I was about nine years old and cycling on the sidewalk in Rotterdam. An older couple walked towards me. I made a wide berth around them, but the man elbowed me as he passed. That man is still a terror: I am terrified that I will become like that too. There are already days when every red traffic light feels like a personal insult. Then I see asos, bastards and rotten people everywhere – like the wrong-way driver in Herman Finkers’ joke who sees a thousand wrong-way drivers. In the supermarket I am abrasive to the children who check me at the checkout counter. In the kitchen I curse the microwave meal because I don’t see where it says ‘six minutes at 800 watts’ within four seconds. I fill the house with a poison cloud of displeasure and woe to anyone who does not weigh her words correctly.
Today I am in such a mood, dear reader. Because the world is failing and I’m doing everything right. So take care. Today I’m already in a frenzy because I have to find out whether it is grumpy, grumpy, grumpy or grumpy. Even the language makes me a grumpy idiot with a rotten mood. In short, very grumpy – but more than that word, I hate the feeling. So today I vent my fury on the grumpy itself.
Spitting on the chocolate cake
Chagrin is senseless violence, spoiling the game. It’s spitting on the chocolate cake. Grumpy causes unnecessary suffering and paints divine summer days black. A person can lose his leg or his job, can get cancer or just have a heart attack – that is usually bad luck in life, you can do little about it. But grumpiness is a disease that is not need. Because you can do something about it. Only a small part of our mood swings is hormonally determined; the lion’s share is due to lack of sleep, stress, drinking, social media: things that are partly within our control.
Moreover, morbid people drag those around them into their misery. Just as there is passive smoking, there is also passive grumpiness. One angry viewer can devastate an entire house. The health industry works with so-called QALYs (Quality-Adjusted Life Years). That is a rule of thumb to calculate whether a medical procedure is worth the money. Currently, treatment may cost up to approximately 80,000 euros per QALY gained. If you live eighty years and are moody 10 percent of the time, that’s eight years of wasted happiness. That’s easily half a million damage per grump. Which you have to multiply because of all collateral damage.
In short, there is every reason to combat grumpiness like measles, but there is no National Plan against Grumpiness. There are no epidemiological studies on the bad mood. In the DSM, the manual for psychiatry, grumpiness does not exist. Grumpiness is a disease that we don’t even try to cure. We say: ‘It will pass’. ‘If you are angry, pick a rose, put it on your hat, and you will be happy again tomorrow.’
Or we say it’s ‘because of the hormones’. In other words: it’s nature, you don’t do anything about it, you have to wait it out. Indeed there are the inevitable fluctuations of the mood, even the most serene Zen monk has a shitty day sometimes. Fortunately, the fluctuations remind us that we are people and not machines. And indeed, some women experience extremely severe mood swings due to the menstrual cycle or menopause. But on average it falls hormonal sadness dwarfed by factors such as work stress and sleep deprivation, which affect almost everyone: that is why researchers see no significant differences in the emotional turbulence of men and women.
Instead of fighting grumpiness, we put the homo chagrinicus right on a pedestal. In Hollywood films the grumpy old men a kind of teddy bears. At Sesame Street, neighbor Aart is a good guy – not an atmosphere sponge. At grammar school, children learn that the sulking Achilles – who walks away from the battle aggrieved after losing his sex slave – is a superhero instead of a horse’s dick. On TV, grouchy people are millionaires and whiny mustaches are archetypes worth emulating: Jan Mulder, Youp van ‘t Hek, Johan Derksen, Wierd Duk. For men, the drooping corner of the mouth is a business model. Women should smile. At least, until recently. About ten years ago the Resting Bitch Face (RBF) was still considered one sexist diagnosis: women who didn’t laugh, that was wrong. Now women are demanding the right to look a little grumpy, just like men. That is good news for equal treatment; bad news for the general atmosphere: soon no one will laugh anymore.
In politics, the cancer pit became the moral compass. The hurt, the touchy, the complainers, the victims, the long toes: they are sacred. The citizen is a customer made king, a consumer who demands compensation like the proverbial ‘Karen’ from the internet meme. I demand reparation for all the grumpiness around me. Even the cars no longer smile, the headlights that were once round become deliberately designed angrily.
In business, working hard and sleeping little is a status symbol. So at the top of the monkey rock there is often a very grumpy, exhausted monkey who can no longer even control his own emotions, let alone run an entire company. Artists with a tormented look are still too often regarded as geniuses who struggle with existence rather than people who take poor care of themselves and therefore their environment. Just because Beethoven threw things doesn’t make you a genius if you broke something.
Angry look is protective shield
Sure, grumpy can be useful. You can use it to set boundaries, sound the alarm, and prevent people from walking all over you. The angry look is sometimes necessary as a protective shield. Anger is sometimes a tool to get things done. Anger cleans up, think of cleaning up anger. Being able to make yourself angry, giving a shit about social norms, the narrowing of the eyes of the grumpy person: these are qualities that provide evolutionary advantages, for example in times of scarcity. When you’re hungry, you need to make sure you get calories. Fuck the social norms.
But there is something else going on when people get angry in times of plenty. Most Dutch people have virtually unlimited access to running water, chocolate bonbons, shower cream with gold pearls – they should go through life cheering, dancing and high-fiving, but grumble too often. The weather forecaster said it was going to rain, so we took the umbrella with us, but it stayed dry, well, we brought it all for nothing.
Our grumpiness is no longer a refreshing shower, it is the climate. I don’t have any hard figures – so strangely enough there is no grumpy research – but I do have five strong indications.
First: sleep deprivation. Roomy a quarter of the Dutch has sleeping problems. Think about this when you cycle during rush hour: 1 in 4 passers-by had a bad night.
Second: the crowds. Dutch live in one of the busiest parts of Europe. Due to strong population growth, the available space per Dutch person has decreased by more than two-thirds since 1900, according to the Compendium for the Living Environment. We live in a hut mute. The available nature – an excellent place to calm down – is dropped even more dramatically. Then there is a housing shortage, approximately 400,000 according to CBS, which means that many Dutch people live too close to each other (or are forced to live with people they do not like). That is also a boost for grumpiness.
Furthermore: aging. Since 1950, the number of people over 65 has doubled. These aren’t all resentful men throwing elbows. But old people usually have to struggle more with aches and pains and have accumulated more sadness in their bodies. Chagrin comes from chagrin and it is not without reason that it also means ‘sadness’. We must be gentle with their grim grimaces. They despise something we don’t see. Moreover, the elderly did not learn at school how to regulate their emotions, but rather that they had to bottle them up, that they had to ‘man up’ themselves. My sons learn how to breathe away anger during the ‘rock and water’ lesson at primary school. (Very simple: inhale for seven seconds, hold for four seconds, exhale for eight seconds and then hit your classmate back.)
Fourth: climate change. In hot summers there are more shootings. But also across the board, climate change is affecting the entire world population literally hot-headed.
Fifth, we started working much harder. You don’t see that in the official hours. But think of how many people still work on the couch into the evening. We were promised that computers would take over our work, but those devices actually make us work overtime. And also count updating your LinkedIn profile or counting Insta-likes as work: only in a world where we are in permanent competition with everything and everyone is it necessary to clean your shop window so jealously. According to CBS ‘work fatigue’ grew by 20 percent in the past ten years.
It is not at all mysterious that people complain especially when the economy is growing and there are plenty of jobs; such an economy that everyone is stressing very hard. Then people sleep too little. Are they becoming shaggo. Do they start eating chips and drinking beer and sleep worse: voilà the eat-sleep-work-repeat cycle of capitalism that gives us so many mood swings.
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The grumpy society
Did I say capitalism? Yes. Homo chagrijnicus is right on one point. The outside world is indeed failing. We have organized society in such a way that we are constantly walking on our gums. We euphemistically call it ‘overstimulation’ or the ‘hypernervous society’. But it’s just the organized grumpy society. We are indeed poor: we always lack the essentials: sleep, houses, nature, time for each other, time for yourself.
Imagine an experiment using mice as test animals. A hundred mice are in a box. You add a hundred more, reduce the space, keep them awake with flashes of light, incite them against each other. Throw in thousands of liters of alcohol, cocaine, chips and candy. Let those blood sugar levels fluctuate back and forth, make the mice hungover, and raise the temperature. I don’t think that improves the atmosphere in the prison.
That box is our country. But we – we are not mice. We shouldn’t squeak. Yes, the world makes us grumpy. That doesn’t mean we have to tolerate grumpiness. We can escape from prison.
This summer my New Year’s resolution is never to sulk again. A decision to be absolutely cheerful. I don’t know if it will work, but the attempt itself makes me happy. From now on I have zero tolerance for anything that spoils the celebration of life. An elbow for every smack in my path. Grumpy is the only thing a person can be grumpy about. The grumpy bastard is the face of a perverse system. All grumpy people out of the country. Or yes, just like smokers: just do it outside, where it won’t bother anyone.
If you are tired, go to sleep. If you are stressed, cancel work. If you hangry you, pick an apple. If you’re boiling with rage, run your head under the cold tap, better yet, jump into the river. Exhale slowly. Tell your vagus nerve that you live in the most carefree part of the world, in the most comfortable time in human history. Claim that life. Seize the day. Pick a rose. Be sweet again, feel the curl in the corner of your mouth. There is no excuse for a total solar eclipse of a grumpy person, it is a sin against the holy life.
