We college kids complain a lot.
KATIE TSANG: I get really annoyed by people who walk slowly on Sheridan and make it difficult for people to get around them.
DYLAN TELLADO: Something that annoys me is when people are overly loud in common areas.
LENA SCHULZE: My biggest complaint right now is that I didn’t get any aid at one of the colleges I want to go to.
GAVIN FISK: The thing that bothers me is classes where an A– is 94, but the professor, when they give out an A it’s just a 95.
DABNE CUELLAR: My complaint of the day, as I have many, is the fact that I can’t get in anywhere to get my nails done for Dillo Day. What’s a girl got to do to get acrylics and not a manicure, I don’t want a manicure. Why does no one have availability for Friday after 3:30. So many nail salons in Evanston for what? A girl can’t get her nails done.
Some might say Gen Z is notorious for all our groaning, and maybe that’s fair! After all, we are only a few years out of those infamous pubescent years of complaining about everything. But with only a couple of decades under our belts, surely we haven’t experienced all that we will have to complain about in our lives. So what are the “real” adults complaining about? What are some grown groans? You heard me right. For WNUR’s homophone-centric Special Broadcast, I found out the g–r–o–a–n–s the g–r–o–w–n–s in our lives have, as well as their advice for the youth.
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Some groans, like that of Northwestern mom Julie Blumenfeld, have remedies.
JULIE BLUMENFELD: I am a grownup, and this is my groan. I love to drink tea, and most mornings I make myself a London Fog, which is Earl Grey tea with steamed milk, to take to work. And I began to notice, over time, how incredibly dirty the inside of my travel mug was becoming, and how completely impossible it was to clean it. Different solutions and different scrub brushes, and soaking it, and I just could not get it clean, and quite frankly it looked horrible. And I came across a YouTube video of an Irish man who clearly also drank a lot of tea and had a travel mug that looked as bad as mine, and posted a YouTube video with his young child of a fabulous hack where he took a dishwashing pod and put it in the travel mug with boiling water and it cleaned it quite magically. I have now used this hack many times, my travel mug looks sparkling and clean. And it has eliminated a tremendous frustration of mine.
Other frustrations, however, may just be par for the course when it comes to aging.
SUSAN RAUCH: I’m not built for speed anymore. My eyesight. You know I’ve always had 20/20, lovely vision, no problem seeing in the dark, and all of a sudden you get into your late fifties and or, you know, late thirties, whatever I am, and you realize you can’t see anything anymore without, glasses. And that’s annoying. Who wants to carry glass around all the time? Plus, you know, the adult children that I’ve raised and always making fun of me because I can’t see anything on their phones without the glasses. Don’t love that about not being twenties anymore. That’s been hard.
KERRIGAN: That complaint from Susan Rauch, another Northwestern mom, sounded all too familiar to me. And sure enough, when I called my own mom, her annoyance echoed that of Rauch’s.
JESSICA KERRIGAN: My grown-up groan is having to wear reading glasses. I’ve worn contacts most of my life and enjoyed not having to wear glasses at all, but when I turned fifty, I couldn’t see fine print or text on the computer or even read comic strips in the newspaper and I’ve had to wear reading glasses. It’s a real pain, and it’s one of probably the worst things that I’ve noticed about aging so far.
KERRIGAN: Beyond just eyesight, Rauch’s husband, Peter, warned that physical spryness is not to be taken for granted.
PETER RAUCH: Be kind to your knees. You’ll miss them when they’re gone. Take care of your body! The little aches and pains, that little thing on your knee when you go up the steps, that is not a big deal, you know, ten more years, ten more years, ten more years, and suddenly, wow, you’re in your sixties, that’s something you have to deal with every day. And you can’t live in fear and you can’t not do stuff, but take care of your body. You know, eat well, get your sleep. It makes a difference.
While some grown-ups have gripes related to their own age, others zero in on annoyances that speak more to age differences, rather than age itself. When I asked Northwestern professor Lane Fenrich what he finds himself complaining about, his groan seemed to be not-so-subtly directed at a certain, phone-preoccupied age group.
LANE FENRICH: My groan is people who walk along the sidewalk, looking at their phones, and paying zero attention to the rest of the world.
It seems only fair that we listen to our grown-ups groan. I mean, I would be annoyed too watching today’s youth instant message if I had to communicate by carrier pigeon growing up. Really though, while age jokes are an easy dig, what we should actually be digging for from our grown-ups is the wisdom that only comes with lived experience.
PETER RAUCH: I’ve got more life behind me to see how things work. And I think they may refer to that as wisdom. I don’t like to think that I’m a wise old soul, and I don’t think I’m any smarter than I was when I was in my 20s, but I know more things. Be true to yourself. People will have expectations of you or you’ll have perceived expectations of you, but at the end of the day when you’re looking in the mirror, you have to answer to yourself. If you’re always true to yourself, you will always be able to move forward. Do your best. Do the right thing, you will be much more successful than just doing enough to get by. Living on purpose leads to a life with purpose.
SUSAN RAUCH: My advice to them would just be to enjoy your lives! Your twenties is doing the things that you’re going to be able to talk about at cocktail parties for the rest of your life, so go do it, you know. Take those chances, take those risks, not with your life or anything, but talk to people that are not like you. Just stretch yourself, because it is interesting! Then you’ve got these great experiences from your 20s when your knees are good and your eyes are good, and your agility– no– it’s hard to make good decisions, but it’s also hard to make a bad decision because you have so many options, and you need to investigate those.
No matter how grown you are, we all have groans. From failed nail appointments to failed knee replacements, life can be pretty complaint-worthy sometimes! But in the spirit of homophone appreciation, remember that our troubles can be deceptive at times, too: a groan can be outgrown and a grown…up– may know more about your groans than you think they do. For WNUR News, I’m Georgia Kerrigan.
