People are pretty crabby these days. There are plenty of reasons to be.
The trouble is that kvetching about everything is addictive. It must produce some kind of chemical reaction in the brain that becomes a dependency. Once you get in that mode, it’s hard to shake off. Everything that happens becomes an occasion for complaint.
This is not a good life. But it’s easy to shake it off, once you become conscious of the need to do so.
Let’s start with just one example: the banquet dinner for some event. For years, I’ve noticed a pattern that happens. Often people are at a table together who do not know each other particularly well. There is this scramble for icebreakers. The weather only takes you so far.
Invariably, some one person starts to complain. Could be that the rolls are too hard. The butter is too cold. The napkins are polyester. The chicken is rubbery. The wine is inferior. The beans are overcooked. The dessert is mushy. The coffee is thin.
Once one comment is made, others join in because they are anxious to speak to each other. So everyone starts joining in. Next thing you know, the entire meal is ruined by whinging all around. Everyone is trashing the food, the event, and the organizers. It’s truly rotten. It’s a habit I despise.
But the first complainer benefits in some way. He gets social attention. People dish out some sympathy or pity, which only further affirms the complainer. He is rewarded with being the center of focus while having others join in. He is the first mover and feels some pride in that. It’s a temporary dopamine hit.
All complainers in any social or private setting are playing off this dynamic. They are grabbing the spotlight, however briefly. They are able to enlist the emotional pity of others and thus feel temporarily valorized. This is the source of the addiction. Sure, it brings everyone down and is ultimately destructive, but for those who have no other means of feeling valued, this is one way.
Nor are we these days willing simply to say, “Stop complaining; it’s pathetic.” I wish we could say that, but our culture prevents it. To be sure, we all think it, but the words never leave our mouths.
Once I tried an experiment. When the meal came, I singled out the green beans for no particular reason. I praised them to the skies and how well they were cooked, plus the blessing of having green beans at all. I reflected on the farmers and the long season and all the effort that went into getting the beans from farmer to plate.
Sure enough, others joined in and started praising the green beans and telling green bean stories from childhood. When that topic was exhausted, I shifted to the rolls and the beef, and so on it went. I observed the change in the culture of the table. People were smiling. People were happy.
It’s amazing what a few nice words can accomplish to turn around the ship of the mood in the room. This is because people are naturally drawn more to happy and affirming people than those who are trashing everything and everyone around them. To be sure, the complainer can get some attention, but we secretly resent that manipulative approach to feeling affirmed.
A happy and celebratory person is offering a kind of gift to any social space, whereas the complainer is only extracting value to his personal benefit and at the expense of others.
To be sure, life offers no shortage of occasions and things about which to complain. The alarm goes off. How annoying that you have to get up. Now you have to make coffee and the kitchen is too far away. The coffee grinder makes an annoying noise. You have to shower but the curtain is kind of gross from mildew while the soap is mushy and small. During the shower the phone rings, but it is just spam. How frustrating. Then the bed has to be made although no one is really going to look at the results. What a waste of time!
So on it goes. We are only a few minutes into the day and we already have dozens of things about which to complain. Once you get on this track—we’ve all been there, surely—there is no stopping it. The day is nothing but a bother. Everything seems broken. The boss is a jerk and your co-workers are lazy. Someone gave you a nasty look. There is a bum on the streets. The room is too cold.
There is literally an infinite number of problems to notice.
If you think about it, our lives consist mostly of small and large problems we have to solve. We can deal with that reality in two ways. We can sit around regretting the problem and complaining that we have to deploy our time and energy to addressing them. Or we can thank God for our living breath, intelligence, and physical wherewithal to grapple with them, viewing the work we do as essential to our life mission.
The truth is that all people at all times have problems. The difference is that we live in a culture that too often encourages and rewards complaints rather than a culture of contentment with our lot and how it affords us the opportunity to make a difference.
I’m not entirely clear how this happened to us. Maybe we are just spoiled. Or maybe we live in a commercial culture that never stops messaging us that our lives are miserable unless or until we fork over money for the fix. This is pretty much the theme of every single ad on TV. You are suffering, but this product or service will fix it. But then we get the fix and it turns into just another subscription, just more stuff, just more to do. And it eventually breaks, revealing that it was never really a solution.
The key message of our times is that only with the following app, robot, service, product, or pill, we can more quickly rush through our problems to get to the life we want to live, such as we see our friends living on social media. Every institution is out there promoting and marketing disgruntlement and disenchantment with all normal things. The message seems impossible to ignore.
When your identity is tied to curated online personae, real life inevitably feels like a series of letdowns. Complaining becomes performative sophistication (“Look how discerning my palate is; this conference chicken is beneath me”). The banquet table complainer has simply taken the online script offline.
Here’s the thing: We must ignore it. We need to fall back in love with the blessings of routine and the opportunities we are given to make the spaces we inhabit better. We need to transcend the tendency merely to complain about things and instead set out toward fixing them, with patience, diligence, piety, and without the expectation of any reward. The reward has to become just the realization that we are doing the right thing. Nothing more.
The alarm clock isn’t an enemy; it’s the starting gun for a day you get to have. The rubbery conference chicken is a small price to pay for being in a room full of interesting people and fun conversations. The mildewy shower curtain is something you now have the power to clean or replace, and the act of doing so is more life-affirming than another hour of scrolling.
You don’t have to join the legions of the crabby. You can defect and find happiness without buying in. It is right there within you, waiting to be awakened with conscious determination to live a better life.
Within minutes of reading this article, something around you will go wrong. Try it out: Instead of complaining, rejoice that now you can be an instrument of fixing the problem. Try that all day and all year, and wow, you might find yourself in a completely different mental and psychological place.
