I hope those of you in America had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday, were able to reflect on your gratitude for all that you have to be thankful for, and remembered that love for your family and friends is more important than arguing over any petty differences. And for you non-Americans, I hope that you have a delightful ordinary non-holiday weekend.
With Thanksgiving wrapping up, let’s talk about the opposite of thankfulness: Complaining.
When we were babies, complaining was one of the few methods we had for exercising influence over the world. If we were tired, or hungry, or wanted a toy, or had a poopy diaper, we would cry about it until a grown-up solved the problem for us.
As we became older children, with control over our own bodies and growing mental faculties, we had enough self-efficacy to handle some small issues, such as using the bathroom on our own or making a bowl of cereal when we were hungry. But for anything bigger, we had to complain to an adult who had far more ability to deal with things.
And so we developed what is described in Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit as a habit loop. Whenever we encountered the cue of seeing a problem beyond our capability to solve ourselves, we’d automatically activate the routine of complaining about it. Then we’d receive the reward, at least when we were children, of someone else solving it for us.
This habit became deeply ingrained in us, and we kept it as adults. Whenever we encounter problems we can’t fix, we complain about them. However, we failed to notice when the reward disappeared. Complaining about problems doesn’t summon a magic genie to make them all better.
Now, there are some exceptions where complaining is done productively, directed at the specific person who can help. Telling your landlord your plumbing is clogged, or a waiter there’s a hair in your soup – things like that.
But most complaints are about problems that the person you’re complaining to is no more capable of solving than you are, or are problems that nobody can solve at all. The weather’s bad, or awful politicians are doing awful things, or your boss is a jerk, or traffic was terrible, or you don’t have enough money or time to do what you want.
Another way to describe complaining is “highlighting things that are wrong with the world.” If you are highlighting things that are wrong so you or others can fix them, that is healthy and productive. Your landlord doesn’t know your plumbing is clogged, so making her aware of that allows her to take action that will repair it.
But when your complaint is not setting things on a realistic path toward improvement, then you are just focusing on the negative for its own sake. If you tell your Facebook friends about some jerk who cut you off in traffic, none of them are going to invent a time machine to retroactively make your commute that morning more pleasant.
Some people describe this as “venting,” or “getting something off your chest,” and view it as a healthy release. But I think it’s better to consider this in terms of habits.
The more you practice something, the more habitual it becomes. When you complain about something, you are building the habit of highlighting what is wrong, bad, unpleasant, unfair, etc. You are training yourself to focus on the negative. Every time you complain, you shift your mindset a little bit toward “What can I find to be unhappy about in this situation.”
Habitual complaining is practicing to live a miserable life.
There’s a saying in sports, “How you practice is how you play.” Habitual complaining is practicing to live a miserable life.
Worse, you’re also dragging your friends down. Do you think they find it pleasant for you to be a Negative Nelly, always seeking out what’s wrong in every situation. If you make yourself unpleasant to be around, you’ll drive people away, which will make your life worse off in countless ways.
There’s also the issue of complaining about your partner in the context of a relationship. This can either be done to your partner directly, or to a third party.
If your partner is inadvertently doing something to make you unhappy that is likely to continue or be repeated in the future, it is reasonable to make them aware of this so that the two of you can work together as a team to arrive at a mutually agreeable resolution moving forward and maximize your shared happiness.
But there are many times when this does not remotely describe complaints in a relationship. When the complaints are repetitive about the same thing (aka nagging). Or when they’re about long past actions that have no bearing on the future. Or when they’re about things that have no mutually agreeable solution, or no solution at all. Or when they’re meant to make someone feel bad, or “score points,” or something like that.
What about complaints about relationships to third parties? Well, when it’s to a therapist or trusted friend for the purpose of asking for advice, that’s totally fine. But it’s fundamentally unhealthy to simply bitch about someone you ostensibly love for the purposes of… what? Trying to make yourself look better by putting them down? Scoring points with your tribe by showcasing behavior that falls in line with cartoonish stereotypes of groups you don’t belong to? (Whether those groups are men, women, Boomers, Millennials, Democrats, Republicans, etc.)
And note when I’m talking about relationships and partners here, I don’t just mean romantic relationships. I’m also referring to family members, in-laws, and friends – anyone you would meet around the Thanksgiving table.
In particular, Thanksgiving is the traditional time for complaining about family members – especially family members with different political views. I admit I’ve been guilty of this behavior as well. But I can’t see any way in which me engaging in this behavior has either improved my life or made the world a better place.
One of your goals in life ought to be to focus on the positive, and look for things that will make you happy. Seeking out things that make you unhappy is the exact opposite of this.
Yet we’ve been training ourselves to do this since we were babies. So how do we counteract this habit?
Something else we’ve been training ourselves to do our entire lives is play games. So I’ve started playing what I call “The Complaining Game.”
The rules for The Complaining Game are simple: I see how long I can go without complaining out loud or in writing. If I make a complaint the time sets over. And I try to beat my previous record.
Maybe I can get other people to play, and we can get competitive about our times. (It would all work on the honor system, and also people being self-aware enough to notice when they complain. But that’s okay.)
What about productive complaints? Well, I figure that if something is important enough to complain about, it should be worth giving up my no-complaining streak and losing that round of the game. That will keep me from complaining about petty stuff. The Complaining Game doesn’t have an exception for being a Karen.
I will grant myself exceptions for blog posts, but only in the cases where I’m reviewing a self-help book, or where I’m making a sub-point in service of a larger uplifting/positive point. I feel like I do need to be honest in order to express my opinion, and don’t want to be tap-dancing around places where I ought to be critical. And I get to make up the rules for the game I just made up, so nyah nyah nyah.
Anyway, let me know if this is a game you’d like to try. Maybe we can play together.
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