‘Quiet quitting’ is a serious threat to our way of life. Just ask Arianna Huffington.

With worker productivity slipping and a near-record number of unfilled jobs, the economy can ill afford a tsunami of snowflakes slacking.

Arianna Huffington wrote that quiet quitting is "a step toward quitting on life."Richard Shotwell/Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP

Forget inflation, Russian hackers, and competition from China. There’s a new existential threat to our economy. It’s called quiet quitting.

And I know this how? Well, the PR pitch couldn’t have been more authoritative — or alarming. For some reason — divine intervention, I see now — I didn’t reflexively spike the e-mail without reading it, like I do with everything else in my inbox that won’t help me become a bitcoin billionaire.

“Quiet Quitting,” the account manager revealed, is “the trend of workers doing the bare minimum to avoid being fired and essentially ‘checking out’ entirely from their work lives.” Note his use of the capital Qs. That proves it really is a thing, not just some joke millennials on the Internet are pulling on their parents, like “birds aren’t real.”

Moreover, my source warned, Q² is just the latest COVID-era development “that has left businesses in every industry struggling with a variety of work force woes.”

The boomers, duped into thinking 80 isn’t a reasonable retirement age, had their Great Resignation. Now young snowflakes are being told that underachieving is like shrinking your carbon footprint: a moral obligation.

In a TikTok video that went viral in July, Zaid Khan, aka zaidleppelin, tried to recruit his more than 11,000 followers into the QQ cult: “You’re quitting the idea of going above and beyond. . . . You’re no longer subscribing to the hustle-culture mentality that work has to be your life.”

Notice how he says “hustle culture” like it’s a bad thing, rather than the reason we are the Only Nation That Matters? Hustle is what sets us apart from Third World countries like France!

With worker productivity slipping and a near-record number of unfilled jobs, the US economy can ill afford a tsunami of millennial slacking. We aren’t going to help Elon Musk conquer Mars with this kind of attitude.

Heed the words of Arianna Huffington, perhaps our greatest social scientist: “Quiet quitting isn’t just about quitting on a job, it’s a step toward quitting on life.”

Think about that for a minute. QQ isn’t a sane reaction to an insane workplace. It’s a devious plot by the libs to turn us into a nation of losers.

Remember what the dad said in “The Incredibles”: “It’s psychotic! They keep creating new ways to celebrate mediocrity. . .”

First you cut back from 60 hours a week to 50 hours, maybe even 40, if you’re really hell-bent on checking out completely. Then you start waiting until the morning to respond to your boss’s late-night e-mails. You use your vacation time.

Before you know it, we’ve got a whole generation living in their parents’ garages and volunteering to help Bernie Sanders turn the USA into a Socialist/Communist dictatorship.

But it isn’t too late to foil this insidious plot.

The aforementioned flack offered to put me in touch with his client, the CEO of a company that runs corporate gift card programs. This expert would, he assured me, “unpack the various factors behind quiet quitting and discuss how leading companies are utilizing incentives, recognition and carefully constructed culture — including peer to peer reinforcement — to fight back against this trend of morale bottoming out among workers.”

Yes, I buried the news. Peer pressure and a $10 Dunkin’ gift card will save American capitalism. That and Ron DeSantis in the White House.

Back in the mid-1980s I worked with a guy named Jerry who did his high-stress journalism job calmly and efficiently — from 7:30 a.m., or as close to it as New Jersey Transit would permit, to exactly 3:30 p.m. Then, come hell or big headlines, he grabbed his briefcase and dashed back to Penn Station to catch the train home.

Unlike a lot of us in that newsroom, Jerry worked to live. He valued time with his family more than climbing the ladder in business news.

These days some people might praise Jerry as being in the vanguard of the struggle for a reasonable work-life balance. But I know what he really was: a quiet quitter, a minion to mediocrity, a threat to American Exceptionalism.