Have You Ever Tried Naked Quitting?
Who Can Afford to Be Brave?
Quitting before you have another secure job lined up is nothing new. At most, it may have raised a few eyebrows among family or close friends and prompted some discussion behind your back about how strange the decision was. Beyond that, it hardly made waves.
Only recently did I realise that it now has a catchy English name, has become a trend and comes with an inspirational story: naked quitting.
Naked quitting means resigning before you have another job lined up. The current English term is new. The behaviour behind it, and the original name for it, are much older.
The term can be traced back to the Chinese word luǒcí. Its literal meaning is roughly “naked resignation”: leaving without another job, a secure transition or guaranteed income for the months ahead.
By late 2010, the term was already being discussed in publicly available sources as a Chinese workplace buzzword. One article from December 2010 explicitly asked whether resigning without another job was a liberating decision or a reckless impulse. Another listed luǒcí among the important workplace terms of 2010. In those articles, the risk to income, the expected length of the job search and the possibility that the decision had been made too hastily were still central to the phenomenon (Huaxi Metropolis Daily, 2010; Qilu Evening News, 2010).
Around 2011–2012, the English-language Chinese press was already calling it naked resignation. The definition had not changed: someone resigned before finding another job. Reports at the time mentioned work overload, dissatisfaction, changing employee expectations and shifts in China’s white-collar labour market. One person interviewed by China Daily had enough savings to last at least a year and was therefore willing to spend months waiting for the right job. Even in this early account, which emphasised autonomy, the financial background was a visible condition (Wang, 2012).
In 2015, a resignation letter containing just ten Chinese characters went viral. Gu Shaoqiang, a secondary-school teacher, wrote after eleven years: “The world is so big. I want to see it.” A photograph of the letter spread rapidly across Chinese social media and received tens of thousands of reactions and shares (Yao, 2015).
Here, resignation became a symbol of freedom, postponed dreams and taking back one’s own life. A later report described the teacher as the heroine of a generation of workers hungry for adventure. Leaving without a safety net was no longer presented simply as a risky labour-market decision. Attention shifted to the kind of person capable of making it: someone who recognises their own desires and has the strength to follow them (Chinanews.com, 2015).
In 2018, a China Youth Daily survey of 1,972 workers aged between 18 and 35 found that 23 per cent had resigned without another job offer. Nearly half had considered it but had ultimately not done it. This was a survey reported in the press, so it should not be treated as a precise national prevalence figure. It does show that naked resignation had by then become a recognisable and widely discussed workplace behaviour (Xinhua, 2018).
By 2024, the term naked quitting had appeared in the English-language press. On 17 March 2025, the Cambridge Dictionary language blog recorded it among its new words and defined it as leaving a job without having another one to go to. This documented a new use of language; it was not evidence that the behaviour itself began in 2024 or 2025 (Cambridge Words, 2025).
What Changed?
The early Chinese term named the absence of a safety net. In today’s Western articles and posts, resignation increasingly appears as proof of personal autonomy, self-respect and courage.
Someone had been miserable in a bad job for a long time. One morning, or after one particularly awful meeting, they decided they had had enough. They resigned without knowing what would come next. The first relief—the sense that one decision had ended the oppressive feeling in a single stroke—may have been followed by the panicked thought, “Oh God, what have I done?” By the time they had gathered their things, they were riding the rollercoaster of relief and a new kind of anxiety all the way home.
But once the story is told in public, it does more than record a feeling. It interprets the decision for an audience. It tells us how to see the person who resigned: as someone who was afraid, but acted anyway.
And now let’s name the elephant in the room: what do they live on until they have another job?
The Financial Conditions of Courage
Leaving without another job carries very different levels of risk for people in different circumstances. A few months without income may be manageable for someone with substantial savings, an earning partner, family support or a profession in which their skills are easy to sell. The same decision may create a housing or debt crisis for someone supporting a household alone.
Using Australian longitudinal data, Gerards and Welters (2020) examined how liquidity constraints affected unemployed people’s job searches and subsequent employment. Jobseekers facing serious financial hardship searched more intensively. It did not shorten their search, and the pay or hours in the job they found were no better. Those who found work while under severe financial pressure were less satisfied with their pay and hours, were more likely to think about resigning again, and had less stable employment over the medium term.
The study looked at unemployed jobseekers, not specifically at people left without work after naked quitting. It matters here because it shows what can happen when the financial room to manoeuvre runs out after resignation. A person may put more time and energy into the search without finding a job any faster or on better terms. As their reserves shrink, they also have less freedom to be selective or to wait.
A working paper by Clymo and colleagues (2022) looks directly at the relationship between wealth, quitting and being laid off. Using worker panel data, they found a U-shaped relationship: both low-wealth and high-wealth employees were more likely to move from employment into non-employment, but for different reasons. Their model suggests that workers with less wealth may accept riskier jobs to get out of unemployment more quickly. Some wealthier workers may leave voluntarily because they can afford more time out of work.
This has not yet been published as a peer-reviewed journal article, so it should be treated as preliminary evidence. It does not prove that every wealthier person resigns simply because they can comfortably afford to. It does support the point that wealth is not a minor background detail. It helps determine who can afford time outside work and who has to find a new income as quickly as possible.
That difference rarely appears in accounts of naked quitting. Courage gets a full paragraph. The financial runway gets, at most, a throwaway half-sentence.
A household budget is not merely the minimum required to stay alive. There may be children, a mortgage, insurance, transport and regular healthcare costs. People may also pay for subscriptions and activities that keep them connected to their cultural and professional world. They may need that one break a year that allows them to carry on. It is easy to dismiss these as optional comforts when you are not the one who has to give them up.
Someone who takes all of this into account and stays in a bad job for the time being may be making a rational assessment of risk. They may know perfectly well how much the work is harming them. They can also see the consequences of resigning.
An article about naked quitting therefore offers a useful picture only if it presents the financial conditions of the decision alongside the courage. How long would the savings last? Was there another income in the household? Were there dependants, loan repayments or substantial fixed costs? How likely was the person to find another job at a similar level?
Without those details, the account presents as personal virtue what is partly economic room to manoeuvre.
Why Do We Post It? Or, Lord, Let Me Share My Courage with the World
Let’s be honest: if the relief after resigning were enough in itself, it would be enough simply to feel good.
A social-media post serves another purpose. It turns the resignation into a public statement of identity. The text usually provides the preferred interpretation in advance: this was courage, choosing myself, drawing a boundary, breaking free. From the opening lines, the writer offers an interpretation in which the decision appears not as recklessness but as a personal achievement.
My reading is that many of these posts process the expected criticism in advance. The writer calls it courage before someone else can call it financial recklessness. Admitting the fear raises the moral value of the decision:
I didn’t know what would happen. I was terrified, but I did it anyway.
The sentence directly communicates fear. Indirectly, it also says that the writer did what many people cannot. They can present themselves as an example to follow without ever saying so outright.
This is where we can recognise one possible structure of humblebragging: self-promotion wrapped in a complaint or apparent modesty.
Across nine studies, Sezer and colleagues (2018) examined humblebragging. They defined it as self-promotion disguised as a complaint or modesty: the speaker wants to make a positive quality or achievement visible while avoiding the social cost of openly boasting. Participants judged humblebraggers as less sincere and less likeable, and in some studies as less competent. The strategy could work even worse than straightforward complaining, because at least the person complaining was perceived as more honest.
The research did not examine posts about resigning. It is relevant to naked quitting because of the structure of the communication. Admitting uncertainty and fear may ask for sympathy, while “I did it anyway” makes courage and agency visible.
I am not, of course, saying that every post about resigning is a humblebrag. Some people are asking for help, sharing information, making workplace abuse visible or simply announcing that their situation has changed. A single text cannot tell us the writer’s internal motivation with certainty.
The structure can still be observed. Uncertainty and fear provide the complaint or modesty layer. The underlying claim is that the writer managed to do what many others cannot. The account may ask for sympathy and admiration at the same time.
Naked quitting can therefore become a strange kind of status signal. The person posting appears to have jumped without any safety net. The wealth, partner’s income, family support or strong position in the labour market that made the jump possible may remain outside the account.
Does Someone Else’s Courage Make Me a Coward?
A bad job is already difficult enough. Social media can add comparison: someone else recognised their value, drew a boundary and had the courage to act. I am still sitting here.
Fukubayashi and Fuji (2021) used two studies to examine the relationship between career-related social-media content, social comparison and career frustration. The first involved 309 Japanese employees. The second used a seven-day experience-sampling method and collected 1,254 responses. Viewing positive career posts was associated with social comparison. Upward comparison—seeing the other person’s position as better than one’s own—was associated with greater career frustration. In the first study, comparison was also linked to the feeling that one ought to escape one’s current career situation.
The research did not specifically examine naked-quitting posts, and the two studies do not show that every resignation success story causes frustration. Applying the relationship here is defensible because these posts are also positive career content and can offer a direct basis for comparison: someone else was in the same bad situation and still left.
The reader gets the carefully constructed story of the person who acted. On their own side are the mortgage, the children, an uncertain labour market and savings that may last who knows how long.
They now have two problems. Their job is bad, and they may also feel that they are not brave enough to leave it.
And What About Those Who Could Leave, but Stay?
There are also people who have savings, a realistic chance of finding another job and no immediate financial obligation that makes leaving impossible. Yet they remain for years in a workplace that is deeply anxiety-inducing or damaging.
There may be perfectly rational reasons for this too. Mitchell and colleagues (2001) used the concept of job embeddedness to examine what ties people to their work and their wider environment. They distinguished three areas: links to other people, teams and groups; fit with the job, organisation and community; and everything a person would sacrifice by leaving. Job embeddedness helped predict intentions to quit and actual voluntary turnover beyond job satisfaction, organisational commitment, perceived job alternatives and job search.
This helps explain why being able to afford to leave does not mean someone will leave. They may fear losing their professional identity, status, colleagues, established position or the chance of returning to the same field later. As an eternal optimist, or by avoiding a direct reckoning with the situation—perhaps through endlessly reframing it—they may also hope that things will soon improve.
When those reasons no longer explain staying, and the situation involves persistent anxiety, paralysis, self-damaging adaptation or recurring relational patterns, therapy may be relevant. The question then is what keeps someone in a harmful environment even when leaving is realistically possible.
That, however, is a different story. It does not justify applying the same psychological explanation to people who stay because they are financially constrained.
The Missing Sentence
Resigning can be a brave decision. Leaving an oppressive or humiliating workplace may require considerable personal effort.
It is not fair to praise the courage while quietly leaving out the rather significant fact of financial security.
If someone tells us how afraid they were, the heroic account has room for the small print too: how they paid for housing, their children’s expenses and everyday life in the months that followed.
As long as we are shown only the decision itself, the reader or listener is left to imagine the background that made it possible. What each person reads into that, and how they interpret it, is probably material for another essay—also not a short one.
References
Cambridge Words. (2025, March 17). New words – 17 March 2025. About Words – Cambridge Dictionary blog. https://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/2025/03/17/new-words-17-march-2025/
Chinanews.com. (2015, July 25). Teacher’s resignation: A love story not an adventure. People’s Daily Online. https://en.people.cn/n/2015/0725/c90882-8926221.html
Clymo, A., Denderski, P., & Harvey, L. A. (2022). Wealth, quits and layoffs [Working paper]. SSRN. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4248008
Fukubayashi, N., & Fuji, K. (2021). Social comparison on social media increases career frustration: A focus on the mitigating effect of companionship. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 720960. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.720960
Gerards, R., & Welters, R. (2020). Liquidity constraints, unemployed job search and labour market outcomes. Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 82(3), 625–646. https://doi.org/10.1111/obes.12345
Huaxi Metropolis Daily. (2010, December 9). Resigning without another job lined up: Carefree or impulsive? [Chinese-language article]. Sina Education. https://edu.sina.com.cn/j/2010-12-09/1001197016.shtml
Mitchell, T. R., Holtom, B. C., Lee, T. W., Sablynski, C. J., & Erez, M. (2001). Why people stay: Using job embeddedness to predict voluntary turnover. Academy of Management Journal, 44(6), 1102–1121. https://doi.org/10.5465/3069391
Qilu Evening News. (2010, December 14). 2010 workplace buzzwords: “Rubber people,” exam-job seekers and naked resignation make the list [Chinese-language article]. Sina Education. https://edu.sina.com.cn/j/2010-12-14/1529197322.shtml
Sezer, O., Gino, F., & Norton, M. I. (2018). Humblebragging: A distinct—and ineffective—self-presentation strategy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114(1), 52–74. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000108
Wang, W. (2012, January 31). ‘Naked’ resignations on the rise. China Daily. https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2012-01/31/content_14510459.htm
Xinhua. (2018, August 12). One in five Chinese youths resign without new job. China.org.cn. https://www.china.org.cn/china/2018-08/12/content_58518822.htm
Yao, Y. (2015, April 25). Quitting jobs to fulfill dreams no longer taboo in China. China Daily. https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2015-04/25/content_20537275.htm
Lilien Gerlach | Behavioural Analyst Notes