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It is a hard thing to convince a person to do more than they should, and even harder for them to convince themself of this, this is what leads to something called silent or quiet quitting.
Silent quitting is doing the bare minimum effort to get what you need, such as a person going to work just to do the bare requirements to keep their job or me simply writing scribbles on my homework and calling it a day because my teachers don’t check and I still get an A on it. A lot of work in school is for one’s own enrichment and development in a subject. However, creating healthy learning habits is easier said than done, especially when as long as you get the grade you want it doesn't matter how you get it.
Silent quitting is problematic for those in a workplace environment. It is understandable not to love your job, but when all you do every day is clock in and then wait to clock out, your job loses purpose which is demoralizing. For example, I volunteer at the library, which is a great way to help my community. My job is to sort and organize books with a massive majority being in the kids section. I'm supposed to sort them alphabetically but because the picture books will get picked off the shelf and then tossed in some different far-away corner to be lost forever, I don’t sort them alphabetically to the extent that is expected of me. This saves me about an hour and a half of my time which lets me pack up early and leave to do other arguably more important things.
Part of the problem might be that there simply isn’t enough recognition for those who go above and beyond to challenge themselves. Significant contributions to a meeting or going the extra mile on that research report may go under the radar, just like how I might get the same grade on the project as the person in my group even though they did not contribute. This leads to unsatisfactory feelings turning into quiet resentment, then into quiet quitting.
“If extra effort invested yields no return, then it’s a foolish investment.” - Ryan Stygar, Labor Lawyer
Or we simply need to set higher standards, though if we set these standards rather than ourselves, gradually, the result of silent quitting will be the same. If anything, it might just reinforce silent quitting if we feel it is an unfair workload. If we do set these higher standards for ourselves I doubt that most people will follow through with it.
A standstill is what you end with — no reason to do more than you need, no reason to grow. Still, there is significant reason to find solutions, many of which need to center around mental health, e.g. stopping people from burning themselves out and recognizing that their notable or even minuscule improvements will counter this epidemic. Personally, I am not going to stop doing the bare minimum. At this point, it is a form of art to get the A by the skin of my teeth.
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