Complaining to Get What You Want

When we want something, as people, we tend to whine, or complain when we don’t have it, to get it. This is annoying, by necessity, because if complaining wasn’t annoying it wouldn’t work at all. By being loud and annoying someone who is in a position to give you what you want, they will want to shut you up, and the easiest way to do that, for them, is to give you whatever you want. There’s a saying that encapsulates this extremely well: The squeaky wheel gets the grease. The squeaky wheel, or noisy complainer, gets the grease, or whatever will quiet them down. But does this mean that people should complain to get what they want?

I don’t think so. I think that when people are able to get what they want, they should be the ones to get it, as to do otherwise would be to leach off the generosity of other people, and it would be dishonorable in the extreme, as well as being annoying, which is unpleasant. There’s also a reason it doesn’t work indefinitely, though. A squeaky wheal is, by definition, annoying, and people will rid themselves of annoying things, which is how whining achieves its goals. But if expensive grease is needed, if whatever the whiner is attempting to get, is more difficult to procure than it is to tell the whiner to shut up, then people will simply tell the whiner to shut up. Also, if the grease does not work, or in other words, people whine for thing after thing after the previous thing is given to them, then people will resort to replacing the wheel to get rid of the whining. And as soon as that wheel doesn’t have someone to grease it, it’ll have to A) stop whining and get what they need on their own, or B) stop turning altogether, unable to make ends meet.

Of course, sometimes there isn’t any way to get what you want just by your own means, so do you have to whine? No! People can ask politely, asking for something in a more dignified way, and that’s not only more dignified and honorable, but also more useful, as it’s rare for people to get rid of a wheel that politely asks for grease (the incredible analogy finally failed me) as requests are not annoying, or at least not designed to be and not generally considered to be. And one should never underestimate what you can be capable of doing, as a genuine attempt is far more impressive than it’s typically thought of.