If you read the media, you’ll walk away with this impression: American employees are fed up. They’re doing the “bare minimum” on Mondays, “cushioning” their careers with side gigs, “rage applying” to vent their frustrations and “coffee badging” to protest return-to-office policies.

US workers are “ghost quitting” (checking out without actually leaving their jobs) and pretending to work when actually practicing “productivity theater”. They’re taking paid time off without authorization in the form of “hush trips” and “quiet vacations”. They’re suffering from “Zoom doom” and paying an “emotional labor tax”. According to the latest polls, things are so bad that they’re “quietly cracking”.

They triggered the “great resignation” but are now practicing the “great stay”. Meanwhile, employers are “quietly firing” some of them while “quietly promoting” others by giving them more work with less recognition or just “quietly cutting” them, which is reassigning employees to less important roles. Don’t complain. Just be quiet.

What’s next? “Mute commuting”? “Calendar cluttering”? “Deadline doodling”?

One thing’s for certain: these reports aren’t going to end anytime soon. They’re catchy and they get clicks. They’re fun to talk about at parties and on late-night TV programs. We can all expect lots more pithy phrases and clever terms describing how unhappy our workforce is for the foreseeable future. But we should all take these reports with a grain of salt. Why?

For starters – and I won’t name names but you can read the links above – most of these eye-catching, clickbait-y terms are defined by surveys conducted by HR firms, HR media sites, HR software providers and polling companies looking for media attention. They tend to survey hundreds of employees at a time out of a workforce of hundreds of millions using a questionable definition of “statistical sampling”. And they all have an agenda. Want your employees to be happier? Buy our software! Hire our firm! Read more of our research! When it comes to most of these reports, you’ll find what I’ve found: science is not a priority.

Next, it’s easy to make employers the bad guys. Any survey that sticks it to the man is going to get eyeballs. The reality? People I know are mostly happy with their jobs and they understand the pressures their employers face. They’re grown-ups who know that work is work and the perfect job doesn’t exist.

Then again, isn’t being dissatisfied with your job a good thing? It says that we want to make things better – we are driven by ambition. I’m not judging people who are happy clocking in and clocking out of their jobs. Good for them. If you’re not happy at your job, maybe that’s because you want more out of your life, and that’s normal. See if you can change the job you do, change how you work. Failing that, change your employer, maybe start your own business. But in the meantime, you still need to do your job.