r/antiwork

Only Slate Plus members can gift Slate stories. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. Only Slate Plus members can gift Slate stories. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. A record 4.4 million Americans quit their jobs in September , accounting for 3 percent of the workforce. That’s the highest quit rate since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started keeping track in 2000 and the latest sign that the “Great Resignation” is not slowing down. The past two years have pushed many people to re-evaluate how they spend their days, especially in a U.S. work culture long marked by its long hours, sparse vacation days, and stingy benefits compared with what workers enjoy in other developed countries. Even those lucky enough to work from home are burning out. It’s no wonder then that people telling their bosses to “take this job and shove it” have become aspirational heroes, as evidenced by the sudden ubiquity of the viral resignation text. The main source of these messages is the r/antiwork forum on Reddit, a magnet for the overworked and underappreciated employees of America. Screenshots of people quitting their jobs over text have taken over the internet in recent weeks, with pieces in the New York Times , Vice , and elsewhere lauding the subreddit’s ethos of rejecting drudgery. All this sudden attention has come as a surprise to the moderators, who insist the community is not just about hating your boss but also working toward a future without bosses, period. “Unfortunately, it’s happening too much,” said Doreen Ford, a founding moderator of the subreddit, who said she was forced to restrict resignation texts to Sundays so they don’t crowd out everything else. “I mean, antiwork isn’t just telling your boss to go fuck off.” Ford has been running r/antiwork for seven years after starting it with a friend who later dropped out. Other moderators have since joined the team, but she remains the main force behind the subreddit and said she was astonished by how quickly it grew at the onset of the pandemic. As workplaces floundered with remote work arrangements or failed to enforce mask mandates and social distancing, more and more people turned to the subreddit as a place to vent their frustrations. Ford—who also uses the online pseudonym Doreen Cleyre, a nod to the legendary American anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre —worked a series of “miserable” retail jobs for a decade and said she fully understands how soul-crushing most work can be. Now 30, she pays the bills as a dog walker and dog sitter in Boston, which she said is much better for her mental health than working with people. She also said the name of the subreddit is quite intentional: Those who have built it into the thriving community it is today don’t just want to improve working conditions, they want to fundamentally change the system so people have the ability to work less, or not at all. As r/antiwork has grown, many longstanding members of the subreddit have complained loudly about recent recruits who seem not to appreciate the larger ideological project. “The subreddit is antiwork, not reformwork. We’re not liberals, a capitalist ideology. We’re leftists, anti-capitalists, and we want to abolish all work,” reads a representative post . Ford said despite that tension, the antiwork movement is a big tent, and some of the most rewarding moments come from new people finding out through the subreddit that they can ask for raises, say no to unreasonable requests, or simply walk away. One of the most popular posts from the past month is an announcement from someone about their decision to focus on woodworking rather than spend more time at a dead-end job. Of course, there’s also the vicarious thrill of seeing people sticking it to The Man in whatever way possible, like a recent post by someone describing how they automated a data entry job and collected pay checks for five years without lifting a finger. There is no way to verify how many of the stor