A Quick Note On Complaining

The purpose of complaining is to get someone to validate that what you are doing is hard. It’s an emotional and mental outlet and a sanity check all at once.

And that’s okay in some contexts, when it’s a controlled release that is prefaced and followed by a general sense of perspective.

Where it becomes cancerous is when it seeps across boundaries–when we start trying to gain empathy from the wrong people or for the wrong reasons.

Complaints in business work the same way. This article at Online MBA highlights how that same principle applies to patronizing a restaurant which is interesting because I was having this conversation about complaining with some friends last night in a restaurant.

We don’t want to hear about how hard the waiter’s job is or why the food came out late. We go out to dinner to escape problems, not to vicariously share in the problems of the person we are paying good money to.

Trying not to complain is noble but hard. Picking when, why, and to whom you complain does a lot to neutralize the poison and is eminently more easy to do.