My dad: “There aren’t enough shrimp in this pad thai.”

Me: “Yeah, this sauce has no flavor.”

My mom: “You know, restaurants aren’t worth it anymore, next time we should just cook at home.”

My wife: “Why are you guys complaining so much?”

All of us: “Complaining? Who’s complaining? We’re having a great time!”

This is not a real conversation, exactly, but it’s an amalgamation of a lot of conversations. My parents are both New Yorkers, and while I never thought of myself as taking on that New York energy, I guess I kind of have. In particular, my wife, who is from China, has absolutely no cultural experience with the phenomenon of complaining for sport, or complaining for fun. What we would call kvetching.

It’s fascinating to me to imagine not having the cultural practice of complaining about meaningless, low-stakes things for fun, and not really having any real complaint. I sometimes have trouble separating having conversations from engaging this habit.

If you’ve ever heard of The Jerky Boys, a New York prank-call duo from the early 1990s, then you have an idea what I’m talking about. They’re full of profanity and their calls are based on the sort of things a lot of people wish they could do. They were also very funny. A tile installer calling up the tile store and berating the manager for selling him a pallet full of broken f@#$ing tiles—that sort of thing. It was an exaggeration, but I get it. It’s interesting to realize that the water you swim in is, in fact, one of many particular habits and cultures.

Now I will tie this, because I have to, NIMBYism. A lot of NIMBYism strikes me as exactly this—weakly held views expressed in a complaining, negative fashion. The key being weakly held. There are people, who I have dubbed “professional NIMBYs,” who actually exert serious effort at blocking new housing or just anything new, really.

But there are so many people who just complain because they like things the way they are. They’re expressing a pretty normal preference. “Oh, because what we need is another bank, right?” “Another eyesore apartment building.” That isn’t even NIMBYism; it’s just kvetching. Maybe I’m sympathetic to this because I’m used to complaining for fun.

When that actually becomes a problem is when those sentiments are given a broken process by which they can dictate how and where things get built. What we call NIMBYism is complaining plus a process that enables complaining, and makes land-use policy via complaining.

But I don’t mean to complain about people complaining.

Related Reading:

Ribbing and Ragging

To Them They’re Making a River

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