Hey Medium Writers: Quit Whining About How Others Have Wronged You

I read a lot of Medium articles, mostly about psychology. Naturally, since psychology is about human behavior, most of these articles are about people’s relationships to others, whether romantic or otherwise.

But I’ve noticed something disturbing about nearly all of these articles. They’re whinefests for the writer who is simply aggrieved at how someone wronged them. That someone tends to be a significant other, or it can be a group of people. This being Medium, white men as a whole make a great punching bag. And I can’t help but feel that people just want to gripe for the sake of griping, and get others to chime in on how right they are to be aggrieved. It feels so good to be justified in ones anger, and writing about it to a chorus of Yes Men (or, on Medium, mostly Yes Women), is just the validation ticket that these writers are looking for.

It’s narcissistic drivel that in no way makes me sympathetic for the writer, because in a lot of ways it’s anti-vulnerable: instead of talking about What’s Wrong With Me, it quickly blames the world for their problems. As soon as I see this sort of writing, I fear that the author got stuck at some point in their emotional development and can’t make it past this. If the writer could at least acknowledge that this is what’s going on, then cool, I’m down with the whining. But by casting themselves as the victim and evil others as the perpetrator in extremely clear cut terms, I fear that I have nothing to learn from this.

Look, people cause us trauma, there’s no doubt about that. And people harm us in immeasurably bad ways. I get it. I don’t want anyone to see me as victim blaming here. I’m not. Stories of self reflection, poignancy and growth are always welcome. Talking about how someone makes you feel is also welcome, as you’re making the story about you, and you’re always justified to feel a certain way.

But most of these stories lack this level of self awareness. They talk about the awful things that people do, and they leave it at that.

So, Medium writers, we can do better. We can write about situations, our own part in the problem, and our feelings regarding this problem. If someone did something to wrong us, we can bring that up to talk about pain and trauma and how we grew from this. This is the kind of writing that I like, and that I can identify with.

But if you’re gonna whine, then you’re a problem, too. It feels good, but you’re not doing a service to anyone.