The complaining disease

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All the things which cause complaints or dread are like the taxes of life. Things from which, my dear Lucilius, you should never hope for exemption or seek escape.

– Seneca

I live in Amsterdam, one of the cities with the highest quality of life in the world. It is also a place where most likely than not the weather is cloudy and rainy.

Everybody’s favorite hobby is complaining about this unavoidable reality. Everybody but me, I decided to quit. I now accept the everpresent greyness of the sky as a toll we must pay to enjoy life here.

I’m conducting a personal crusade against the mere act of complaining. We all do it much more often than we think. It happens so automatically that we barely register it. We do it for all kinds of things, big and small. Some we can do nothing about like the weather. Whereas some others we could but we find complaining a much easier path than taking action.

One could say that it’s a coping mechanism against the dire nature of life. A way of blowing up steam, a relief valve. We treat this venting as a necessary evil. Without it, we would accumulate all those negative thoughts until we experience a mental breakdown. That is a false belief though.

If that were true, the people who complain all the time would be happiest. They would have allowed all their negative feelings to escape their brain. The bitterness with which serial complainers navigate through life proves this wrong. I’m sure you can think of more than one person who fits this description.

Complaining is not an effective mechanism for purging pessimistic opinions from our heads.

Who would you rather spend your time with? A chronic complainer who can only see the dark side of everything or a person who lifts the spirit of the room with their contagious energy every time they come in. Think about these two stereotypes and pay special attention to how you feel around them. You can now choose the type of person you want to be.

Why do we complain?

Don’t be overheard complaining… not even to yourself.

– Marcus Aurelius

There are always reasons why we behave the way we do, even if we can’t understand them. There must be something happening in our brains that drives us to complain as much as we do. Complaining gives us a tiny hit of instant gratification. If not, we wouldn’t do it. It doesn’t come for free though. We pay for this small but frequent gratification by sacrificing our long-term happiness.

Some might argue that it’s our human nature. Evolution equipped us with a negativity bias that maximizes our chances of survival. Being ignorant of all possible adverse outcomes doesn’t prepare us for when life goes wrong. Awareness translated into a longer life, even if that meant an unhappier one.

Evolution never cared about our feelings. But we live in a different time now and it requires a different mindset if we want more in life than just survival.

What can we do?

We quickly embrace that complaining is unavoidable. We have no control over the thoughts that spontaneously materialize in our heads That doesn’t mean that we are not responsible for keeping them to ourselves instead of sharing them with the world.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

– Victor Frankl

Negative thoughts will keep arising automatically in our heads. It’s part of our nature and we shouldn’t punish ourselves for that. We have to live life responsibly as we carry the power to choose what we do about them. We must resist our impulses and work towards subduing them.

A seller cannot exist without a buyer

The mind produces thoughts and the mouth buys them every time we say them out loud. If we encounter them less often, our brain will diminish the rate at which it produces them. Out of sight out of mind.

The things you think about determine the quality of your mind.

– Marcus Aurelius

We are social creatures. Our complaints affect not only ourselves but the people that surround us. We absorb negativity from our own words and also from the ones spoken by those around us. By stopping ourselves from expressing these complaints we can contribute to their scarcity.

One of my favorite books The four agreements emphasizes this idea in the first of the agreements:

Be impeccable with your word. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love. Your words have the power to both create and destroy. If what is going to come out of your mouth is not adding anything positive to the world, it’s better to keep it to yourself.

Be grateful

We remember all the situations that go wrong but forget the ones with positive outcomes. Moreover, we don’t pay any attention to the things that could have gone wrong but didn’t.

What happens if we almost get hit by a car? We experience an immediate relief that goes away as fast as it came. 5 minutes after the event and we feel as if it never happened. Because there are no consequences at all we never stop to reflect upon what has happened. Different is the case if we are not lucky enough to avoid the accident. We rant about our bad luck and how all the sour things always happen to us.

The antidote to complaints is gratitude. Make a conscious effort of contemplating all the good things we should be grateful for. Practicing gratitude is not about forcing yourself to feel positive. It’s about noticing that good things are going on in your life even if it takes some effort to bring them to light.