The Whiner's Guide to Not Complaining

It was sunset and I was being ferried by my future uncle-in-law around Lake Superior in Northern Minnesota while a warm breeze wafted into the rental car window. My longtime boyfriend, who had just proposed, was sitting in front of me, turning around every few minutes to beam in my general direction. We were on our way to get pies. Not just any pies. Betty’s world-famous pies [2]. Life is pretty good right now, I thought. I don’t have anything to complain about. Which led to a twinge of panic: I have nothing to complain about.

This shining moment of whine-free living made me realize how much kvetching I do on a daily basis. If I am honest with myself, I would estimate that about 70 percent of the things that come out of my mouth are gripes. Good-natured, often, but still nonessential and sometimes obnoxious to others. Usual topics of complaint include, but are not limited to: the amount of work I have, the weather, F-train delays, F-train crowds, F-train stank, existential malaise.

It’s all pretty pathetic, when you consider how lucky I am in the grand scheme, and that I’m fundamentally a reasonably happy person. But the extent of my complaining didn’t really sink in until I returned, after my Minnesotan epiphany, to all the minor irritations of my workaday life. I was in the middle of a reverie about how much work I had when my fiance began to give me suggestions about how to delegate more tasks.

“Why don’t you talk to your bosses about it?”

“Because they have just as much work as I do!”

“Remember how you were so excited when you got this job?
“Yeah. So?
“Well, it’s a great job.”

“But I’m so stressed out!”

“Dude, you’re not a lion tamer. There’s nothing to be that stressed out about.”

And so on. I wanted to punch him after a while. Why couldn’t he just listen to me whine rather than offer suggestions about how to proactively improve my mental status? Yes, this is a very stereotypical male-female behavioral pattern—and there’s a name for it: expressive complaint. In the book [3] Aversive Interpersonal Behaviors [4], Clemson psychology professor [4] Robin M. Kowalski notes that “people frequently complain not because they expect changes to be made, but, rather, because complaining simply makes them feel better.” The other kind of complaining is known as instrumental complaint [5]—kvetching meant to bring about action.

In the case of my workload whine, expressive complaining only made me feel worse. I would blow off the initial steam, but then feel hopeless because a lot of the suggestions for improvement I’d receive seemed impossible to bring about. And what’s more, my almost-daily whining was pissing off my fiance. That’s when I started considering going cold turkey on needless complaining.

I did a little initial research—had anyone tried to give up whining? Will Bowen, a pastor from Kansas City, Mo., has a movement called A Complaint Free World [6]. His project involves a purple bracelet that you wear for 21 days. Whenever you find yourself “complaining, gossiping, or criticizing,” you move the bracelet to the other arm and begin again. Bowen, on his website, defines “to complain” pretty narrowly: It is “to express pain, grief or discontent.” He also says that when people are complaining, “they are talking and thinking about what they do not want in their life and, thereby, attracting more pain, grief and discontent.”

Bowen’s methods are theoretically iffy for me on a number of levels. First, I firmly believe in the expression of pain, grief, or discontent. They are excellent human emotions that even the most relentlessly positive person feels. I’m also offended by this The Secret [7]-lite message about “attracting more pain, grief and discontent” through one’s behavior. Random terrible things happen to people regardless of the “energy” they’re putting out into the world.

In fact, I think I’ve attracted quite a few boon companions on the basis of all my negative energy. My friends are a hilarious, black-humored lot, and our connections are based on “complaining, gossiping, or criticizing,” as well as mutual grudge-holding and long walks on the beach. I have no use for smiley-faced people and have no desire to become one of them.

But still: My excessive complaining is obviously a problem, as it’s made me tedious to talk to, and it’s not even cathartic after a while. So I am going to try to quit it for a month. My definition of complaining is going to be somewhat loose, and continually evolving, because complaining is so deeply subjective. When is something a legitimate gripe and when does it cross the line into a whine? I can’t answer that question yet, but basically, I will try to stop complaining entirely about small things and quit excessively complaining about the bigger ones. I’ll ask my friends, family, and colleagues to point out to me if I’m complaining and I don’t even know it.

Finally, I’m also curious if my noncomplaint agenda will affect the people around me. According to Clive Thompson’s recent New York Times Magazine [8] article about social contagion [8], “good behaviors—like quitting smoking or staying slender or being happy—pass from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses.” My boss-lady Hanna is also going to participate in this experiment with me. Will our workplace become a shining beacon of joy once our petty griping disappears? Check in with us next week to find out.

—Jessica Grose

Boss-lady here,

When Jess first told me about this, I was, of course, totally condescending. “Great idea,” I said, figuring the post-engagement glow would last a day or two, and soon I could look forward to the usual steady stream of caustic IMs. At the time, I was reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America [9], which is essentially a withering argument against just this kind of project. Ehrenreich made me feel very righteous and proud of my complaining. But Jess persisted, and after a couple of weeks I had to admit that I have a problem.

It’s not simply that I like complaining, or need it. It’s more that I honestly do not know who I would be without my complaining. For many generations back, the women in my family have complained. Sometimes they had a legitimate reason—pogroms and genocide. More recently, it runs to colds or laundry detergent that clumps. I always assumed you were not allowed to be Jewish if you didn’t complain. I complain to my husband, my friends, my colleagues. I complain in person, over the phone, by e-mail. In a group of mothers, I find the one who is complaining about her kids and attach myself to her. Ditto for random strangers on the Metro.

What do I have to complain about? What does it matter? Anything will do: the kids, my hair, FedEx, novels, the New York Times, the weather. Recently it’s been the workload. My conversations on this subject proceed much the way of Jess’ with her husband-to-be. A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I had a classic in the domestic gender wars. (Give me credit for telling this story, since it makes me look like a moron.)

I was complaining about how many after-school activities the kids now had, and how they would ruin my life. My husband David very helpfully drew up a weekly schedule and put it up on the fridge. I nearly killed him. Honestly, it was our most dramatic marital fight to date. Why was I angry with him? It took me a few days to figure it out. Because by helping to solve the problem, he had robbed me of my God-given right to complain.

Then one day—there is always a “one day” in these self-improvement projects—I overheard my 8-year-old daughter talking to her little brother. He was looking for his lost shoe, which she could see peeking out from under the bed. “What’s your problem?” she said. “Are you blind? Even a baby could find it.” For some reason, this stopped me. I wanted to scold her for being so nasty. But then, this was exactly like something I might say, in exactly that undermining tone of voice. I realized then that all my moral lessons, timeouts, heart-to-hearts, had come down to this. I had transferred to her not a set of golden rules to live by, but a sensibility. And that sensibility was ironic, dark, negative, and a little bit mean.

Now, I realize this is not the same as complaining but it’s all of a piece. Or at least I think it is, and that’s what this project aims to find out. The happiness gurus always tell you to stop focusing on the negative things in your life and find things to praise and be happy about. This is still all vague to me, and as this project progresses I’ll do more reading. But the aim is to somehow preserve a critical sensibility and maybe even some irony, but lose the endless negativity and complaining. In other words, to remain, essentially, who I am, but complain a lot less. Or complain better, or “mindfully,” as Jess has started to say. I am not searching for dramatic transformation in the Elizabeth Gilbert [10] mode. Just a more pleasant daily existence.

I have never read a self-help book in my life, except to make fun of it. The Deepak Chopras [11] and Marianne Williamsons [12] of the world, who believe negative energy gives you cancer, are downright offensive and even criminal. One of my closest friends is a yoga teacher and incredibly smart. Sometimes I pretend to believe some of the Eastern philosophy she spouts, but in my heart I think it’s all nonsense. I have another acquaintance who is a kind of happiness guru and also very intelligent. This weekend I tried to read through her website. Honestly, all that packaged cheer just depressed me.

But I will not give up. I have officially pledged myself to be subject No. 1 in Jess’ social contagion experiment. The aim is not to solve the supposed epidemic of female unhappiness [13], because happy is a shifting, mostly meaningless term. But we will try to take concrete, practical steps to reach a state of “mindful complaining.”

We’ll start slowly, by just cataloging a weeklong effort to complain less. Along the way we will check out the new science of happiness, which tries to isolate what parts of our well-being we can and cannot control. Each week we will try something different, which we will announce in advance.

We’ll check out the new academic gurus, for example, like UC Riverside professor Sonja Lyubomirsky, the author of the How of Happiness. We'll also try out the iPhone app she created, Live Happy [14].

For the first week, we’re going to try to define the difference between useful and useless complaining. Can we complain only about things that we expect to change? Is complaining worthwhile when it creates a genuine connection with another person? If you have other good suggestions, let us know. Also, please join us on the DoubleX [15] Facebook page [15], where you can tell us what sorts of complaints you think we should preserve. Take the Mindful Complaining Pledge, tell us how it goes, and try to make yourself less of an irritant to those around you.

—Hanna Rosin