What's the use of complaining?

"How are you today? How's it going?"
"Can't complain. It doesn't do any good anyway."

Do these lines sound familiar? We say them every day. OK, maybe not every day but often. Is there any point in complaining when, no matter how much we complain, no-one listens, no-one cares, and things stay as they have always been.

A reader of Walt's blog has this suggestion:
Can we suggest that Mr. Whiteman becomea member of "complaint-free world"? The premise is that the world givesback to you what you think. So if you complain, the world will give you something to complain about. Just a thought! (a complaint-free thought).

In her new book customer service, Your Call Is (not that) Important to Us, Emily Yellin tells the story of Rev. Will Bowen, pastor of an evangelical Protestant church in Kansas City, MO. His book, A Complaint-Free World, challenges people to stop complaining. Why? "When you're not articulating complaints, then they have nowhere to go, and your brain literally stops producing them, and you become a happier person."

Bowen now sees a complaint simply as an unmet need. "I'm not saying that we all don't have unmet needs, and that we want those needs met. What I'm saying is that just to gripe about them and say, 'This is the way it is,' keeps you in the way it is."

What he's not saying, it seems to Walt, is that if you just suck it all up and greet the world with a smile, the world will be a better place. What he's inveighing against is complaining for its own sake. It seems to Walt that complaining should be purposeful -- trying to get your needs met, and trying to suggest ways to improve products, services, policies, processes, etc. etc. We used to call it constructive criticism.

There is value in a constructive complaint. A complaint is an opportunity to improve, to make things better. And for the complainer, it's therapeutic -- a good way to get things off your chest. So Walt says: don't keep it all bottled up inside you. Get on the phone. Get on the Internet. Write letters to the editor. Write to your congressman or member of parliament. And good luck to you!