ESSAYS on THE NEW ECONOMY #11

Why Complaining is Cool, and Building is Better

In the New Economy, it will be more important your health than your wealth, more valuable the quality of your friendships than the quantity in your bank account, more inspiring to show how curious you are about others than to demonstrate how much you already know. Are you manifesting the New Economy in your life?

I used to be a whiner, and I still am sometimes. It’s cool.

The French LOVE to complain. They complain about the weather (it rained for weeks on end this spring, and it’s grey every winter). They complain about government ‘reforms’ and then they complain about the strikes protesting the government reforms. They complain about bureaucracy, food, family… They complain about everything, really.

Why do they do that?

It’s not a rhetorical question. Since I’m basically French now (approaching the five-year mark being a French citizen) I’ll make it personal: We French even like to complain about ourselves. Why do we do that?

Because it feels so good!

Whining and complaining is sometimes the very best we can do. Don’t believe me? Maybe it’s your cultural conditioning, a way to keep you separate, a way to keep things the way they are. Consider this:

When construction recently started on a building right next to ours, it not only meant drilling and digging and irritating noise, dust and needing to walk on the other side of the street as soon as we went out of our building, it also meant we lost the view outside our bedroom window (which had been for four years a community garden and soothing skyline).

No one had asked our opinion before starting the construction. If they had, I would not have approved. It made our life worse than before.

Rather than let the frustration fester, I started to talk openly about the negative change with friends and neighbors. It felt good.

There’s a severe shortage of teachers in France, and each year several classes in almost every school go unstaffed for part of the year. The children are usually still welcomed in the school, but their class is broken up and spread across other classrooms, even with students from a different grade. It’s glorified babysitting, and without parents complaining, the government wouldn’t prioritize fixing the situation. To be fair, the complaining is only the beginning. The complaining helps highlight the problem. Fixing the problem is going to take a good while longer. (It’s not like the government can whip teachers up out of thin air.) But if the French were silent about the issue, does it make the problem disappear?

Many people whine and complain, not only the French. The whining can seem trivial (ah! the rainy weather today), but let’s not forget: To let feelings of frustration or disappointment be expressed is to let off steam and to welcome in connection.

Now, some people whine and complain, and that’s all they do. It seems like they’re saying, Woe is me! My life is so tough. And maybe we find it annoying they say that because we have problems too, real problems! And maybe our problems are more serious than theirs. Still, why not join in the party? We can all complain.

If we hold those feelings in, later on we could very well erupt or explode with violence. Sound extreme? Here’s another example.

At the start of the Paris Olympics this summer, 3 of 4 high-speed train lines in France were sabotaged by “far-left anarchists” (as described by the ministry of the interior). These were people very frustrated, very upset, willing to commit arson (setting fire to property illegally) and wanting to disrupt the train travel of hundreds of thousands of people.

Often, these acts of public violence are related to pent up frustration and deep-set anger that a person can feel. And it brings us to the next piece of my argument, which can be summarized like this:

Authority figures don’t like complaining. With time, the people who lack (or feel that they lack) power are trained to be more polite and more constructive and to give up on their complaining.

Two types of violence can result: (1) Domestic violence, in which an authority figure (often a father/husband) does violence to family members at home, or (2) Revolutionary violence, in which ideologically-motivated protesters commit violence [sometimes labelled as “terrorist acts”]. In both cases, the violence is a horrible and unwanted outcome. And while it might not be fully preventable, it is enabled by the silence of those who are feeling unhappy about their situation.

We can protect ourselves from this violence, when we understand what we are being trained for culturally speaking, and when we understand how to claim our power in a more peaceful way.

I was trained to not complain. When I would question things, or bring up uncomfortable truths, I was often met with silence. People preferred that I not rock the boat, that I not get upset. It was preferred that I let others decide what is fair, that I assume the people in authority were doing the best that they could, that there was no better way.

Complaining can be more than just expressing annoyance. It can be an attempt to figure out a (better) solution. We could be criticizing others or highlighting a problem because we’re hoping somebody somewhere will fix that problem that we see. If we’re criticizing others, it can be because we see it as their fault! We’re directing our dissatisfaction towards another person, so they know they ought to change things. They need to be part of the solution. We’re expressing annoyance but also hopefulness that things can get better.

And it’s true sometimes our criticisms are unjust. Sometimes we are part of the problem. It happens often enough we blame others for not doing their part, while we’re ourselves doing very little and benefitting from others’ hard work. We’re complaining at life not being perfect, while we’re comfy in armchairs that someone else built! That happens, sure. When we expect someone else to fix all of our problems, it gets to be a bit much, I agree.

I agree we ought to take responsibility. Let’s not point fingers. Criticizing others is easy; creating something ourselves is hard. Let’s be building. Let’s be creating. Let’s be finding new ways to live together, make cool things, and get along.

That said, there are some fundamental truths we are sometimes forgetting, and it’s because it is more convenient for the powers that be if we just keep forgetting. If we aren’t complaining, then we can’t find our allies. If we fall silent, we start to believe we’re all alone. We let things go on, business as usual. We don’t rock the boat. Sometimes, we become violent.

There are problems in the ways we’re conducting business that are hurting the planet, breaking up families, burning out careworkers, disrupting communities. Are we going to say that it’s impolite to complain? That it’s annoying? That it can’t all be true? How will we find real solutions then?

It was only when in France, where I re-found the courage to complain, to whine a little, to sound petty… that I found healing and hope and possibility. It’s because of growing up in the United States that I learned to be entrepreneurial, to see value in building (or re-building).

Let’s be building, creating, and taking responsibility. And let’s also leave space for complaining. Letting off steam, being a little petty… As long as it’s no big deal, part of the human experience (and only one part of it), then I dare say complaining can be therapeutic.