Do something

When she's right, she's right:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says in a new interview that she can’t stand “whining” by women who are unhappy with the work and family choices they’ve made in life and complain that they have no options.

Clinton, in the interview with Marie Claire, was discussing Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former director of policy planning at the State Department who left in 2011. This summer, Slaughter wrote a much-discussed cover story in the Atlantic — “Why Women Still Can’t Have It all” — about leaving her job because of the difficulty of balancing her work at State with the needs of her two teenage boys.

“I can’t stand whining,” Clinton told Marie Claire. “I can’t stand the kind of paralysis that some people fall into because they’re not happy with the choices they’ve made. You live in a time when there are endless choices. … Money certainly helps, and having that kind of financial privilege goes a long way, but you don’t even have to have money for it. But you have to work on yourself. … Do something!

However, she's just talking about women and the choices they have to make in balancing work and home, and I would expand the admonition to cover men as well and include all choices about everything. It's natural to feel regret over some choices and endlessly wonder whether others were right. But keep it to yourself! The people most likely to inflict their whining about choices on the rest of us are also the ones most likely to blame other people or outside forces instead of looking in the right place. You have to work on yourself. Do something! Absolutely.