we have normalised complaining about everything & changed nothing
on venting culture, the shared complaint, and the relief that replaces resolution
Something interesting happened when we all got access to a platform.
We started talking about our problems. Constantly. Collectively. With a specificity and a volume that had never previously been possible.
The bad date got a TikTok. The toxic workplace got a thread. The exhausting family dynamic got a voice note sent to the group chat and then a longer voice note when the first one did not fully capture it and then a whole conversation that lasted 40 minutes and ended with everyone agreeing that yes, it is a lot, and yes, you are completely valid, and yes, something should probably be done about it.
And then everyone went back to their lives.
And the bad date kept happening. And the toxic workplace kept extracting. And the exhausting family dynamic kept exhausting. And the following week there was a new TikTok.
This is venting culture. And it has become so thoroughly the dominant mode of processing difficulty that most people have stopped noticing that venting and addressing are not the same thing.
This kind of writing is slow, unoptimized, and made with care. If this resonated, you’re welcome to support it.
Venting feels productive because it produces something real. The relief is genuine. The solidarity is genuine. The specific comfort of saying the thing out loud and having someone respond yes, I know, me too, this is not nothing.
It is, in fact, one of the more human experiences available. Community built around shared difficulty is as old as difficulty itself.
The problem is what happens after. Or more precisely: what does not happen after.
Venting has always existed as a pressure valve, the release of tension that allows you to return to the situation with slightly more capacity to tolerate it.
The function was always temporary relief, not resolution. What has changed is the scale and the speed at which the venting now happens, and the degree to which it has come to substitute for the harder work rather than supplement it.
When the venting is immediate and the audience is enormous and the validation is instant and the dopamine hit of a thousand people saying same arrives within the hour, the pressure valve releases so efficiently that the pressure required to actually change something never builds.
You feel heard. You feel less alone. You feel, briefly, like something has happened. And something has, just not the something that would change anything.
The group chat that spends 40 minutes agreeing that the situation is terrible is a group chat that spent 40 minutes not changing the situation.
There is a particular kind of chronic complaining that social media has made not just acceptable but aspirational. The person who has a sharp, funny, relatable take on everything that is wrong, with dating, with work, with the cost of living, with the patriarchy, with the algorithm, with the whole arrangement, is rewarded for the sharpness and the funniness and the relatability.
The reward is engagement. The engagement is not accompanied by any expectation that the complaining will lead anywhere. That would be beside the point.
This is not cynicism about complaining. Naming what is wrong matters.
The articulation of a shared experience has genuine political and personal value. The problem is the loop that closes after the naming, the one that says: I have named it, others have agreed, the thing has been witnessed, we are done here.
The complaint has become the destination rather than the beginning of the journey toward changing what produced it.
We have, collectively, become very fluent in the language of what is wrong and increasingly unpractised in the work of making it otherwise.
I don’t think people are lazy.
I think the architecture of the platforms we use to process our difficulties has optimised so efficiently for the expression of dissatisfaction that it has quietly crowded out the messier, slower, less shareable work of doing something about it.
Organising is not content.
Changing your circumstances is not a TikTok.
Leaving the situation that is making you miserable does not go in the caption.
The algorithm has no mechanism for rewarding the unglamorous act of actually addressing the thing, only for rewarding the articulation of it.
And so we articulate. We vent. We validate each other’s venting. We feel briefly less alone inside our unchanged situations.
We return the following week with a fresh complaint, because the situation is unchanged, because the complaint was the whole response, because relief replaced resolution so thoroughly that we have started to mistake one for the other.
The shared complaint is real. The community it builds is real. The relief is real.
The situation is still there on Monday.
The thinking work
Name one thing you have complained about. to a friend, in a group chat, in your own head, more than three times without taking a single action toward changing it.
Ask honestly: is the complaining releasing enough pressure that the situation remains tolerable?
And is tolerable what you actually want?
xo,
musingsofacitygirl — still spiraling, still observing, still surviving beautifully
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I'm answering your question: I've vented about work more than three times. I've just become comfy here and while they do get under my skin, I can handle it. But this job isn't what I truly want to do. So, I stay out of comfort of knowing this beast and fear of the outside world.