Why is everyone complaining?

You're a captive audience to friends who want you to share the agony of their aches and pains, their spouse's experiments in the kitchen gone wrong, or partners' peccadillos

These days, you can hardly have a work-related conversation even with strangers without it being preceded by a personal historiography of ailing cousins, incontinent aunts, cloistered children, inconsiderate parents or suspicious neighbours and their woeful lives. Remember the annoying colleague who took the insincerely asked “How are you?” at face value to give you a litany of his woes — well, he’s been superseded by the WhatsApp colleague who responds to the same innocuous query with a full medical report of his urinary tract infection and swelling in the bladder, begging pardon for his slow typing because of the cannula