I’ve done an awful lot of kvetching on Twitter about my day job in the last year. I also hate complainers. I want to talk about that dissonance.
My general opinion of complainers is the same most people have: That even when the thing they’re complaining about finally gets fixed, they’ll just go and find a reason to complain about the fixed thing. For example, someone who hates his apartment might spend months complaining about it, eventually move into a new apartment, and then stop complaining for a little while until he starts complaining about his new apartment.
Similarly, one probably assumes that, once my day job situation is resolved and I’ve finally transitioned into my new life as a full time game developer, I’ll just find something about the dev life to bitch and moan about. I want to present a counterexample that I hope will convince you that I’m not like that; that I am, in fact, by the definition we’re assuming here, not a chronic complainer.
Those who know me well should be familiar with my demeanor from before I met my wife. Back in those days, I constantly complained about being single. While I believe I was justified in doing so (it was a seriously painful thing for me), I know it was annoying. But a chronic complainer, upon meeting and wooing the girl of his dreams, would then go on to complain about his relationship with said dream girl, yes?
Do I do that?
Of course not. I’m completely in love with my wife, and utterly content with my relationship with her. All those years of complaining about where my love life was way back then happened because I was hurting, just as I am today with my day job.
So yes, I’ve been bitching a lot lately, and I am truly sorry for that, but I need the world at large to understand that, right now, at this particular point in my professional life, I am genuinely and intensely unhappy. This is not a mindless complainy habit talking when I whine about my job. This is pain talking. Just as someone with a broken knee has a right to complain about the physical pain, a person in a life situation that causes him regular emotional pain should be allowed to voice the feeling when it gets bad. The two kinds of pain are more similar than you think; They tweak out the exact same parts of the brain, in fact.
I don’t like being like this, and I know nobody likes hearing about it, but please don’t assume I’m just a complainer by nature. I’ve been around people like that and they make me sick.
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