I experienced ‘quiet cracking’ 15 years ago, before it was a buzzword. It’s extremely self-destructive behavior.

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.

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: They love it at first, but some series of events leads to a misalignment.

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.”

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.

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.

There were many reasons why I felt I couldn’t leave.

Some of them were financial. I think this is why it’s coming up again — I bet it happens anytime when the job market gets tight. 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.

The Great Recession 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.

Another part was that I was doing an MBA program, and I had some commitments to the job around paying.

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.

Whether I was successful in protecting them or not, I don’t know. But I did feel that pressure.

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.

It’s extremely self-destructive behavior.

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.

I finally left the organization, which took about a year and a half.

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.

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.

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