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The Complain Brag Is Even Worse Than the Humblebrag
It’s annoying, but women in particular may have a hard time breaking the habit
If you work hard and you’re lucky, there will come a day in your career when blessings are heaped upon you. (If you’re my professional nemesis, that day will be every day — you literally will not go one day without being inexplicably rewarded! Anyway.)
On that day, you may wonder how to share these blessings with your colleagues. You have several options:
You can just brag-brag, confidently describing your good tidings with your colleagues like a sociopath: “I got a promotion!”
You can humble-brag, couching your brag in self-deprecation: “I got a promotion, but I’m an unqualified wretch, omg.”
Or you can complain-brag: “I got a promotion, but I have to do ten times as much work, the raise is pitiful, the industry is crumbling from within, a recession is coming, my ex doesn’t want to get back together, and I’ve had a weird pulse in my eyelid for three days. Death comes for us all.”
Since the late comedian-writer Harris Wittels coined the term “humblebrag” in 2010, we’ve gotten very good at calling each other out for false modesty. But complain-bragging is actually more common. People also hate it more. In a 2017 study, researchers from Harvard Business School compared humblebrags, complain-brags (or “complaint-based humblebrags,” as the researchers put it), and unvarnished brag-brags.
They found that complain-brags are least effective: Those brags “reduce liking, perceived competence, and compliance with requests.” In their attempts to preserve likeability while also signaling competence, complain-braggers took hits on both fronts. Complain-bragging was less effective than simply bragging, or just complaining.
I am aware that complain-bragging is an annoying habit. I didn’t need a Harvard study to tell me that it’s an ineffective social strategy, because I loathe it when others deploy it, on Twitter or in person. But much like buying the family-sized tub of Nutella with an earnest promise to myself that this time I will at least use utensils, I keep complain-bragging. Why, when I know it doesn’t “work,” is complain-bragging still my…
