On the Curative Properties of Bitching
....stop telling me to stop complaining, dammit
So before I was an illustrator, I worked a series of corporate administrative type jobs, mostly for EU funded development projects. On one of those I had bluffed my way into the position of Financial Manager, with zero requisite experience for that role. To my credit, I hadn’t lied - I stated boldly in the interview that I had never done financial project management as such before, but - how hard could it be, amirite? I must have sounded hella convincing, because they gave me the role.
This position, as you can imagine from facts outlined above, came with a steep learning curve. In my scramble to learn on the job, I spent many late nights in that office, wrestling with tax exemptions, exchange rate conversions, and mountains of travel expense forms. The one single thing that saved me from absolutely losing my mind in the process was Anne.
Anne (pronounced Ann-é), was the Finnish girl responsible for central project finances. We had offices in seven Balkan countries, and the headquarters in Sweden - she was there, at the HQ, making sense of all our local financial reporting chaos. Anne was poorly treated and severely overworked, and she would often also be in the office late at night, sorting through her end of the endless financial paperwork salad. Our interaction started due to me having questions, many questions. At first, extremely stupid questions. She was very patient and kind with my desperate cluelessness.
But as I got to grips with the role and figured out what the hell I was doing, our nightly conversations turned into wild and rapacious bitching sessions.
It was the catharsis we both needed. We were both overworked, our roles had bloated far beyond their initial scope, we had both been given certain promises that didn’t end up getting fulfilled, we were stressed and annoyed by multiple management decisions that seemed intent on making our lives additionally difficult, and incessantly complaining to each other in ever more creative terms was, honestly, a salve on both our blistered souls.
In general I think we can admit that people complain about things with far more energy, creativity or gusto than they would ever employ for praise. A positive book or film review might be informative or mildly intriguing, but a searingly negative one will be a laugh riot. It’s not by accident that we have multiple creators who have risen to fame entirely on amusing reviews of terrible books and movies. I won’t read the books or watch the movies, but you better believe I’m watching that bitching review. These are honestly my main source of information on pop culture.
Conversely, I often come across content that tries to tell me I need to stop complaining and be more positive. You don’t have ‘problems’ marketing your art! You have ‘challenges’!!! And remember - every challenge is actually an opportunity!!! It’s not that you ‘have to promote your work incessantly in order to get any attention’ - it’s that you ‘GET’ to talk to people about the work you’re passionate about! Yay! Excitement! Think of the privilege!
And I do NOT disagree with this notion at the baseline. Yes, many difficulties CAN be creatively handled, and might bring us to new opportunities we hadn’t considered. Yes, being positive and proactive will do more for you than being dispirited and downtrodden. Yes, the glass which is half-empty is also half-full, we should learn to recognize the privileges we do have, and focusing on the possibilities in front of us is naturally more useful than constantly whining about what we don’t have.
But.
I feel there is something lowkey sinister about being told to stop complaining. It never feels like it’s being said to make my life better. It feels like it’s meant to make other people’s lives less inconvenienced by my opinions. It’s very much a ‘shut up and get with the program’ sort of sentiment. Because, genuinely, what is so negative about complaining? Why are we trying to put certain things beyond the reach of criticism?
I’ve heard people say ‘you shouldn’t criticize the government, you should appreciate what the country has done for you.’ Hummmm, does appreciating something, or someone, mean never criticizing them? Who loves you more, the acquaintance who will never bring up an uncomfortable subject or a friend who is close enough to tell you outright when they think you’re making a mistake? I love my child dearly, yet I would never NOT tell him when I think he is doing something harmful to himself or to others. Why would this not hold true for my community, or my country? How does my silence actually improve anything for anyone? If you love something, you want to see it thrive. You support it thriving, by admitting what needs change.
I’ve been told recently - by close friends - that I shouldn’t complain so much about social media scraping our data and using it to train generative AI models that aim to replace us as cheap content creators, because ‘I’m using the service for free, I have given it access to my images, so I should have known they would do this.’
It was my own fault. I had signed Ursula’s pact and now I should have no voice.
But this is not how society functions. If I have signed on to a certain deal, and then that deal continued to become continuously worse, and worse, and worse, I am going to bitch about that. And when I have bitched for long enough and nothing has changed, I’m gonna take my ball and I’m gonna go home.
The bitching, you see, is a warning sign. A canary in the goldmine, if you will. Yes of course we do live in a complainy culture, and there is often the feeling that some people are never content. Yes sometimes it seems like griping is a national sport and if we held a Kvetching World Cup, the competition for gold would be fierce. But when there is a massive wave of people complaining about something happening in society, very often they have a point.
The fact that our governments and media are completely ignoring our concerns about the way our countries are responding to the egregious violence in Palestine IS an actual issue.
The fact that Adobe, Meta and all the other Digital Overlords have decided to take off all the masks and openly tell us we have no choice in getting our souls scraped to feed their generative AI models IS an actual issue.
The fact that more and more people can’t afford the rent and food prices in major cities, while massive corporations report record-breaking profits, IS an actual issue.
Maybe it’s not that I should complain less. Maybe it’s time you started complaining a little more?
Bitching, my friends, is a superpower. People have told me ‘Why do you keep complaining about that? It’s not like you can change it?’ But here exactly lies the magic of bitching. I don’t need to bitch about the things I can change. I’ll just change those. (Ok sometimes it might take seventeen tries or so. Shut up ok I’m working on it. 😓) It’s for the things I’m powerless to change that I must raise my whiny little voice and signal my distress. I can’t do anything about it, but it’s not ok that cherry tomatoes cost 10$ at Metro. I can’t do anything about it, but it’s not ok that legacy media are covering up news stories and we all have to be sleuthing around for real information on social media. I can’t do anything about it, but it’s not ok that rents are rising ten times faster than salaries.
And my incessant little whinge will be a beacon, a signal to others that they, too, can think these things are bad, and unfair. That they, too, are allowed to feel frustrated and dispirited at certain things, and are not always obliged to ‘think positively’ and ‘be proactive’. As we aggregate, we may find small ways to make positive changes on those issues that inspired us to bitching. And in the meantime… we’ll be soothed by knowing we’re not alone.
Take that, positivity!
You've managed to pack almost every paragraph with some point that invites elaboration. Good stuff.
I'll touch on just one for now - "In general I think we can admit that people complain about things with far more energy, creativity or gusto than they would ever employ for praise." - assuming you imply humans and/or things, situations, etc created by humans, I think it's just objectively so. In this world there are much fewer things to praise, apart from maybe nature. I personally have no problem complimenting anyone or anything when indeed it's called for.
The culture, though, calls for expressing positivity always - smiling, praising, etc - but when there's no underlying reason for it, it just looks and sounds fake.