Complaining is for individuals who cannot accept their situation and surroundings. Things change, new opinions replace old ones, and generations progress, but complainers find it hard to accept reality. In this article, I will show the nature of complaints and how we can get better at not complaining.
Why do we complain?
I ask myself why I complain, and I can think of multiple reasons:
- We take pride in defending our mistakes.
- Reality is too painful to accept.
- We cling to our miseries.
- Complaining is tempting to the ego.
- We use complaints to cover up our failures.
An essential quality of complaining is truth dismissal. Not accepting the truth hurts; yes, it hurts badly. But that shouldn’t be a good reason for lamenting.
Complaints can be of different types:
- Personal Complaints
- Collective Complaints
- Fleeting Complaints
- Sticky Complaints
Let's decipher each one of these and understand their true nature and relationships with other entities.
1) Personal Complaints
If an individual complains about their situation or against a system, it is a personal complaint. A personal complaint almost always arises from ego. Without ego, there is patience and perseverance, which will never breed an environment that raises a complaint.
Overall, the destructive power of a personal complaint is limited. But at times it is more destructive to the complaining person than to the entity that is complained against. So, it is better for an individual to keep ego in check and not complain to limit that self-destruction.
2) Collective Complaints
If a group of individuals complains about their situation, it can be a collective complaint. It leads to two scenarios:
a) A group of individuals complaining against another group b) A group of individuals complaining against a single individual
Case a leads to confusion because groups complain about each other, and it can simply lead to a deadlock for neutral entities. As we already saw, complaining at individual level is unproductive, now aggregated at collective level between two groups can be catastrophic.
Case b is slightly better than a, with a group of individuals complaining about an individual or vice versa. In this case, the deadlock will be easily resolved by either “group silencing the individual” or “individual leaving the group.”
3) Fleeting Complaints
A fleeting complaint is a temporary complaint that behaves like a swift wind. It is temporary and transient. An individual or a group raises this type of complaint.
When an individual exhibits an array of fleeting complaints, they look inconsistent and unprofessional. If a group does it, we can confirm the environment is depressing.
4) Sticky Complaints
A sticky complaint resurfaces repeatedly without a solution. An individual/group can use a sticky complaint either to surface a real problem that was never solved or to distract others from questioning why important things are undone.
These complaints are also notoriously painful to hear, like an old tape recorder that plays the same song.
After learning about different types of complaints, let’s see why we should avoid complaining.
Why never complain?
At the individual level, a complaint is rooted in a highly volatile, subjective bedrock called Ego. When hurt, Ego deploys its commander-in-chief, anger, to take matters into hand. The angry mind doesn’t have patience to wait for the fire to extinguish and seeks revenge through immediate action. Anger creates a complaint.
Complaining makes an individual look weak because the world assumes their pain tolerance is low. They may look physically bulky or strong, but mentally weak.
An individual shouldn't complain because of ego’s involvement and the world’s perception. So always speak to your inner self that:
- I will never complain.
- I will accept the reality of how painful it is
- I don’t cling to my miseries.
- I accept my failures gracefully.
- I will keep my ego in check.
Final Thoughts
Remembering this will give you peace of mind and protects you from harm caused by another individual or a group.