The smartphone in particular has facilitated extemporaneous caviling. Irritations that the passage of time may have soothed can, in the moment, be immediately expressed to an audience. Often these complaints take the form of a narrative developing in real time: the talkative taxi driver, the hostile airline ticket clerk, the interminable security line, the malodorous seatmate and crying baby. Such threads frequently pick up steam as the audience validates or shares the narrator’s posts; the nuisances others must contend with can make for excellent vicarious entertainment, and accreting Likes tend to fuel the microcomplainer.

Fear of Missing Out could also have something to do with microcomplaining. In a virtual environment in which everyone else seems to be crowing about an achievement or storybook lifestyle, those stuck for three hours at the D.M.V. are likely to be even more distressed by their current circumstances. Absent anything to trumpet about in those moments, and faced with a streaming barrage of others’ vacation photos and professional victories, they could feel additionally entitled to grouse.

In this way, the microcomplaint functions as a kind of reverse boast: You may be celebrating a new job or engagement with a Michelin-starred dinner, but look at how much I have suffered today — I’m deserving of more attention.

This one-upmanship of absorbed pain may be the strongest force behind the rise of the microcomplaint. “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?” Tony Soprano asked, in his first therapy session, on the pilot episode of “The Sopranos,” back in 1999. “The strong, silent type. That was an American. He wasn’t in touch with his feelings. He just did what he had to do. See, what they didn’t know was once they got Gary Cooper in touch with his feelings that they wouldn’t be able to shut him up! And then it’s dysfunction this, and dysfunction that. …”

While Tony was talking explicitly about the culture of therapy and confession, he identified a general transformation in the way we regard stoic reserve versus expression of vulnerability.

He surely would have agreed with the conclusions drawn in a 2014 paper in the journal Comparative Sociology called “Microaggression and Moral Cultures.” The authors Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning argue that the increased attention recently given to microaggressions (commonplace exchanges that denigrate marginalized groups; see the recent controversy at Yale over Halloween costumes) on college campuses is a result of “the emergence of a victimhood culture that is distinct from the honor cultures and dignity cultures of the past.”