”Rage quitting” is one of the many popular buzzwords of our time, but what are really the deeper implications behind this expression?
When I was in my 20s and 30s it wasn’t really much of a ”thing,” although it did sometimes happen… but it was seldom frequent enough that it didn't almost qualify as newsworthy, at least on a localized scale.
These days, it seems like such a common occurrence that it barely merits a five-second pause in our eternal doom scrolling.
But why do people rage quit?
Yeah, I know, you think you know why… but that’s not really the deeper question… so let’s rephrase it slightly:
”Why do people rage quit, as opposed to just getting appropriately angry and then getting on with life?”
From where I am sitting, in most cases rage quitting seems like a disproportionate response to a situation.
We ”rage quit” jobs, clubs, friendships, hobbies and even marriages.
While this might piss off some people, I fear the answer may come when we poke at the figurative hornets’ nest known as entitlement, combined with an ever-declining willingness to put up with ”not having things our way.” Which could also be termed as a lowered tolerance for discomfort.
Just consider a hot button topic like Free Speech. Ostensibly, free speech suggests you have the right to sharing your opinion, but free speech does not come with the right to be AGREED with. Just because you feel you should be allowed to have your cat with you at work doesn’t mean the world should accommodate you and let you bring your cat. Calling your employer an asshole and quitting a good job over being denied cats at work is hardly useful personal management.
Smells more like behavior befitting a little "prince" or "princess!"
While I am not really in favor of playing ”Let’s blame the Internet,” one thing does stand out, as a potential reason — or fertile breeding ground — for rage quitting is the illusion that we have many more choices than we really do, functionally speaking.
Going back to the cat example, we can go ask Professor Google and almost certainly find some place of employment somewhere, that allows people to bring their cats to work… and then we point at that and argue that one example out of millions represents the truth. You know, a bit like this (at the 45-second mark):
Getting a bit more ”local” with it, I watch people rage quit Hive all the time, often trying to burn the building down, on their way out… often over some ”detail” in the system/community they disagree with. Except they are one person, and this is a whole community.
For the record, there are lots of things on Hive I disagree with… and lots of things in the greater world I disagree with, but that’s hardly a reason to rage quit anything and everything. In fact, if I rage quit everything I disagreed with and found distasteful, I’d likely be one of those odd people living in a hut somewhere off the grid, possibly wanting to rage quit life because it rains too often…
Which brings me back around to the idea that nobody ever told me — or promised me — that life was going to be easy. In fact, I was taught (mostly at home) that life is hard as hell and I should likely not expect it to turn out anything like what I was hoping for… ”but do celebrate the small moments when everything aligns and turns out as you wished.”
So… were people who tend to rage quit somehow promised that they would get whatever they pointed at, no matter how ridiculous, without pushback?
I guess it's something we might not find a concrete answer to, anytime soon...
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Created at 2025.11.19 00:13 PST
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I rarely rage quit, if I ever have done it. I am more the ghosting type. I agree also not beautiful.
Mostly it is a combination of feeling powerless combined with the feeling that the world is against you.
Also probably this could also could be related to the season. More in the winter, decreasing in spring, almost none in summer and building back up again in fall.
Not heard this expression, but it reeks of "cutting your nose off to spite your face" .....
I wasn't taught that life would be easy, but there was a general impression that perseverance would eventually pay off.
That was a lie.
Rage quitting. New term for me, though I did quit once. The boss, part-time job I didn't need, threatened to kill me over a typo ("If you do that again I will kill you"). Even if he was speaking figuratively, I thought he was a bit out of line. I called next work day and quit. He called back and asked why I was quitting. I told him calmly that I didn't like the way he spoke to me. No anger. No rage. Just quit. Though, I think he may have been raging on the other end when he hung up :))
This is a good point. I think that in life we can always expect there to be certain aspects of anything that we do that we don't like but you have to take things in stride else you just end up quitting everything.
I don't often rage quit at all in my life but I do look back on the few times I did do so in my youth and look back with a sense of shame. It's kind of stupid to let minor aspects of something get so under your skin that you don't just walk away, you run away and take your ball with you.