Embracing the Art of Complaining
February 22, 2023 • Written by Ari Bowman
For a project in my Time class recently, I documented the amount of times I complained, where I complained, and what my complaint was, over the course of roughly two weeks – one initial week with sample data, and a second week with final data. I did not anticipate just how much I would learn about myself and complaining in this span of two weeks.
In some ways complaining might be coded into my genetics – both of my grandmothers are complainers too. I inherited my grandmother’s love for painting, and her sighs. We both sigh while we’re painting. Neither of us realize when we’re doing it. My other grandmother is a walking ball of complaints. The tea is always too hot; if not too hot, too cold. The cup is too big, or maybe it’s too small. It’s never just right. Nothing ever is.
Complaining a lot comes with people telling me that complaining is bad; that I should stop complaining, and be more positive. Be polite, I’m told. Don’t be rude, bite your tongue.
Of course, there are absolutely times where complaining borders and often crosses over into the territory of being outright rude or offensive. However, we all might be a bit better off if we all complained a little bit more.
Hear me out: The Oxford Dictionary’s definition for the word complaint is, “a statement that a situation is unsatisfactory or unacceptable.” How many things in life are unsatisfactory or unacceptable? An endless number of things – we live in late-stage capitalism, people, there will never be a shortage of things to complain about. And we should complain about them! How else are we ever supposed to advance and achieve true justice if we can’t even point out when things are unjust?
Even on a small-scale level, it’s normal and healthy to want to express your own personal frustrations about things going on in your life at the moment. Hell, when I collected my data, a good chunk of my complaints were about my back hurting.
A lot of anti-complaining sentiment, at least in the US, is probably due to how the ideas of working hard despite pain and discomfort, pulling oneself up “by their bootstraps,” et cetera, are embedded within American culture to some extent.
Some workplaces even instate “no complaining policies,” intended to help create a more positive work environment. Even while well-intentioned, this worries me. This such company, Buffer, separates the ideas of “speaking up” and “complaining,” saying the former is in service of change and the latter is in service of ego; one is good-intentioned, the other is not. However, this attempt at trying to reframe the definition of complaining is misguided.
Complaining is stating that you are unhappy about something related to your current situation; that’s about it. It doesn’t necessarily entail any sort of snark, rudeness, or audacity. While it can contain those things, there are many ways to complain that are simply just stating the facts of life. When I complain about how MassArt doesn’t have a written excused absence policy, and think it’s ridiculous that a professor could theoretically fail me for missing two classes, I don’t think it’s to serve my ego. It’s to serve myself and other students. But it’s still complaining nonetheless.
Complaining is kind of hard to do properly, I’ll admit. Ruminating over things I can’t change is something I do often. However, breaking out of that cycle and using your complaints to make change is something everyone has to do. To complain is to change, is to grow. And to do all that is to master the art of complaining.
