[Seth Says] Always Be Enterplaining

People are exhausting to deal with.

This is a general truth about people. Or I guess arguably, it's two general truths about people, both that they are exhausting to deal with, and that they (we? is it a bad sign that my default is not to include myself in people? guess I'll ask the supreme overlord when I get back to Nebulax 7) find other people exhausting to deal with. (hopefully you don't find frequent parentheticals exhausting.)

Of course, not all people are the same degree of exhausting at all times. Obviously, people driving big trucks without mufflers are very exhausting. (If you don't like that joke, you can blow it out your tailpipe.) But there are also people who tend to give us energy, and people who tend to be energy vampires. And given my propensity to avoid the sun and be awake at night, I have to work hard at not being the latter. (If you don't like that joke, you can blow it out your pale type.)(Hey, all this wordplay vamping really sucks.)
 

One of the ways to be an exhausting person to deal with is to constantly complain about everything. This can earn you the label of being a very negative person, and people might start to avoid you if they're trying to have a good day and don't want to be subjected to an endless torrent of complaint, which come to think of it, describes most people on most days, because very few people want to drink from the unhappiness firehose.

But -- and it's a big but (and I cannot lie) -- it turns out that complaining is really cathartic and consequently most of us want to do it sometimes. Maybe even often. Because there are lots of things that certainly merit complaint occurring nonstop in our world, like the climate crisis and the fact that the big corporations even amidst non-stop catastrophic weather events continue to just drill and pollute and we're destroying the climate at an ever-faster rate, and America's absolutely atrocious for-profit healthcare system, which just this past week I've had family members and friends share their annoyed tales of fighting to get problems seen to in a reasonable amount of time, not to mention that two separate cancer GoFundMes crossed my Facebook feed in the past week because even with health insurance, the cost of being sick in this country is more than many people can afford, that's where we are as a country, people can't afford to live and stay healthy.

Sadly, I'm already a little exhausted just from writing that paragraph, and even just reading that paragraph was probably already a little exhausting for you. And if the whole newsletter was nothing but that, I suspect that you wouldn't want to read it. Hell, I wouldn't. Non-stop complaint is exhausting, as discussed above. But also, we still want to complain sometimes. So what do we do?
 

A simple solution is to ration your complaints (literally a ration-al solution)(If I can call you al)(you can call me betty). You might only complain to your closest friends, or only complain to people who *aren't* your closest friends because you want to spare your friends. You might only complain when things are particularly awful, or only complain on Mondays.

But my preferred solution for many years has instead been to make the complaining interesting. Because while we might avoid people we think of as "constant complainers", we very much gravitate to people we think of as "entertainers", even though many of them might more accurately be called "enterplainers" (if you're given to using too many portmanteaux)(which I certainly am).

Because plenty of comedians like Lewis Black have built entire careers out of "complaining, but funny," and it works. Even among your friends, maybe there's someone who always tells the best stories at parties, which could arguably be complaints but she tells them so well that it's a pleasure to listen to. And I think that's a fine thing to aspire to, to let your cathartic complaining give other people energy and enjoyment rather than draining it from them. 

Which of course is not to say you always have to be putting on a show; everyone needs time and space to just be sad and honest about what's making them honestly sad. But I do think that as a general precept, one can do a lot worse than, "If you're going to complain, try to make it worth listening to for your audience." Of course, it's up to you what makes it worthwhile. It doesn't always have to be a funny song and dance.
 

Well, technically just a funny song. (BYOD.) But this week's column is another pitch-perfect song parody that you can sing along with:
 

It is my sincere hope that you find it a very fun and enjoyable way to hear me complain. 

I had a "great" idea for a closing pun about someone trying to buy and sell small drinks and stacking them up, and the punchline was going to be Dram Broker's Stackula, but I couldn't make it work, and now I've got the morbs. In other words, It's Morbin' Time!

Thanks for reading, and back in two weeks with another column.



Yes We Have Nosferatu,
Seth