The Microcomplaint: Nothing Too Small to Whine About
16th November 2015
When even the New York Times notices that things have gotten silly, then they’ve really gotten silly.
Name an inequity, and it is highly likely that social media has helped call meaningful attention to it, if not started and hashtagged a movement.
But a glance through your acquaintances’ aggrieved online posts may well show equal attention paid to the slings and arrows of everyday vexations. The same technology that allows people to voice their displeasure with dictatorships, police brutality and prejudice also enables them to carp about mediocre meals, rude customer service and that obnoxious guy at the next table who won’t shut up.
It was once considered unbecoming, or annoying itself, to moan publicly about trifling personal ordeals. Now, in a seismic shift for the moral culture, abetted by technology, we tolerate and even encourage the “microcomplaint”: the petty, petulant kvetch about the quotidian.