TikTok users are fascinated by “Bare Minimum Mondays,” a trend which encourages employees to exert as little effort as possible on the first day of the work week.

Marisa Jo Mayes, a TikTok creator based in Phoenix who resigned from her corporate job, coined the phrase “Bare Minimum Mondays,” which has now garnered more than two million views on the platform. Videos posted by Mayes, who now says she is self-employed, depict the 29-year-old completing various chores around her apartment and listening to podcasts before she starts her workday or schedules any meetings.

@itsmarisajo Bare Minimum Monday: Chores Edition ⏱️🧼🎧 #bareminimummonday #bareminimummondays #wfh #selfemployed #selfemployedlife #burnoutrecovery #productivitytips ♬ Theme From A Summer Place – Percy Faith

Mayes realizes that most people with a traditional office job do not have the luxury of delaying the start of their workday or otherwise presenting minimal effort to their employers. She advised her followers in the corporate world to “remove any wishful thinking tasks from your list” and save efforts to “overachieve” for Tuesday.

“One thing I know would have helped me when I was in corporate is to think to myself, Where might I be putting unnecessary pressure on myself?” she continued in the video. “What are you overly stressed about that you just don’t need to be stressed about?”

@itsmarisajo Replying to @alysialovesmakeup This shift would’ve saved me so much stress & overwhelm back in my corporate days 😵‍💫 #bareminimummonday #bareminimummondays #worklifewellbeing #burnoutrecovery #wfhtips ♬ Theme From A Summer Place – Percy Faith

Mayes said in an interview with The New York Post that the philosophy has “completely overhauled” her relationship with work and hopes there are effects throughout the economy. “It’s more of an opportunity for people to start untethering themselves from hustle culture, little by little, until corporate America catches up,” she commented. “The tide is turning, and I feel like employees are tired of trading their well-being to perform well at work.”

The “Bare Minimum Monday” trend drew immediate comparisons to “Quiet Quitting,” an approach to work in which employees refuse to exert more effort than the bare minimum required by their job descriptions or resign from their positions without a two-week notice. The phenomena occur as prominent technology companies and other white-collar employers downsize staff to increase profitability: more than 94,000 workers have been dismissed from prominent technology firms in the first two months of 2023, according to a report from Crunchbase, even after companies in the sector dismissed some 140,000 positions last year.

The layoffs come as young employees at leading firms shared viral day-in-the-life videos on TikTok which showed them enjoying free perks while completing minimal work. Nicole Tsai, who previously released a series of videos boasting about the amenities-packed offices at Google, completed her video series with news that she had been laid off, while Riley Rojas, a project manager at Meta, posted videos of the company’s generous perks before the company reduced their payrolls at the behest of worried investors.

Many employees in the technology sector are also incensed as executives roll back virtual work policies established during the lockdown-induced recession. Thousands of employees at Amazon, which is now requiring staff members to report to the office at least three times per week, have started an internal Slack channel meant to challenge the end of fully remote work, while Starbucks employees petitioned management in the wake of a similar announcement.

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Employees generally prefer virtual work arrangements because of reduced commuting time and more flexibility, but costs for employers are often significant: 85% of managers believe the shift to hybrid work during the lockdown-induced recession has eroded confidence that employees are remaining productive, according to a study from Microsoft.

Biden’s Secretary of Transportation isn’t really into the day-to-day parts of his job. In fact, it seems that he would much rather be a figurehead who shows up for photo opportunities, based on a recent CNN interview with Mayor Pete himself.

“Buttigieg says what he’d rather be doing is trips like Monday’s: Opening the first new airport terminal in Kansas City since Vice President Spiro Agnew was there for a ribbon cutting … celebrating the groundbreaking on a record-busting $4 billion electric vehicle battery plant in DeSoto, Kansas, and talking transportation programs with students at the University of Missouri,” the outlet reported.

“Those events are the things Buttigieg thought he was signing up for with the Cabinet job,” CNN added.

Instead, though, he has had to deal with crises such as supply chain hiccups, rail strikes, aviation woes, and that whole toxic train spill in East Palestine, Ohio, that has upended the lives of thousands.

Buttigieg’s message for his haters is simple: He knows how to shop better than they do, and they’re a bunch of frauds, he implied during the CNN interview.

“It’s really rich to see some of these folks – the former president, these Fox hosts – who are literally lifelong card-carrying members of the East Coast elite, whose top economic policy priority has always been tax cuts for the wealthy, and who wouldn’t know their way around a T.J. Maxx if their life depended on it, to be presenting themselves as if they genuinely care about the forgotten middle of the country,” Buttigieg bemoaned to CNN.

“You think Tucker Carlson knows the difference between a T.J. Maxx and a Kohl’s?” he threw in for good measure.

Buttigieg’s media therapy blitz also included a sit-down session with twice-failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The two discussed unfair criticism from naysayers.

“When you read about your biography, your accomplishments, you’re often described as a trailblazer,” Clinton said to Buttigieg at the event hosted by the Clinton Global Initiative University. “You are the first openly gay Cabinet member. You’re the youngest person to ever hold the office of the Secretary of Transportation. You’re one of the youngest people to make a serious bid for the presidency. So there’s no doubt that along the way being the first often requires knocking down some barriers, some misconceptions.”

Buttigieg replied, “Yeah, I mean, again, I’m humbled to have a word like ‘trailblazer’ used when I’m sitting next to you and knowing all the cracks you put in that glass ceiling.”

During that conversation, he assured voters that he wasn’t going to “complain about any frustration associated with coming to an agency and having work to do every day and finding that you’re dealing sometimes with a noise machine that seems to have little to do with your day-to-day work and a lot to do with perceptions about your real or perceived role in presidential politics.”

“It would be very indecent of me to complain about that sitting next to you,” he added, which drew a cackle out of Clinton.

There's a "noise machine that seems to have little to do with your day-to-day work and a lot to do with perceptions about your…role in presidential politics," Pete Buttigieg tells Hillary Clinton.

"It would be very indecent of me to complain about that sitting next to you." pic.twitter.com/jJo1d8pGue

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 6, 2023

What has not seemed to cross Buttigieg’s mind is that he may be criticized because he stinks at his job, focuses on nonsense issues such as equity over merit, and has a general smarminess about him that no photo-op can fix — not because of his sexual orientation.

The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.