February 19, 2008.   A friend sent me an article in which the author says that he gripes a lot but believes that his gripe level has been fairly constant throughout life.  He just gripes about different things than he did in the past.  This got me thinking about my own griping and the value of griping in general.  I decided that I do complain a lot, and, unlike the author of the article, my gripe level (measured by number of complaints) has probably increased as I've gotten older.  I also decided that griping is healthy.

The reason my gripe level has increased is that I'm constantly finding new things to bitch about, but I've not had reason to discard many of my old complaints.  Much of what I grumbled about in the past hasn't changed, so why should I stop grumbling about it?  In fact, experience has validated many of my old gripes.

For example, I wasn't very old when I observed that people do an awful lot that is really mindless and stupid.  The more experience I had, the more valid all the gripes I had about stupid people became.  I learned that common sense is not very "common" and began to subscribe to the view that it is impossible to underestimate the intelligence of the human race.  Very soon, I realized that this principle applied to human institutions and organizations as well – schools, corporations, the government, and so on.  It wasn't just that "to err is human"; it was that to do the same stupid things over and over is pretty much normal human behavior.

One could argue that, even if this is true, there's no point in bitching about it.  While there's some validity to the view that complaining about something that cannot be changed is futile, I believe that the anti-gripe, Pollyanna crowd are wrong (I gripe about them, too).  In the first place, I suspect that they are hypocritical and cowardly; they are secretly quite annoyed but afraid to admit it.  In the second place, I think that they are lazy and defeatist; they don't want to exert the effort to correct any of the gripe-worthy conditions in the world, so they rationalize that this is the way everything has to be.  The only other explanation is that they're too dumb to notice.

These (outwardly) jolly Pollyannas also try to charge us gripers and grumblers with being nonproductive human beings whose negativity retards progress and ruins the quality of life for everyone else.  "There you go, complaining again," they say.  "You're part of the problem."  No, we're trying to be part of the solution.  Whatever progress and improvements to the quality of life we've had the good fortune to experience have been brought about by people who recognized that something was broken or deficient or not working well – and tried to fix it (or, at the very least, pointed it out).  If they didn't gripe about the status quo, nobody would have tried to change it.  If we all had decided that getting soaked in the rain is just fine and the way things are supposed to be, nobody would have invented umbrellas and raincoats.

Another charge that the Pollyannas level against the grumblers is that grumblers stand in the way of their own happiness.  That's really quite absurd.  Am I supposed to believe that I'm going to be happier if I ignore all the irritations and annoyances I experience and say nothing about them?  To be sure, my griping may make someone else unhappy, but it doesn't make me unhappy.  Grumbling is therapy, and therapy makes us feel better, not worse.  If the anti-grumblers were honest about it, they would admit that what bothers them is not that the the grumblers are unhappy but that the grumblers make them unhappy.  Ironically, what they want to do is gripe about the grumblers, but Pollyannas won't allow themselves to complain, so they mutter stuff such as, "You're just making yourself miserable."  Hey, if grumbling made me feel miserable, I wouldn't do it.

Let's look at this realistically.  Millions of people pay hefty sums to therapists and psychiatrists so that they can spend some time in these people's offices.  What do they spend 90% of this time doing?  Grumbling – that's what.  Only they call it therapy.  Often, the only significant difference between grumbling and therapy is that grumbling is free.  The other difference is that therapists are legally entitled to dispense prescriptions for pills that will provide chemical happiness.  I don't know how these pills work, but I suspect that they anesthetize certain emotional receptors in the brain, thus converting a feeling human being into something that has the emotional depth of a cud-chewing cow in a pasture.  I would much rather grumble and experience the highs and lows that make life interesting than wander about in a state of chemically induced happiness.  (Note, however, that I fully approve of the use of such medications by people afflicted with clinical depression, but that is something else entirely.  The clinically depressed are not grumblers; they are usually afflicted with a hopelessness and recurrent despair so deep that they can't summon the energy to grumble.)

Grumbling is, therefore, a joyous activity, albeit a somewhat perverse kind of joy.  At its simplest level, it is a sign that we care – if one doesn't care, if one is utterly indifferent about something, one wouldn't bother to gripe about it.  For instance, I don't happen to care about baseball; therefore, I don't grumble about whether or not baseball players ruin the game by taking steroids.  At a deeper level, bitching about the state of affairs in the world is a sign that we are involved in the world, not dispassionate observers who are sitting on the sidelines unconcerned with whether civilization as we know it is being flushed down the cosmic toilet.

Finally, grumbling has a creative side that is thoroughly unappreciated by non-grumblers.  Among grumblers, it is seen as wit.  Those of us who gripe a lot become, in the natural course of events, acutely aware of the foibles of mankind, including our own.  Although we are quite serious in our gripes, we simultaneously develop a consciousness of the ridiculous and the absurd, and what is absurd is, at some level, also quite humorous.  For instance, some bureaucratic nonsense (the byzantine nature of tax forms, for example) is grounds for serious complaints, yet it is, at another level, quite comical – a treasure trove for cynical humor.  Many a grumbler who is scowling on the outside is smiling on the inside at the absurdity of it all, and the only sign that this is happening is the acerbic wit that the grumbler displays as he hurls verbal brickbats at his target.

Well, I don't want to express all my thoughts here, for I am thinking seriously about writing a book called The Joy of Grumbling.  It could be a best-seller like The Joy of Sex, The Joy of Cooking, and other "Joy of" books.  The title should leap off the shelves – at amateur grumblers who want to fine-tune their skills, at people who don't grumble but wish they did, at grumblers who feel guilty about it and seek validation, at people who live with grumblers and would like to understand them better, and probably a variety of other niche markets that I haven't thought of yet.  And, if it doesn't sell, I can always grumble about that.