Melville’s Bartleby: The Great-Great-Grandfather of the Quiet Quitters of Today’s Gen Z

Corporations across the globe are currently doubling down on “return to office” mandates. They are keen on summoning their employees back into their cubicles and open-plan watercooler chatter.

And yet, one wonders: What exactly are they being called back to? The promise of collaboration? The lure of higher productivity? Or is it something more profane — a claim of presence meant to boost executives and assure them that corporate control has not slipped?

An astonishingly old debate

We mere mortals alive today in many ways think of ourselves as so cutting edge that what we are going through is an absolutely novel thing. After all, remote work thanks to the internet has not been around for so long.

And yet, every one of us presumably super-modern people should take note. It is now more than 170 years ago that Herman Melville wrote “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”

His 12-page short story, first published in Putnam’s Magazine in late 1853, is set in a sterile Wall Street law office.

The tale that Melville, the author of the far more famous Moby-Dick, lays out could not be more relevant in this age of hybrid schedules and Slack fatigue.

Bartleby is an enigmatic copyist who one day stops working, simply by repeating the phrase “I would prefer not to.”

A 19th-century prophet of 21st-century workplace malaise

Equipped with what we know today, we realize that Bartleby’s story is not just a relic of literary study. He is a 19th-century prophet of 21st-century workplace malaise.

And he has something important to tell us about today’s misguided rush back to the office.

No question about it: Melville’s Bartleby is the great-great-grandfather of the quiet quitters of today’s Gen Z.

Melville’s story strips the clerk’s work down to its bare bones. His office is not a place of innovation or positive group dynamics, but of tedious, repetitive work and inertia.

Workers are caricatures of dysfunction, barely tolerated as long as they function. The labor is bureaucratic and circular: Copies of copies, paperwork for paperwork’s sake. Sound familiar?

Attached to what, precisely?

Ask today’s experienced white-collar corporate warriors who have at least a couple of decades of corporate work on their backs.

Is the work really about the office as a physical and/or communal place? Or is it not primarily about the laptop computer on their desk?

When people leave one “office job” for another, they get a new phone and a new laptop from their next employer. These days, most often not even a new title. That’s all.

As many who have experienced the corporate office routine knowingly acknowledge: The monotonous lure those corporate gizmos provide compares to a Taylorized factory job of old any day.

And that was before the feeling of being made redundant by AI started spreading like wildfire.

Dressed up, but no improvement

True, today’s offices have dressed up this monotony with stand-up desks, corporate-branded mugs and serious espresso machines.

But the core issue remains: Much of what passes for “collaboration” or “presence” is performative. Employees are not made to return for better results.

They consent to return to make sure they are being seen – as eager worker bees, to prove they are still part of the machine and to protect themselves, so they hope, against that new “ARB” phenomenon – the AI Redundancy Bacillus.

The danger, of course, is that the corporate machine, itself increasingly unsure of its own future path, meanders along aimlessly. Tragically, showing up at the office becomes less about purpose and more about surveillance.

Bartleby’s rebellion is not rooted in laziness

At the heart of Bartleby’s rebellion, expressed in his refusal to work, is not laziness. To him, it is about existential protest. He sees no meaning in the tasks given to him and, in response, simply opts out.

Yes, his categorical statement “I would prefer not to” is devastating – but not because it is defiant, but rather because it is delivered so quietly. Bartleby isn’t angry – he is emptied out of meaning and purpose owing to the utter repetitiveness of his work.

Work environments lack meaning or care

And this is precisely what companies risk recreating by dragging employees back into environments that, despite their best redesign efforts, lack meaning or care.

The pandemic shattered the illusion that the office is indispensable. Productivity did not collapse when people worked from home. In many cases, it improved.

But more importantly, many workers found space to think, to balance, to breathe. They realized that the office is not where purpose resides. It is just where the printer is (as long as the doctrine still was to print things out.)

Now, in 2025, as return-to-office mandates proliferate, companies offer rationalizations rooted in claims of care that often are no more than thinly clad exercises in corporate control.

The question they rarely ask is whether the work environments they are recreating are worth returning to. They rarely ask whether people want to collaborate more – or whether they just want a little less soul-burning structure in their lives.

The moral of Bartleby’s tale

The lesson of Bartleby is not that work is bad, or that everyone should opt out. It is that a system that demands presence without purpose eventually hollows people out.

In case you wonder: Bartleby ended up dying in a prison cell, having refused to rejoin the daily grind.

Today’s employees will likely not meet such a tragic end, but Bartleby’s quiet despair – the disengagement, the quiet quitting, the burnout – is already here.

If companies want to bring people back together, they must start by asking: What are we bringing them back to? If the answer is little more than face time, micromanagement and keystroke monitoring, then Bartleby’s answer still stands: “I would prefer not to.”

That applies even more as micromanagement and keystroke monitoring are corporate practices that, illicitly or not, can also happen in the home office.

The real question: Are employees like farm horses?

In the end, productive work is largely about skill, self-motivation and self-organization.

Faced with that question, responding by calling people back to the office is akin to calling the horses back to the field after the world of agriculture had undergone a massive wave of mechanization, with tractors spreading on many a field.

Agriculture has not vanished. Far from it, it has only risen in importance (and productivity).

Corporations and government bureaucracies should therefore accord the same amount of strategic reflection and willingness to innovate to the field of work as farmers did a century ago to the field of agriculture. All too often, they still rely on the “sheep count” as a measure of executive performance.

If we know one thing, then it is that this is the wrong measure of success – and that, if we are being honest, we are still quite far from having reliable ideas of how to measure productivity – whether for machines or humans.