{"id":150613,"date":"2025-08-16T13:41:12","date_gmt":"2025-08-16T13:41:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/150613\/"},"modified":"2025-08-16T13:41:12","modified_gmt":"2025-08-16T13:41:12","slug":"i-experienced-quiet-cracking-15-years-ago-before-it-was-a-buzzword","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/150613\/","title":{"rendered":"I Experienced ‘Quiet Cracking’ 15 Years Ago, Before It Was a Buzzword"},"content":{"rendered":"

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kevin Ford, a 56-year-old retiree who lives in Las Vegas. It’s been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n

I was in a middle management position. In the beginning, I loved it. I think that’s what happens with a lot of these people who are quietly cracking<\/a>: They love it at first, but some series of events leads to a misalignment.<\/p>\n

I had gotten my team to the point where they were doing good on their own. They had some issues, I got them running smoothly, and then I thought, “I don’t know if I’m providing value anymore.”<\/p>\n

As I was going through a concurrent MBA program, I was realizing there were a lot of other things in the business world that I also wanted to do, but there weren’t a lot of opportunities at the company.<\/p>\n

For quiet cracking to happen, two things have to be at play: There has to be a reason why you think you can’t leave the company, and there also has to be a point of dissatisfaction.<\/p>\n

There were many reasons why I felt I couldn’t leave.<\/p>\n

Some of them were financial. I think this is why it’s coming up again\u00a0\u2014\u00a0I bet it happens anytime when the job market gets tight<\/a>. People start feeling they can’t leave their jobs. We get ourselves into various levels of financial commitments and mortgages, and we start to feel trapped.<\/p>\n

The Great Recession<\/a> was in 2007. I started really hitting it maybe a year later, so the market wasn’t fully recovered. That played a part in it, certainly.<\/p>\n

Another part was that I was doing an MBA program, and I had some commitments to the job around paying.<\/p>\n

I also felt a fair amount of responsibility for the people who worked for me. One of the misalignments with my organization was that I had some different feelings on how people should be treated. I felt I had to stay to protect those people.<\/p>\n

Related stories<\/p>\n

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Whether I was successful in protecting them or not, I don’t know. But I did feel that pressure.<\/p>\n

\"Kevin<\/p>\n

Kevin Ford spent over 30 years working in information technology before he retired.<\/p>\n

Kevin Ford<\/p>\n

It starts eating at you. Day after day, you feel trapped there, and you start hyper-focusing on what’s going on at work and why it’s not going the way you need it to. I was thinking about it all the time and have flashbacks to these different events that weren’t happy at work.<\/p>\n

It’s extremely self-destructive behavior.<\/p>\n

Over time, it also started affecting my work performance, because you can’t live like that. It’s not good for the employer, and it’s not good for you.<\/p>\n

I finally left the organization, which took about a year and a half.<\/p>\n

Something that I learned at my MBA program was, they use the colloquial term “F You Money,” which is always having the financial wherewithal to be able to get yourself out of a bad situation. But we know that’s not a realistic expectation.<\/p>\n

If I had left early, it would’ve been much healthier in the long run. It was probably 10 years before I was really over it. It would’ve been a fairly significant cost to leave early, but it was nothing compared to the cost of staying in the situation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kevin Ford, a 56-year-old retiree who lives in Las…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":150614,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[64,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-150613","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-united-states","10":"tag-unitedstates","11":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115038734600866724","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150613\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}