now, in a normal economy, an increased workload alone is enough to make people burn out.

But when you combine that with no increases in pay, what you have is you have more people that would start to quit because they're looking at it going, I'm doing twice the work for the same amount of pay.

As more people would quit, the problem would only get worse

and it turned into this downward spiral where you had less and less people doing more and more and more.

Now, I've heard a lot of older people and heads of companies refer to quiet quitters as lazy.

And to a degree, I do understand and appreciate that perspective.

I don't think it's a great thing if broad swaths of people are just mentally checking out from their jobs.

But you have to understand and appreciate the perspective of quiet quitters.

The working class has been pushed to its absolute limit for decades now, and nobody's done a thing about it.

And in my view, I think that quiet quitting is just the natural progression of

that pain that the working class has been feeling for decades now.

I think that people are sort of using it as a defense mechanism, a way to stay sane, or a way to try and figure out how to prosper and how to survive in today's world.

And if you don't believe me on that, then let me show you this.

Since the end of the baby boomer generation, there have been three fundamental shifts that have changed America and flipped labor upside down.

First, the world or society has changed.

Second, companies and their leadership have changed.

And third, technology has changed.

So let's look at the first one of those.

The reality of being working class today is significantly different than it was even in the early 2000s.

Let's take a look at median home prices, for example.

Median home prices looked fairly reasonable in the U.S through the early 2000s,

but after about 2003, you saw this huge spike where prices started to skyrocket.

And yes, I get that houses have always been expensive, but this chart doesn't even tell the full story.

Let's take a look at how home prices have competed against inflation.

In 1963, the median US home price was $17,800.

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Let's put that number into an inflation calculator

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and see hypothetically what home prices should look like in 2022 if they were growing in line with inflation.

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So in 2022, if housing prices had grown in line with inflation, the median housing price should be $159,000.

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But when you look at what the median house price in America actually is, it's $440,000.

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What you're seeing is houses are getting way more expensive, faster than inflation is going up.

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From the 1960s through the early 2000s, home prices were about four to five times more than median income.

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Meaning if you made about $40,000 a year, you would expect your house to cost about $160,000 a year.

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In 2022 though, home prices are about eight times the median income, meaning a house used to be about four times more than what your salary was.

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And now it's looking like about eight times.

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And the numbers keep going up.

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We know the CPI just keeps going up right now in 2022.

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So it's looking like this is only going to get worse.

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Now, what does this have to do with quiet quitting?

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Well, for the first time in modern US history, homeownership is looking like it's out of the reach of tons of young people, which when you look at that,

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that means it's getting harder and harder for people to live the ordinary American life over time.

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Now, this next part might really get me killed, but I'm going to say it anyways, because I think this is why it's happening at a macro scale, and I think this is valuable information to share.

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But look at this graph of currency in circulation.

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This is how many dollars have been printed or added into our economy over time.

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If we look at the money printed since 1965 and compare it with median home prices, these graphs are almost identical.

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The more money the government prints, the more expensive homes get.

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But here's the thing, it's not the government printing dollars and adding money into our economy.

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They're partially to blame for it.

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But it's also the Federal Reserve, which is an institution that's actually not even part of our government.

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And it's not overseen by standard people like us.

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But once again, what does this have to do with quiet quitting?

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Well, the working class is being exploited by the elites in our government and the Federal Reserve, and nobody's talking about it.

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We're being sold out and turned into wage slaves so that our leadership can extract our wealth of the working class.

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They have the ultimate leverage over us because they get to print the money that we need to use.

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So they can make our life more difficult by stealing our income, time, and labor by just printing more money while keeping us working.

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And then we're the ones that are called lazy

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when we have a problem with this system and we want to step back from it.

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I say all of that to say

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that the first enemy of the working class is the government and their henchmen at the Federal Reserve.

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These people are making our lives more difficult, making it so that we have to work harder

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and longer to afford the basic stuff that our parents were able to get at younger ages.

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That doesn't mean that companies are blameless in this, though.

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I think corporate failures are actually probably a bigger cause in quiet quitting than the government.

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You hear stories about what companies were like during our grandparents' generation.

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They got things like pensions, good benefits, you know, you could get a job at 20 and support a family.

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that's not a thing anymore.

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There's not that same level of loyalty that existed back then.

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We're just not seeing it now.

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And yes, there are a ton of stories in the past from managers, you know, being dicks, being bad people.

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But typically what you saw from the top down in a company is

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that they actually cared for their employee to some degree.

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And they were trying to build relationships with people.

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You know, that's why you hear stories about people would get gold watches after working at a company for 40 years.

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That's why, again, you hear about pensions

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or you'd hear about all of these different employee benefit programs

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and employee appreciation events that a lot of companies just don't do now.

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So you have to look at that and say, if companies are getting more transactional with their employees, how can you expect employees not to get more transactional with their employers?

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If you don't care about building a relationship with me and you're here to make money off my back, then that's fine.

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I'll be here to make money off your back.

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And I think that's the shift that you're seeing in a lot of people.

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You can't be loyal to somebody that's not loyal to you for forever.

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And I think you see that general lack of loyalty at the macro level and at the micro level.

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Employees just aren't rewarded for staying at companies anymore.

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If you look at the data, people who switch jobs every couple years

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end up making way more money than people who stay with companies for seven years or longer.

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There's literally monetary incentive to hop between companies, hop between jobs, because you'll make more money.

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If you stay with a company, they're not going to pay you more to match that.

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And don't tell me that companies can't afford to pay more, because when you look at corporate profits versus employee compensation over time, companies have been screwing us for the last 20 years.

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Corporate profits have just gone up and up, whereas our compensation, our wages, have mostly stayed stagnant for the last 20 years.

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This is hard evidence that there's a growing disparity between what companies are making and what the working class is being paid.

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And I think this is even more frustrating when you compare it with the gap between workplace productivity and employee pay.

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The United States is getting more and more efficient.

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We're producing more and more or workplaces are more productive, but the working class is basically staying stagnant.

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We're not getting paid more to reflect that.

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So what does that have to do with quiet quitting?

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You look at it and you have to say all of the odds are stacked against young people today joining the workforce.

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Can we really expect them to work harder than ever when they're getting less and less for their labor every year?

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But even with all of the financial obstacles that I've shown you, I think one of the biggest problems in corporate America that's really driving a lot of this quiet quitting

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is poor leadership style.

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It starts at the top, but you have a ton of business owners nowadays that have no real empathy, understanding, or appreciation for what it's like to be working class in today's world.

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Take Kevin O'Leary, for example.

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This guy is the prime example of out-of-touch, greedy corporate leadership.

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This guy literally said that quiet quitting is worse than COVID.

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If you walk in your interview and say, I only work from nine to five, and then I stop working, I can't wait to get you into my competitor.

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Help me find these people.

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This is like a virus.

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This is worse than COVID.

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He's saying that people working from 9 to 5 and doing the bare minimum is worse than COVID, a virus which killed millions of people across the world.

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And it's not just Kevin O'Leary that feels this way.

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It's a lot of higher up leaders and companies.

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And the problem is a lot of this falls down, trickles down into the lower level management who then has disdain

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for their workforce they don't know how to treat people right because coming from the top down it's an abusive structure.

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A little empathy, humility and understanding would go a long way for a lot of these companies

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that are struggling with quiet quitters.

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If you want more out of your workforce you have to build those relationships with people.

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The working class is getting screwed in a hundred ways than it never was before

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and then you still have CEOs

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that have the ego to say shit like you're lazy

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if you only work nine to five you don't work free hours

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and then you want to go to your kid's soccer game after work.

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People that shut down their laptop at five want that balance in life, want to go to the soccer game, nine to five only.

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They don't work for me.

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They don't work for me.

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They don't work for me.

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For people like this, I've got news.

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There are two job openings for every one unemployed person in America today.

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This economy is different than the economy that you've been running in, operating in for the last 40, 50, 60 years.

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Your management style, your leadership style is going to have to change if you want to stay competitive.

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There are more job openings than there are people to work those job openings, which means you're going to have to get more competitive about how you're getting people to work for you.

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And throwing money at this isn't going to fix the issue.

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The more money you throw at the problem, the more you're going to need to throw at it in the future.

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People get accustomed to things like hiring ads.

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You tap into areas, you burn through their workforce.

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Now you need more people from outside workforces.

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Again, you have to pay more money in advertising and acquisition costs.

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That's not sustainable for businesses.

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The companies that are going to really succeed in this next couple of decades

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are going to be companies that give their employees a real sense of purpose, a sense of community at work.

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The feeling that I'm not here just being taken advantage of in some transactional trade.

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I'm here to help somebody.

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I'm here to do something bigger than me.

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And I love the people that I work for.

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Young people are different.

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Our circumstances are different.

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I've outlined it.

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You can't just be a slave driver and expect young people like me to want to come and work for you.

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We go, if we're screwed either way, I might as well be screwed and work for somebody that I enjoy, do some sort of work that fulfills me or that I'm happy to help with.

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And as I started putting this video together, an article came out saying that the Federal Reserve is trying to tighten the labor market.

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What that means is the Federal Reserve is literally trying to kill a lot of these job openings

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so that employers don't have to compete so hard, don't have to pay more, don't have to come up with all these great ideas to get new employees.

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I told you guys, these people aren't your friends.

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As soon as the working class has the upper hand, You have the Federal Reserve going to work, trying to weaken us, trying to decrease our bargaining power so that we have to take these jobs.

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It's not going to work long term, though.

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And that's because technology also changed the game for us.

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Gary Vee has talked about this a lot, but young people, we're aware of the options that we have.

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The amount of options 17, 19, 22-year-olds have going into the world, and they're aware of it,

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of how easy it is to make $60,000 a year flipping on eBay, making content on TikTok there are

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so many more options than what we grew up with

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if you're over 35 here gen z grew up with the internet we know

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that we can make 40 50k a year flipping stuff i know

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that i can go private label product right now and make 40k

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if i need to i know that

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if i keep grinding on social media for the next couple

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the next three years like i've been doing right now i'll be making six figures

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or more if you're an employer your measly 40k a year is not going to keep people working for you

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if they hate what they do and they hate working for you.

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We know that we have options and it really doesn't matter if the federal government

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weaponizes the Federal Reserve to tighten the job market because we're living through the beginning of the second renaissance.

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The internet is allowing more people to make money online than we ever would have thought possibly even just 10 years ago.

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Companies are gonna have to get more strategic

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with how they keep their employees and how they give people a sense of purpose because young people today, the working class, we have more options than the working class ever had in the past.

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And it's also because of the internet

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that we even saw this movement pop up on tiktok You saw people nationwide starting a movement saying that hey, we're dealing with the same problem That to me tells me

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that the future of unions is going to be digital That's real bargaining power too

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If you have people across state lines across city lines across

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country lines saying the same things having the same demand That's a real bargaining power

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that we've never seen before And even with all of that, I do have to be honest and say that technology is a double-edged sword for labor because when I mentioned workplace productivity, how it keeps going up and up and up,

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but wages are mostly staying stagnant, this is partially due to automation.

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As technology gets more and more advanced, CEOs are gonna be able to replace more and more labor with machines that do what people used to do.

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This is gonna mean that they don't have to pay out as much.

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They're able to make more profit, retain more profit because machines will work for cheaper than humans will.

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Whether that's right or wrong, that's the reality of it and that's the world that we're moving into.

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So I say all of this to say, don't let the elites shame you and don't let your grandparents generation shame you either.

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The working class today is coming up in a significantly different world than past generations did.

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I think quiet quitting is allowing a lot of the working

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class to stay sane with a lot of the insane stuff going on around us.

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And I think there are some ambitious people such as myself that are using this opportunity to work two jobs, to work three jobs, or maybe they're checking out a little bit,

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they're checking out at five from their main job so that that they can go and work on a side hustle, something that is going to be their escape plan.

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The fact of the matter is working one nine to five

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in today's world is not going to buy you a house for most people.

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So if it's not going to buy you a house or let you live, how can you expect people to be all invested for more than eight hours a day into your office job

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if that's not going to allow them to even own a home?

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As long as you meet the requirements of your job, you're not a bad worker.

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You're an okay worker.

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And I think as crazy as this world has gotten, being an okay worker at your day job might be the reason that you're able to get through the storm.

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That might be the reason that you still have the mental bandwidth to go out

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and start the company that makes money for your family and allows you to buy a house for your kids.

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Let's just stop and be honest for a second about the fact that if you're working class, if you're a young person today, the odds are stacked against us,

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more so than our parents' generation or even our grandparents' generation.

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And the wealthy people, the owners of these companies, they want you to keep working more and more.

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They want you to keep working harder and harder so that they can make the lion's share of whatever money you generate.

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Your grandparents' generation, they want you to keep working harder and harder.

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They don't want you to be lazy because that's what they value.

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But the world today is significantly different than the world that they inherited.

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I think now more than ever, it's important to work smarter rather than harder.

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And if these companies want to use you, then it's time to use them back.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing Practice: Why QUIET QUITTING is the BEST THING GEN Z ever Did - Learn English Speaking with Video

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