Because you become what you do. Actions and habits are shaping one’s mind in the long run. This has little to do with work ethics, it’s about spending one’s life doing things that are meaningful to oneself.

It kills any and all potential career progression, will annoy your coworkers if it’s bad enough they have to carry you (which will make the 40 hours a week you show up at the office less pleasant for you) and will put you at the top of the list to go if and when your company eventually hits a rough spot.

"Bad" is subjective, but as I stated, it's my opinion. It's not about work ethic at all; it's about your own values.

To simplify:

1. Reinforced behaviors become stronger, while others get weaker. Ultimately, I'm a behaviorist (ACT).

2. Work is a big part of your waking life.

3. If you spend that much of your life going through the motions, you're strengthening behaviors that may not be constructive.

4. When your situation changes, and you need those more constructive skills and behaviors, you may find them much more difficult to access.

That's a very functional lens. However, there's a deeper lens you can apply. I believe people feel most fulfilled when they're routinely acting in alignment with their core values (what they truly care about).

Phoning it in at work may actually be "workable" from an ACT standpoint if your personal life lights up all your values, and you are feeling completely fulfilled by friends, family, hobbies, etc.

However, I would venture that most people also want to feel that their work is giving them some feeling of intrinsic satisfaction, not just a paycheck. You can call it Purpose, Mission, Self-Efficacy, whatever you want. In my framing, people don't want to live in conflict with their values 8 hours/day.

But there's an even more basic argument that I would make: Life is incredibly short. You are hurtling toward death. If you're phoning it in, you're giving away your most precious resource for a small amount of financial security (and you still might get fired). You may find that when you hit 45 (or 65) you look back and weep for the decades you poured into something that you didn't care about, or even held in contempt.

You have to do what's right for you, but it's never too late. As someone who has admittedly phoned it in previously, I'm violently on the other side now. Regardless of how you feel about your job, I strongly recommend finding a way to give a shit, or getting out by any means necessary.

Same reason stealing is bad, dingus. When you steal, it is bad, _and_ it is bad for you. Do you know why? The culture right now is so unaware and precious and douchey!

Corporate is 100% forked tongue snakes. Loyalty to _a machine_ is foolish. I am happy when team members move on by-choice and improve their situation.

But, _I_ am not corporate, and you make my life shittier and devalue my work and demoralize me when you whine like a baby about the work and then quiet quit. Just quit quit if you are going to be a dirtbag to the rest of us.

It closes future doors for you. Who gets assigned to the interesting new project? Not the guy who's phoning it in. Who gets first crack at the limited pool of raises? Not the guy who's phoning it in. So, even if all you want out of work is money, phoning it in is bad for you. If you want more, if you want interesting, fulfilling work, it's bad for you there, too.

More than that, phoning it in is bad for your character. That assumes you share a certain moral framework or outlook, though. If you're a moral nihilist, then it's really hard to make such an argument make sense to you. But let me at least try to make it make sense.

I want to be part of something, part of a team, not just a cog in a machine. I want relationships, not just for all of life to be transactional. But, see, wherever I go, I take me. The "me" that I take to my marriage or to hanging out with my buddies is the same "me" that goes to work. When I make one part of my life purely transactional, it's hard to keep that from leaking out into other areas that definitely should not be transactional.

Now, you're going to say that companies take advantage of that, and you'll be right. They do. They try to sell you on "we're all a big team!" and such. But the fact is that some places do actually try to live that out, and some places purely use it to try to extract the maximum effort from suckers. And the second group tends to be corrosive to your character, too, even if you don't phone it in, partly because such places tend to have lots of people who are phoning it in, but more because the company is phoning it in in how they relate to you. But the answer is not to phone it in in return. The answer is to start looking for somewhere better.