The Addictive Nature Of Complaining

How it robs you of enjoyment

How many of you know a chronic complainer? A lot of people seem to think that complaining is a way of enacting change in the world. It isn’t, but that doesn’t impact the frequency in which people do it.

Complaining is, as far as I can tell, about ego and attention. I know that might seem a bit odd, but follow me here. When you are complaining about something, it isn’t because you just want the world to know your displeasure, you want the world to do something about it.

If you complain in a restaurant, you want them to fix whatever it is that you perceive is wrong with your meal, the atmosphere, the service, the price, etc. You aren’t going to go to the trouble of telling the waitperson that you didn’t like your meal if you had no intention of them asking you if there is something that they can do to fix it.

It would be a lot more direct, however, to just state that there is something wrong, and you would like this remedy. A lot of people do this when there is nothing that the restaurant actually did wrong. It isn’t their fault that you decided to be adventurous but then found out that calf’s lung really isn’t your cup of tea. Wishing that you had gotten the pasta instead is the epitome of “not their problem”. However, people complain anyway, and they get free stuff.

That is a very specific type of complaining, but I actually mean complaining in general. I get it, life has difficulties, but complaining about them changes nothing about that. Life is still going to have the same difficulties, you are just unloading them on someone else, apparently blissfully unaware that they have their own problems, they just aren’t waxing poetically about them.

Complaining seems to be the primary means of communication for many people. Why? Because it works, but it shouldn’t. If you are the type that responds to other people’s complaining like they are giving you a to-do list, ask yourself why. Why are you rewarding their behavior? It only encourages more of it.

This is especially common in relationships. Complaining is a heavily relied-on means of shaping a partner’s behavior without directly telling them what is wanted from them. Not only is this annoying, but it’s also disrespectful. If I want my Significant Other to do something, I ask him to do it. It is far easier for me to direct a request to him than it is to hint around about it with complaints. It also doesn’t treat him like he’s an interpreter trying to sort out what I might be saying in my vague roundabout whining.

One of the things that I tell people when they ask me for relationship advice is to stop complaining and ask for what you want. Expecting someone to figure out exactly what has you perturbed is disrespectful of everyone’s time. It treats your partner like they are a servant, not an equal. If your mate responded to complaining the way that I think that they should, they would just ignore you, and wait for you to find a grown-up voice in which to have a conversation.

Often when this advice is followed, there is a dramatic difference in how the couple interacts with one another. The person will come back to me and say that they are amazed at the difference, to which I am not surprised at all. Communication is far more effective when it isn’t a quagmire of garbled messaging. There are plenty of people however that are not remotely interested in giving up their preferred way of speaking, which brings me back to what I was speaking about before.

Ego.

How does this relate to ego? Simple. You think your discontent should be everyone else’s problem, when in reality, likely it is just yours and very few, if anyone, actually care that you aren’t happy. You are expecting everyone around you to psychically glean what it is that you want, and then you are assuming that what you want supersedes all other things, and should be attended to.

That is ego. You expecting people to be able to sort through your whinging to know what it is you want is hubris. You could just ask them, and they can tell you yes or no, but that’s not what you do.

Different types of complaining relate to different types of ego thought processes, but they all seem to come back to ego and emotional gratification. Maybe this is more important to neurotypicals than I imagine that it is. Perhaps you get something more out of complaining than just getting people’s focus to be on you. Maybe complaining about pain somehow lessens it, but it seems to me that it just gives it power. It also doesn’t make you a very pleasant person to have to deal with.

What I have learned about the emotional experience of non-complainers when dealing with complainers is this. Those who complain come across as though they are the only ones in the world that suffer. They seem to have the thought that if someone else does not complain that they have nothing that they could complain about and that because their lives appear on the surface to be better, the complainer feels the need to make them understand how difficult things are for them.

Personally, I just find complaining annoying. As I said, it seems to me to be an exercise of ego. There is nothing to be gained by complaining to me. I have no interest in undertaking the process of figuring out whatever problems they imagine are so important that they have to make them my concern. If someone wants something from me, they had best ask me. Otherwise, they are going to be out in the cold wondering why they couldn’t get me to latch onto their sob story. This includes people that are close to me.

I don’t know why this is such a foreign way of dealing with things, but it suits me much better than listening to a person tell me for the fifteenth time about whatever bitch and moan is on their minds at the moment. I simply do not have the patience for those that apparently think that complaining is an efficient way to get people to jump to attention and attend to their needs.

Now, complaining for attention. This is the type of person that will complain about everything. If it’s sunny, it’s too hot. If it’s cold, where did all the sun go? They always have something to gripe about, and it is the first or second thing that they will do when they see you. They might, if they are a seasoned complainer that knows how to garner a captive audience, they might ask how you are doing first. Most people will reply with “fine”, or “okay”, but god forbid that you actually have something going on in your life and make mention of it.

They will appear to listen to you, but they aren’t. They are picking through your words, and cross-referencing them across their entire life spectrum looking for anything that is remotely related to what you are saying so they can one-up you. They always have been through something similar, but exponentially worse. They are just waiting for you to take a breath so they can jump in and let you know that their lives are far more difficult.

Why do people do this? It garners them attention and sympathy. If you are a caring enough or empathetic enough individual, you are going to come away from that conversation thinking that they really have it rough. if you are religious, you might even pray for them.

Do you ever take a step back and consider the laundry list that this individual has downloaded into your brain, and question its legitimacy? You really should. The reason I say this is because these people tend to not get the same response from me as they do from others, and I can tell you what I have observed from them when the sympathy is totally lacking.

It stresses them out, and it makes them try even harder. They will keep looking for things that should initiate a response from me, and they stare at me, in the eyes hard, to see if there is a blip on the radar. When there isn’t, they shift tactics and become super friendly with me. It appears that they believe that the amount of response, or the lack thereof, is directly tied to me having warm feelings for them.

This of course doesn’t work, but I imagine that it must with other people, otherwise they wouldn’t do it. Perhaps some of you that are reading this have seen this tactical shift and can tell me if it worked on you. Why, or why not?

Complaining is very selfish in nature. It comes with the assumption that people care about your state in the world. Some things are worth complaining about. I also understand that complaining can alleviate certain physical difficulties on the emotional spectrum. However, most of the time that is not why people are complaining. They are doing so because they want the focus on them. They want people to at least feign interest in their lives.

This is going to seem like a strange segue, and that is because I have been writing this piece over several days when it seems like I can actually access my computer because it has enough of a charge to do so. No power, remember? Anyway, as I have been writing this I came across something that made me think about it quite differently. It was a moment of cognitive empathy that told me that I was missing a part of the puzzle, but I really should have been able to put them together without the added help.

I have said many times that neurotypicals need other people. They require personal relationships, and without them, they die. That is something that I know cognitively but can easily overlook the importance of when I am thinking about something that I don’t imagine to be related. That is until I hear or see something that provides me a line drawn between the two, that links them in a way that I was previously oblivious to.

Today that link was made between complaining, and people needing other people.

I have a hypothesis at the moment about complaining, and even possibly about people that never complain until they have to. I have said many times that strangers will tell me their entire life stories without prompting. It isn’t a rare occurrence, and it has made those close to me absolutely baffled when they see it happen. Recently I came across a Jordan Peterson quote that got me thinking about this behavior. The quote states:

“People organize their brains with conversation. If they don’t have anyone to tell their story to, they lose their minds.”

This struck me. Perhaps what is actually happening when these people tell me everything that they would never tell their closest friends, let alone a stranger, is that they are not the type to complain, or even if they are, they have no one to hear them. Perhaps in their lives, this habit accompanies a tremendous amount of stress at the moment, and there is something about me that subconsciously tells them that they can tell their story, whatever it may be, and nothing bad will come to them.

Often I have looked for an explanation as to why people do this. It is strange, not only to me, but to people around me as well. I am beginning to think that this ties in with people needing personal relationships, but for whatever reason, what they tell me either can’t be shared with people that they do have a personal relationship with, or that these people feel fairly isolated, and there isn’t anyone that they can speak to.

Online relationships have both helped and hindered this I would guess. If you feel like there is a whole community of people out there that you can tell everything to, it would feel a little less like you are on your own. However, people online are fickle at best, and also, they are just text on a screen. Even if you video chat with someone, when you disconnect, you are still alone in your house. I imagine that could be very disconcerting.

Online friendships may not actually fill the need for human companionship that neurotypicals require, but it may be a stopgap for it in the short term. The more people live online, and the less of a fulfillment those relationships provide, the less heard a person may feel. The stress of life doesn’t go away just because you have someone half a world away that you speak to on a nightly basis, and that stress needs to go somewhere. Maybe that is why I have noticed an uptick in complaining. People feel less heard because they are less connected.

Perhaps complaining is the result of poor interpersonal relationship skills that is resulting in people not knowing how to speak to others in a productive manner. Perhaps it is also the result of people becoming more and more isolated. This is all conjecture on my part of course. All I can do is speculate on what see, and what I experience.

Complaining is a strange behavior to me. In my mind, there is no point to it. If a situation cannot be helped, there is no point in bringing it up. No matter what is happening in my life I don’t complain about it. If someone asks me how I am doing, usually the most they will get out of me is, “fine”. If they know me well, and it’s applicable, “tired”, but that’s it. I have no interest in dwelling on anything negative, as there is nothing about doing so that is helpful in managing it.

I get that this is not the case with other people, and complaining is something that comes naturally to some. I now have to wonder if that has to do with their need for connection with others, or if it is an overinflated sense of self. It may be the first, but often it appears to me to be very connected to the second. Then again, this may just be appearances, and not based in reality.

It may well be that complaining is a vast mixed bag with many motivations. I simply wonder what the base of it is. I can’t imagine that complaints would endear a person to the tribe. I wonder if since humans have moved further away from tribal living if complaining has become more of a way to ensure that the person is still noticed, and therefore thought of. It wasn’t exactly like you could disappear from the village, only to be found dead in your hut a year and a half later. People noticed when others in the tribe were ill, missing, or acting differently. Now, that isn’t the case, and perhaps that is why complaining has become such a common past-time for so many people.