“Woe is me” decries the Modern Man.
Complainers think that complaining is a form of thinking. They’re not dissimilar from people who will add a snotty little something to a tweet of yours and then feel accomplished. The typical exchange is something like this:
Me: America has been totally busted since 2001.
Complainer: 2001? Try 1913, bub!
Only they don’t say “bub”. They tend to say far nastier things.
“I can’t do this, I can’t do that,” wails the complainer.
One of the simplest formulas in the world is, “Person X doesn’t feel good inside, tries to infect Person Y with same said feeling.”
Complainers typically have a gigantic backlog of negative feedback that they act out onto others. They don’t want to own the backlog, simply spew it out like bile from an upset tummy.
Where the difference can be made is in taking responsibility for the condition of one’s own mind wherein one would resort to complaining in the face of whatever difficulty.
It is not someone else’s job to fix you.
It is not someone else’s job to support you (unless you’re paying for professional help).
The world is not particularly interested in your difficulties, especially if you’re a White male.
I don’t say these statements with a strong feeling one way or the other. This is simply an observation of how the deck is stacked. It is stacked against the consolation of everyone, particularly straight White males.
Complainers generally have a strong Inner Critic.
Meaning, the parent that was dominant in their life was also critical, scolding, shaming, and dominant.
“Nobody wants to look at the devil in the mirror.”
Complainers cannot separate from their childhood feelings of helplessness. Yes, you felt helpless as your parent tore into you and made you feel less-than.
Complainers sort of give up rather than attempt to separate from their feelings of helplessness. They don’t want to recognize the origins of the helplessness. They want to live inside of the helplessness so they don’t ever have to grow up. Their complaints become their friends and a kind of inner community they inhabit.
This is how you end up with Boomers who will complain about the same thing for decades while never fixing it. A lot of Millennials and so on down the line will end up like this.
Mommy loves you, Snookums, one injection at a time.
For some complainers, complaining was the only way they garnered sympathy, however temporary. Sometimes this is called Munchausen syndrome. And some go through Munchausen by proxy where their parent deliberately sabotaged them so that the parent could receive support and sympathy for the “problem child”.
These are rather common experiences but the psychology medical complex attempts to seize control of the situation through their clinical labels.
In a strange way, complainers want to drive others nuts the same way their negative parent drove them nuts. Or they want to induce in others the aggressive behavior their parents showed them. Simon The Boxer. Complainers can’t give it up because it’s all they’ve ever known.
This reminds me of people who grow up on “state assistance” and then end up as diabetics in the hospital on Medicaid.
I think it helps to even know you have a strong Inner Critic, usually modeled after your mother or father.
To stay firmly centered on that fact, even if it takes months or years to solidify.
Not everyone’s Inner Critic will give up right away. And, eventually, Inner Critics do offer benevolent insights. But that takes a while to get to and sometimes a person’s Inner Critic will take advantage of a person’s awareness of this fact in order to jump ahead in line.
Heckin’ based??
A spooky one to consider is how many men are just GIVING UP. Because that’s not all it amounts to. They’re asking to be bullied by the environment. For a Strong Man to come into their life and give it meaning and shape. To march in columns in uniforms again. This potential eventuality means contemplative people such as yours truly get pushed to the fringes even further and sanity goes out of the Marketplace. Society needs its moral philosophers and honest artists if it is to go to a benevolent place. The spells that overcame men en masse in the past should be left to the past. There is much work to do.
We live in a situation where the women, and their cats and dog babies, are all marching in a row, going nutso on abortions, consumer credit, and voting in every Taliban and Epstein they can. We already live under a whacko Godhead and it looks suspiciously a lot like Christine Lagarde:
You can get out of complaining but it means accepting the principle that rationality can resolve all personal challenges. Some men don’t want to do this. They want to persist in a kind of personal mysticism where sorrow and defeat are inevitable.
Is rationality a force stronger than your own personal struggles or not?
Men who don’t like the Hidden Hand of the free market almost 100% of the time cannot overcome their personal struggles. They do not accept their smallness in the face of the collective human capital and pooled intelligence of the human species.
What have you been through? Someone has been through it before and overcome. There are human resources out there for you to tap into and attain gains from.