Whine and Dine

I’ve often said I speak ‘anecdotally’. When I make my points, I pull from personal experience. In a kind of storytelling format, I usually open with a story and then I try to universalise; if I’m contributing to a conversation it’s usually in the form of a tiny story. It’s spectacular for me when something interesting happens because it’s a new story to tell: you can catch me teeming with delight as I recount how the hairdresser’s assistant who washed my hair inexplicably knocked on my forehead twice (à la “Hey, open the door!”) while I was in the chair. 

But my anecdotal disposition has its drawbacks. The most significant is, by far, my over-complaining. When I’m out of interesting material I stall like an engine, recycling mundane complaints into little anecdotes that don’t do all that much for anyone. The weather’s bad; the wind is cold; the road’s being worked on; the bus is slow; one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish — and by the way, seafood is just awful. Someone asks me how I am and, for whatever reason, I suddenly have nothing good to say; my automatic response is to cast my day in the worst light possible. I walk up to people, and other people walk up to me, and the only small talk we can seem to generate stems from petty inconvenience or laughable mistakes.

Maybe my anecdotal talking style is a product of its time. I’ve noticed that the tendency to complain, especially about little things, is widespread amongst people my age. Petty complaining is everywhere, and it’s drying out conversations like grapes: all we’re left with are raisins. It’s almost like anecdotal speech has mutated into live content creation: this is what happened to me, isn’t that relatable, attractive, important, exciting? Isn’t it kinda quirky that I can’t handle this, that I’m at the end of my rope? 

I can remember a time when this kind of ‘social complaining’ was the official language of Youtubers and content creators. They played at being imperfect: their curated paradigm often included spilling their iced coffee, tripping on obvious things and then laughing at themselves, and/or walking into obvious obstacles. Things got stuck, simple machinery broke, and the creators were always and forever at the end of their rope. That was the content: their failures, their ineptitude. Their reactions were overedited, as exaggerated as flappers and tap-dancers, except with sound. They’d mess up, flail, then spoon feed us a reaction to it. And since everything was hard, it was appropriate to complain about it. Thus, complaining and relatability were forever linked, appearing to be an accessible and worthwhile conversational tool. 

Combine that conversational tool with the aforementioned suggestion that overplayed struggles (iced coffee spilling; tripping) are relatable and you get a maelstrom of constant, never-ending complaining — ploys to cash in on the likeability that struggling with the mundane can bring the speaker. People really want you to know that they burned their dinner, that they tripped in front of a lot of people, or that they failed a test. Don’t get me wrong, conversations would be just as dull if we started packing them with plasticky optimism. In either case, the issue is obviously a lack of substance in lieu of the real work: finding meaningful things to talk about. 

My over-complaining has started to feel a bit jester-esque. I open conversations with the performance of ineptitude and keep going and going, unconsciously motioning for relatability. Fake it enough and you just might make it: you start to appear unable to cope with anything and the dramatics are endless. Beyond that, every problem progressively becomes the property of the world at large and its discourse. I’ve started to feel an emotional pull to keep things for myself, to go quiet and hoard my problems in secret. I want them to be just for my close friends, for us to focus our intention towards solving them, towards achieving positive growth, towards defeating them rather than using them as placeholders. I don’t want my problems to be my social capital anymore; it’s gauche, and people can tell that complaining is for you, not for them. 

The real problems aren’t the ones we front conversations with. So maybe all that ‘relatable’ complaining just isn’t necessary anymore. Maybe we could just — I don’t know — say something interesting. Of course, I’m really not good at this sort of thing. It’s so hard. Isn’t it really hard? Ugh, this was difficult — ha, ha, am I right?

Image from Wikimedia Commons