Bitching About Bitching

The next time you’re engaged in conversation — and it really doesn’t matter with whom — pay special attention to both the topic and the tone of what’s being discussed. For I’d be willing to wager that more often than not, one or both can be readily classified as whining, bitching, or complaining.

In fact, throughout my life’s experience, I’ve come to the reluctant (and highly unscientific) conclusion that a majority of human discourse consists solely of complaining. Complaining about work. Complaining about life. Complaining about other people. Complaining about complaining.

Clearly, it’s one of humanity’s favorite pastimes. But does that make it intrinsically okay? Is bitching a birthright? Is it a personal failing? Or is it a sign of a wider societal malaise?

Types of complaining

Complaining comes in myriad forms, but it can be broken down into four main types, each defined by its purpose.

Comradery

The first of these is comradery or solidarity building. After all, life can often be hard. Everyone experiences challenges — both long-term and day-to-day. Knowing you’re not alone in your struggles is calming and reassuring. It helps you connect with your fellow humanity on a fundamental (and fundamentally human) level. It helps build alliances and can be the glue that binds together social networks.

When colleagues get together after work for Happy Hour and then proceed to complain about work, this is solidarity building. But it can quickly grow tiresome, even toxic. And if left unchecked, it can spoil the entire enterprise.

Perhaps the best solution is to allow only a limited window for whining. After everyone has had their say, switch topics to something positive or interesting and move on.

Catharsis

The next type of complaining is that done in pursuit of catharsis, or the release of internal negativity. As anyone who’s ever visited a therapist knows, simply talking about your problems is a great way to feel better about them. It’s as if giving them voice makes them tangible and thus manageable. If kept bottled up, they only continue to fester and worsen and can create even greater problems down the road.

I’d argue that this is more or less the primary function of Twitter, this complaining for catharsis. Everyone on Earth suddenly has a public outlet to complain about everything under the sun no matter how insignificant or removed from their personal life or expertise. And complain they do!

Everyone seemingly has strong opinions about everything — mostly negative — and there’s no longer any social etiquette about holding back. For all the immense damage such negativity and triviality has done for the world, I sincerely hope it at least lets people vent their frustrations in cyberspace so they can be more pleasant in real life. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

Awareness

If the emphasis of a complaint is less on feelings and more on facts, it can be highly informative. By raising awareness of issues, it can point the way toward solutions.

Ignoring problems seldom does anything other than put them temporarily out of mind, like turning up the radio so you don’t have to hear the funny sound your engine is making. Far better to pull over and pop the hood, even if you don’t know the first thing about mechanics.

This is the level of a lot of climate change discussion at our present juncture in history. While practical solutions can seem impossible to implement, the first step has to be awareness.

If everyone can be made to believe that climate change is real and is being caused by humanity’s actions and lifestyles, perhaps we can act to change things before it’s too late (if it’s not already too late). In this sense, complaining about freak weather that’s no longer so freakish might serve to wake people up and eventually inspire them to action.

Constructive criticism

The best kind of bitching is when it’s constructive. That is, when the complaint is accompanied by a proposed solution.

I’ve heard many a story of corporate executives who will tear into their subordinates ruthlessly if they’re presented a problem with no accompanying mitigation measures or workarounds. While that may seem needlessly harsh, it’s probably a pretty good recipe for success in the long run. Because as noted above, whining without a purpose, while perhaps satisfying on a personal level, does little to solve organizational or societal issues.

And on the flip side, if you never deliver or accept bad news, if you only tell the boss what they want to hear, you fall squarely into the “dictator trap” where you’re surrounded by useless lackeys and sycophants and then can’t fathom why your “special military operation” isn’t going to plan. I think it’s fair to say we’ve all seen this writ large with current geopolitical events.

Baggage and pitfalls

Besides those already mentioned, as well as the obvious one of negativity being a self-fulfilling trap, what are the other downsides to whining, complaining, or bitching? And are there nefarious connotations built into the latter?

The Urban Dictionary defines bitching as:

Excessive complaining without a specific reason and without the will to change something. If the actual reason will be refuted, a new random reason will be immediately invented. It presupposes the loser mindset that nothing can be done to change the situation in positive enjoyment of being angry.

Bitching is by far the worst type of complaining, for it seeks neither solidarity nor catharsis nor solutions. It’s just negativity for the sake of negativity, and precisely no one benefits from that. It becomes a form of masochism, of reveling in self-suffering.

We all could stand less doom and gloom and much more positivity, more celebrating and practicing gratitude. So in that sense, the less bitching, the better off you’ll be. And the more pleasant you’ll be to be around.

The very label “bitching” also raises the thorny question of whether or not the term is purely sexist (as semantically, it essentially means “unpleasant womaning”). If that’s the case, there’s a pretty strong argument to be made that this particular expression ought to be retired.

But ironically, to complain about the term being sexist is itself to manifest the meaning of the term. So any movement to cancel it needs to be accompanied with a suitable replacement. (Any suggestions?) And to maintain gender parity, if “bitching” is out, so too must “mansplaining” go the way of the dodo.

Medium’s role

Few would argue that Twitter is primarily a place of sweetness and light. Personally, deleting my social media accounts and swapping them out for the nobler and more elevated discourse of “social journalism” has been nothing but a boon to my existence. But just because you can say something in two hundred and eighty seconds instead of two hundred and eighty characters doesn’t automatically change the subject matter or the tone it’s delivered in.

Far too many articles and essays on this site are just a long-form version of whining. (See how meta I am?) As far as this writer’s concerned, the world has far too much negativity as is.

Use the opportunity this platform provides to share something positive, something uplifting. It has such powerful potential for good. And the beauty of it is, despite the algorithm and its bias toward sensationalism, the choice of topic and how one goes about presenting it is entirely up to each individual author.

So on that note, having said my piece, I’ll leave it on a happy note. Vent your frustrations, yes, but then allow that newly vacated space to be flooded with positivity. For if there’s one thing nature abhors worse than a vacuum, surely it’s pointless bitching!

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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