si dawson

How often do you complain?

No, I don't mean half hour long solil­o­quies at the barista because your cof­fee is cold, I mean just every­day complaints.

Any­time you ver­bally express a neg­a­tive thought, that's a complaint.

Why do we do this? Habit, typ­i­cally. Some­times bore­dom, But deeper than that — often­times it's a social thing (f***mylife is an exam­ple) — it's socially encour­aged to bond over mis­ery sto­ries. To sym­pa­thise, express empa­thy & so on. Some­times it's a way of adjust­ing social hier­ar­chies — I'm your supe­rior, but if I express mis­ery that makes us more equal, & thus you more com­fort­able. If I feel infe­rior, com­plain­ing about you might (in the­ory) make me feel bet­ter about myself by dimin­ish­ing you some­how. Many entire cul­tures have whing­ing as a core attribute (Eng­land, I'm look­ing at you).

With all those peo­ple doing it, what's the big deal? I mean, really?

Fun­da­men­tally, it dam­ages us.

Talk­ing about some­thing gives it our atten­tion, our energy. Gives it power.

Focus on the moon, not the clut­ter of trees.

Basi­cally, whin­ing makes you feel shitty.

If you believe in the law of attrac­tion, then the more you talk about some­thing, the more you're going to attract more of that thing. Want a mis­er­able day tomor­row? Spend a bunch of time talk­ing about how mis­er­able today was.

If you think LOA is a bunch of hokum, well think about it this way — why the hell are you wast­ing you time, energy & atten­tion focussing on some­thing you don't like? How on earth is that mak­ing you any hap­pier? Any more pro­duc­tive? Sort­ing the prob­lem out, or improv­ing your life? It's not.

Sure, unde­sir­able things hap­pen. So what? What really mat­ters is how we react to them. Mar­tin Selig­man in Learned Opti­mism dis­cov­ered that the key dif­fer­ence between suc­cess & fail­ure in life is how we treat set­backs. Fun­da­men­tally, we do bet­ter, get luck­ier & have more suc­cess the less energy we give to these neg­a­tive events. Pes­simists talk a lot about set­backs. Opti­mists dis­miss them. This is elo­quently summed up by Sylvester Stal­lone who likes to dis­miss neg­a­tive sit­u­a­tions with "They prob­a­bly just ate some bad clams."

As Vik­tor Frankl said, (para­phrased) the only real free­dom we have is the free­dom to choose how we react to any event.

The less atten­tion you give neg­a­tive events (other than the min­i­mum nec­es­sary to phys­i­cally deal with them, of course), the more of your time is focussed on things you actu­ally want. Your goals. Your hap­pi­ness. Feel­ing good.

Whing­ing takes us out of that zone of joy. Out of express­ing our­selves in the world. In the process, it adds noth­ing pos­i­tive to our lives at all. The more we can reduce it, the bet­ter we feel about our lives. About our days. About how things are going for us. Why? Because how we feel about our­selves is the sum total of our thoughts. The more of those thoughts are pos­i­tive, the bet­ter we feel.

If you remem­ber noth­ing else, remem­ber this:

Your qual­ity of life is directly pro­por­tional to how much of the time you feel good.
Yes, that's incred­i­bly obvi­ous. You want to have a bet­ter life? Spend more of it feel­ing better.

Of course, the ques­tion is — how do you increase how much you feel good? Well (& a big duh to this one) stop mak­ing your­self feel mis­er­able so often. You may not be able to help what hap­pens to you, but you can def­i­nitely change how much time you spend­ing talk­ing, think­ing or focussing on these bad things around you.

Try it for a week. Any­time you catch your­self whing­ing, delib­er­ately let that thought go, & think (or bet­ter, say!) some­thing pos­i­tive instead. Or heck, if you can't do that, just shut the hell up — that's a great first step. See how great you start feel­ing, by com­par­i­son. Notice how much bet­ter things get in your life — peo­ple react­ing more pos­i­tively to you, oppor­tu­ni­ties arriv­ing, things just some­how going smoother.

We only have so many min­utes each day. Make them count. Make them pos­i­tive ones. It's just a choice.

[If you'd like to read more, my man Dhru­mil has a great pod­cast here about why we com­plain, & how to help oth­ers we see com­plain­ing. Also worth check­ing is ACom­plaint­Free­World]