How to Act Your Wage, Quiet Quit, According to Millennials Who Did It

• Workers quietly quit and act on their wages by doing their job as written – and no more.
• Two workers who have quietly quit and traded their wages said it’s about setting boundaries.
• It’s also crucial to exercise control at work where you can and let it work for you.

A boss tries to give her co-worker Veronica a stack of papers to work on overnight.

“With all due respect, Susan, I’d rather spend time with my family,” Veronica replies. She then declines a 6:30 p.m. Zoom meeting; It’s outside of their working hours.

Veronica and Susan are not real. They’re characters played by 30-year-old content creator Sarai Soto, whose TikToks about quitting quietly, acting on your wages and enforcing boundaries at work have garnered millions of likes and views.

“People really feel seen, they feel heard, they feel like someone cares about them,” Soto told Insider. “I can’t tell you how many messages I get from people saying, okay, I know your content is funny and offers that comedic relief, but I’m telling you, although it’s an exaggeration, I’ve been through the exact same thing have scenarios.”

Soto himself is no stranger to quietly quitting, the act of doing his job and nothing more. She’s done it before to keep her sanity at a “horrible job” she was unhappy at, which she ended up leaving.

It’s also become a fundamental part of her success on TikTok. When Soto got into content creation, workplace videos were the ones that went viral. She discovered that there was an audience of people who felt stuck at work, unable to stop, and longing for the scenarios she plays out.

Thus, Soto’s characters and other workers quietly quit, or as some workers have renamed it, “barter their wages.”

Try as hard as your salary dictates

The trends of quitting quietly and acting on your pay have set the internet on fire, with managers threatening that quitters could be first when layoffs hit.

But the retreat to quiet surrender reveals more about managers than workers—it shows they’ve always expected overwork. The employees no longer agree to this, especially since prices are rising, wages are not keeping up and, moreover, it just means more work. This is where your salary comes into play.

“If a company pays you, say, minimum wage, you’re going to put in minimal effort,” Soto said. “If you trade your wages, it means the amount of work you put in reflects the amount you get paid. So you’re not going to go above and beyond and do two people’s work three people and do all that extra work when you really aren’t even making a viable wage.

Soto said that quitting quietly doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing a poor job or are no longer invested in your work.

“It just means when you’re feeling burned out, you go to work and you set those boundaries,” she said.

Make changes to your environment that you can control

For Billy, a mid-30s warehouse worker in Ireland, it’s all about making work work for you. While working his night shifts, Billy didn’t want to keep his mind idle – and substituted listening to ambient radio for listening to audiobooks. In just four weeks he worked through Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital”.

“The only thing I did was change what was on the radio. It’s the only thing I did,” said Billy, whose last name is known to Insiders but is being kept private for privacy reasons. “There was no material change. I didn’t work more or less otherwise.”

That kind of little thing — taking control of something you can affect at work — is key, Billy said. They don’t have to be audio books; Maybe you’re just changing the TV channel at the bar you work at.

“When you’re taken to a job, you’re put in a box. It’s someone else’s box,” Billy said.

But even so, “there are ways we can control our jobs,” he said, even if they’re small. And those victories of making work work for you — and trading your wages — can lead to something even greater.

“Staff have a lot of power to negotiate at the moment. You have a choice with the Big Resignation,” Soto said. “So I’m hoping that people will just keep standing up and raising awareness about it.”