Back in 2006, an American pastor named Will Bowen launched a campaign he called A Complaint Free World. Bowen challenged his parishioners – and then, when the campaign took off, he challenged the viewers of Oprah and readers of his bestselling book – to cease complaining for 21 days straight. I tried it; I even carried (though couldn’t bring myself to wear) one of the purple bracelets Bowen distributed to help people remember not to complain. I didn’t last long, and I thought it all a bit corny, but I could hardly argue with the basic idea. As long as you define “complaining” correctly – we’re talking everyday petty moaning here, not agitating for social change – then of course complaining’s bad. Who wouldn’t want a world with less of it?

But then the other day I read Companions In Misery, a marvelous New York Times essay by Mariana Alessandri, a philosopher at the University of Texas, and had the feeling of an inner tension being resolved. It’s time to come out of the closet: I’m a complainer. And complaining doesn’t get in the way of my happiness; it makes me happy.

Alessandri’s piece takes issue with Unhappy Cities, a recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which concluded that New York City – where Alessandri was born and raised – is America’s least happy city. But the survey on which that judgment was based asked Americans if they were “satisfied” with life, not “happy”. Researchers are “a little bit loose” on that distinction, Stephen Wu, a researcher on a related project, told Pacific Standard magazine. “They’re quite related but they’re not one and the same.” Alessandri thinks they aren’t remotely the same. She writes:

I was certain that a person (even a New Yorker) could be both dissatisfied and happy at once, and that the act of complaining was not in fact evidence of unhappiness, but something that could in its own way lead to greater happiness.

Drawing on the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, Alessandri pushes back against the assumption that complaining is only worthwhile if it gets concrete results; there’s no point in it, the received wisdom goes, if what you’re bemoaning is beyond your control. In New York, she’s irritated by “overcrowding, potholes, high prices, train delays, cyclists, bees” (bees?). She can’t do anything to change them. So why bother complaining?

Well, first of all, because it’s cathartic. But more importantly, moaning brings people together:

Just because the topic of conversation is negative rather than positive doesn’t mean we’re unhappy, and oftentimes the opposite is the case… Two strangers complaining on a subway platform can end up cracking a smile or laughing.

To exchange dissatisfactions is to acknowledge another person’s existence, and to share rueful mutual sympathy at the sometimes tremendously irritating predicament of having been born.

As a British person living in New York, I like to think I know what I’m talking about when it comes to grumbling, and Alessandri pinpoints something that makes me feel at home here. True, New Yorkers are more expressive than the surly Brits when they’re annoyed – the trait that’s commonly described, mistakenly, as New Yorkers being “rude” – but deep down we share the understanding that community can arise as easily from kvetching as good cheer. More easily, perhaps: one way of interpreting a recent British study of people’s behavior on Facebook is that sharing photos of your awesome life actively alienates your followers.

New York can certainly be dispiriting, exhausting, isolating. But New Yorkers’ talent for complaining isn’t a cause of that; it’s an antidote. The complaining is the social fabric – a scratchy fabric, to be sure, but a durable one. When Alessandri relocated to Texas, she writes, she found her affable moaning socially unacceptable; the thought of living in such a complaint-averse climate strikes far more horror into my heart than the worst day in New York.



Indeed, I’d dissent from Alessandri’s argument in only this respect: I don’t think you necessarily need to exchange complaints with others in order to feel camaraderie with your fellow complainers. As fellow Brooklyn-dwellers will know, the G train is an insultingly preposterous excuse for a subway service; as urban infrastructure in a major metropolis, it’s a joke. But the community of people who gripe about the G train feels like a real and vibrant entity, to which I’m happier for belonging. It needn’t be discussed: even my silent, inward complaints seem to connect me to thousands of fellow grumblers.

In Will Bowen’s book, he tells an old joke intended to illustrate the futility of complaining. It concerns two construction workers who eat lunch together. Day after day, one of the men opens his bag to find a meatloaf sandwich and complains: “Another meatloaf sandwich?” Eventually, his friend can’t restrain himself: “Why don’t you just ask your wife to make you something else?” “What are you talking about?” the first man responds. “I make my own lunch!”

The point, of course, is that half the time when we’re complaining we could fix the situation ourselves. (Many other times, we can’t do anything to fix it; in either scenario, the argument goes, we shouldn’t complain.) But there’s another way of looking at it: those two construction workers had a conversation, a rope thrown from one human to another, across the existential void. Maybe it’s the start of a lasting, emotionally supportive friendship that will see them through their worst hours. Or maybe it isn’t; maybe it’s just a conversation about sandwiches. Either way, complaining forged a connection. Which is surely nothing to complain about.