DoubleX editors’ final week of trying not to complain.

This is the final entry in the non-complaining project. Read the first entry here, the second here, and the third here.

In our last noncomplaining project entry, Hanna vowed to be “more visibly cheerful and appreciative” toward her friends on the advice of positive psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky. As I am already outwardly bouncy (Hanna predicts I will continue to sound like a cheerleader even when I am 40), I decided to try out another aspect of Lyubomirksy’s friendship advice, a strategy she calls simply “making time.”

Lyubomirsky says to “create rituals that allow you to get together and be in touch on a regular basis. …In this way, friends become as much a priority as all the other areas of your life.” This counsel is somewhat obvious and self-help-y, but it still makes sense. Commitments to my friends can just feel like yet another responsibility in my over-packed schedule, and I get resentful and whiny about them.

I am in almost constant IM-contact with my friends who have media jobs like mine, and so with very little effort I know the intimate, LOL-inflected minutiae of their lives: whom they’re dating, what they’re eating, when they’re on their periods. But with my friends who have jobs that actually require them to step away from the Internet abyss, I have to pick up a phone and call and make dates to see them in person.

One of my closest friends, my ex-roommate and college bestie Anna, is one of these off-line ladies. I am always thrilled to see her and excited when she calls me. But Lyubomirsky made me think about how she is usually the one to initiate our rendezvous. This made me feel awful—she means so much to me, and I would never want her thinking that I wasn’t really invested in our friendship. I decided to text her this week, and after a back and forth, we ended up having a 30-minute phone call and making plans to hang out this weekend.

I got off the phone with Anna feeling high, almost as if I had just returned from a run. I had been about to spend a night inside because it was raining and the subways weren’t running right, but I decided to go socialize instead. But what if this convivial mood was merely narcissism masquerading as happiness? “What a great friend I am!” I had been thinking. But then I took a step back: I called my good friend. I didn’t give her a kidney. This is pretty much basic friendship maintenance, and I shouldn’t give myself a mental gold star just for being a decent human being. This reveals a fundamental flaw with the happiness psychologists: Many of their lessons are grossly self-absorbed. In her chapter on positive psychology in Bright-Sided, Barbara Ehrenreich talks about her frustration with the narcissism at the center of a happiness test created by psychologist Martin Seligman. “[A] question that had hurt my score [was one] where I had confessed to being ‘pessimistic about the future,’ assuming that it was the future of our species at issue, not just my own.”

Even though my overall worldview is more like Ehrenreich’s, at the beginning of this project I worried that the attempt to stop kvetching would sublimate my true, rather pessimistic nature. But both the positive psychologists and Ehrenreich have been instructive when I remember the original aim of our project, which was not to stop complaining entirely, but to stop whining about the petty stuff that doesn’t matter. Lyubomirsky and Seligman’s practical behavioral strategies about how to quell various anxieties and be more vocally grateful about my lucky circumstances have helped me weed out some of the more noxious complaints.

Tags: Barbara Ehrenreich, Happiness, noncomplaint, whining

Jessica Grose and Hanna Rosin are the managing and founding editors of Double X, respectively. Click here to follow Jessica on Twitter and here to follow Hanna. To follow the non-complaining project on Facebook, click here.

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The Whiner's Guide to Not Complaining

Two DoubleX staffers attempt to cut down on kvetching.

Jessica Grose and Hanna Rosin
|
October 19, 2009

The Noncomplaining Project: How Do You Define a Whine?

Entry No. 2 in our monthlong complaint diet.

Jessica Grose and Hanna Rosin
|
October 27, 2009

The Noncomplaining Project: What's Wrong With Our Happiness Gurus

Parsing the advice of positive psychologists.

Jessica Grose and Hanna Rosin
|
November 10, 2009

Life

Can Cranks Turn Into Cheerleaders?

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