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Many vaulted into the Iranian elite, becoming academics, actors, ambassadors and athletes. Urbanization began to take hold in this region a century ago, and over the years, the majority of the Bakhtiari have assimilated. She says she does not like the nomadic way of life but feels she has no choice but to accept and endure it.

They travel many hours on rough paths throughout the year, from pasture to pasture - and then there's the yearly 10-hour journey from their summer home to their winter home. That way, he can work for himself and buy his own gold watch.Enayat Asadi for NPR Fereshteh, 14, is photographed in the central Zagros mountains, where her tribe spends spring and summer.

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Deciding he wanted no part of that, Bouser opted out and got his real estate license as soon as he graduated. 'My favorite saying is 'the gold watch days are over,'' he said.īouser explained that whereas people used to work at a company for 40 or 50 years and retire with a pension and gold watch, now loyal workers just get a text from their boss informing them their pay is cut. The more Bouser thought about his experiences in the workforce, the more he realized that company loyalty felt like a liability. 'And at the end of it, you've just gotten nowhere.' 'The job was, basically, you drive for six hours a day in a circle,' he said. Still, the frustration and ennui workers are experiencing could lead to major changes, as it did for Bouser, who said all the time he spent driving the cars to the car wash, bringing them back, and renting them out now does seem meaningless. 'Once you've had that sort of Ecclesiastes moment of thinking everything is futile and pointless, how do you get people believing that hard work pays off again?' she said.Įcclesiastes is the book in the Old Testament that begins: 'Meaningless! Meaningless!. Productivity, then, may continue to decline. Looking toward a less-productive futureĮnnui can create a very bad cycle that is hard to turn around, said Pollak. The result has been two decades of economic stagnation. Japan, for example, has seen a years-long drop in productivity due to a population decline. economy will shrink, quality of life will go down, opportunities will dry up, and innovation and ideas will go elsewhere. Productivity is the fuel of our economy, said Pollak, and if it continues to decline, the U.S. 'That's really discouraging to top performers,' she added. Workers came away from all of this feeling like the connection between working hard and being rewarded was broken, Pollak said. Existing employees were often worked to the point of burnout, newbies with less experience were brought on at a higher wage and employers overlooked things that could have cost workers their jobs in the past. Firings and layoffs reached historic lows.

Then the economic winds shifted just months later, and companies were suddenly desperate to hire.

Nearly 20 million people were laid off in a matter of weeks as the pandemic took hold, regardless of whether they had strong work ethics, good performance or loyalty to a company. 'I no longer think that.' Major swings in the job market led to major ennuiĪn economic ennui has settled in among workers after the experiences of the last few years, said Julia Pollak, chief economist with ZipRecruiter, and that ennui is showing up in the numbers. 'I used to think having a job would make me secure,' said Bouser. Still, he said that in his short time in the American workforce, where he'd already been laid off from another job at the beginning of the pandemic, he knew this is just how it goes with companies. His boss at the car rental company where he made $25 an hour informed him his pay was going down to $13.50 an hour, without any explanation.īouser learned that all of his colleagues had seen their wages basically cut in half, and at a moment when companies were desperate for workers and pay was rising across the country. In the end, this could have a profound effect on the country's well-being, according to economists.įor Brian Bouser, 22, questions about how much effort to put in at work began when he received a text in the middle of art history class at the University of Louisville last year. workforce is not as productive as just a year ago - it seems people are not producing as much in the hours between clocking in and clocking out each day. Brian Bouser, 22, says his recent experiences in the workforce have prompted him to go into business for himself.Īll of the quiet quitting rolling through the country is starting to make some real economic noise.ĭata now shows that the U.S.