The following post is meant to be fun, silly and tongue-in-cheek rather than serious, and yet at the same time I’m hoping it might be somehow useful – much like Aaron James’ theory of assholes and Harry Frankfurt’s theory of bullshit.
I want to clarify in advance that I’m not looking to create a slur. Just as how we can all be assholes and we all bullshit ourselves and each other sometimes, we can all be pissbabies. My silly hope is that thinking out loud about this might lead to some clarity that might even be helpful to people. Or hey, at the very least, I’ll have some fun writing this.
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“The strongest person in our culture is the baby. The baby rules over the adults with his weakness. And it is because of this weakness that nobody can control him.” – The Courage To Be Disliked, referencing Adlerian psychology
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Currently, the top definition of “piss baby” on Urban Dictionary is “a little bitch“, which isn’t very meaningful. This however is marginally better than the second definition, which states “a piss baby is not unlike a crybaby, but where a crybaby cries out of sadness, fear, or pain, a pissbaby pisses on things out of anger“. I personally think this second definition is wrong.
Here’s my attempt at defining a pissbaby. A pissbaby is a person who is crying because they’ve pissed themselves. With actual infants, this is literal piss. Which, while annoying to deal with, is understandable, because infants are works-in-progress and they do not yet possess the capacity for self-regulation. This is key.
An adult pissbaby is a person who is crying (whining, complaining, expressing discomfort) because of the consequences of their failure to self-regulate appropriately. This failure of self-regulation could be emotional, psychological, social, you name it. Whatever the reason, this person has pissed themselves and they’re crying about it.
I’m not looking to be judgemental, derogatory or insulting here. I believe that people deserve basic human dignity, even when they piss themselves, literally or otherwise. But I do also think it would be preferable if we could make enough progress as a species so that we have more adults (who I will define in this context as as “people who know are willing and able to self-regulate appropriately, clean up their own messes, and even clean up after other people’s messes”). It just seems like a more ideal state of affairs, and a plausibly achievable one.
There’s a lot of nuance we can get into. Why was this adult unable to regulate themselves? It could be that the adult somehow made it to adulthood without ever being taught these skills. We do live in a largely infantile social reality, where lots of people are not very good at understanding their own needs, communicating them, working to get what they want and so on. We are very poorly educated, and our mainstream model of education is itself limited and flawed by traditional schooling.
An interesting thing to observe is that people differ substantially on the issue of how to deal with a pissbaby, and it seems roughly akin to how people think we should deal with children. There are two extremes. One extreme is that the pissbaby should be babied, meaning you help them clean up after themselves, make reassuring noises. One alleged outcome of babying pissbabies is that they’ll just piss themselves more, because they can trust that other people will clean up after them. I think there can be some truth to this.
Another extreme is that the pissbaby should be shamed, scorned, mocked, derided. Some people do this because they think it’s the only way pissbabies will learn. Others do it because they simply don’t care, and are expressing their annoyance at having to see, hear and smell someone else’s piss and tears. “I’m putting in all this work to self-regulate and not piss myself,” they might think, “and I don’t get any reward for it. Why should you? Fuck you, pissbaby.”
I think the ideal approach is the costliest in the short term: encourage the pissbaby to learn to clean up after themselves. With literal infants this might be developmentally impossible, but with adults I think there can be some hope. It’s a whole project, though. There may be some trauma or other factor that keeps the adult trapped in arrested development, and that may have to be addressed before they can grow out of being a pissbaby. And… it’s nobody’s job to help someone else stop pissing themselves. It’s practically a full-time job not to piss yourself. Still, there is some opportunity here to be a nurturing, supportive, encouraging figure in other people’s lives, if you choose it, and you approach it from a place of non-neediness.
(Some people may have a sort of pathological need to take care of pissbabies, and keep them dependent on them, to feel needed, etc. It’s complicated and tricky, you have to be careful about this stuff. Or not. It’s your life.)
Broadly I think I would end by saying, while pissbabies deserve basic human dignity, they will not receive much real respect. And that’s kind of sad. You might get some respect for being honest and communicating clearly about the way in which you are being a pissbaby, and this can be a first step to growing up and learning to self-regulate better. It can be brave to admit you’ve pissed yourself, as opposed to being in denial about it and treating other people badly as a consequence.
But simply articulating your problems is not a substitute for making progress on solving them. And quite a few people end up in this cyclic trap where they just continually articulate “so I pissed myself today” and receive support and validation from other pissbabies-in-various-stages-of-recovery. It’s tricky. I don’t mean to mock or insult anyone here. You never know where people are on their journeys. Some people might need to be in a cycle of affirmation and validation for 10 years before they finally take the leap towards taking responsibility for themselves, their feelings, and managing them in graceful ways.
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There’s something humbling about how, it’s common for people to lose control over their bladders as they age. Someone once said something like, “being able-bodied is a temporary condition”. We all start out pissing ourselves, and we all end up pissing ourselves. We all need help from others. It takes a village not just to raise a child, but to be a person. If you have to piss yourself, try to piss yourself like an adult. Try not to be “a little bitch” about it.
Or not! It’s your life.
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There’s some additional detail I wanted to get into but I’m running out of steam on this writing session and will maybe update later.
One is the phenomenon of pissbabies on social media: particularly one where a person who is simply talking out loud on their own personal channel (Twitter, YouTube, whatever), gets quote-tweeted, reposted, etc to be cringed at. I highly recommend watching Contrapoints’ video on Cringe to get into this. It’s a long video but it’s a very thoughtful examination of the phenomenon. I think it would not be inaccurate to say that, people who deliberately go searching for pissbabies to mock and cringe at have pretty serious issues of their own.
Another thing I was hoping to get into is a more social mode of pissbabying. There’s some overlap between being an infantile pissbaby, and being a demanding asshole who insists on being treated a certain way. And this previous sentence I think is a sort of Barnum statement, where different people will go “Oh, I know,” and then fill in the blank with very different mental pictures. Some people might think “ah, he’s talking about LGBTQ folks who insist we must learn their strange new pronouns,” others might think “ah, he’s talking about petty narcissistic tyrants and authoritarians.”
I’m not perfectly sure who I’m talking about. It’s complicated. There are layers to it. I would invite people to try and keep an open mind, try not to leap to judgements and conclusions, and generally… try to be as kind as you can, and if you can’t, try to exit the situation gracefully and quietly. Don’t piss yourself on your way out. 😂
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I made a video recently about the idea that “complaining is unmasculine“, which I think is also relevant here.
Finally, for more context, you may be interested in my other post about assholes. Not all pissbabies are assholes, and not all assholes are pissbabies, but you can get some sense of how I think about dealing with frustrating social issues.