On complaining

It’s safe to assume that you have, at some point in your life, complained about something or someone. I certainly did, more than once. I used to complain a lot more, actually. But one day I realized that the source of all those annoyances and frustrations was not the world out there, behaving in ways that didn’t jive well with me, but was actually inside me: I was the source of all those feelings.

Pick the classic example: traffic. Traffic is annoying, isn’t it? You’re sitting there, wasting time, dealing with people doing wacky shit. And yet traffic has no intrinsic quality. Traffic is just traffic, that’s all there is to it.

But what if I told you that tomorrow you’ll get paid 10000 bucks for every minute you spend in traffic? I bet you’d have a very different experience dealing with said traffic. You’d likely not be annoyed by it—why would you, you’re getting paid handsomely to be there—and you’d probably spend most of your time thinking about what you’d do with all the money that is about to come your way.

And yet the traffic is still the same. Your time spent with it is still the same and the people doing wacky shit are still doing that. The only thing that has changed is how you perceive that experience.

This is true not just for traffic but for the vast majority of the things that are annoying and frustrating out there. Things and people are not frustrating: we are frustrated by them. The feeling and the sensations are coming from us, not from them.

Now, I’m saying all this but I’m also someone who enjoys ranting about all kinds of things. But I find ranting enjoyable for two reasons.

The first one is that I’m doing it in good spirit. Sometimes I like to be a bit silly and go on a tirade against webfont licenses, browser companies, AI, or any other topic that comes to mind. But I’m doing it for fun, I’m honestly not bothered all that much by those things.

And the second reason is that I find venting in an overly dramatic way—and you should see me in person yelling at my screen—to be a fun therapeutic exercise. It’s almost like a piece of acting and it’s genuinely fun, at least for me. But it doesn’t consume me. It’s not something I carry with me.

But some people out there are consumed by their constant complaining. And it’s infectious. The more you complain the more you find and see things worth complaining about. And that’s not healthy. It’s not healthy for them, it’s not healthy for the people around them.

I can’t pay you for every minute you have to face something that annoys you—I’m really sorry—but that doesn’t mean you can still pretend I do and see what happens to your mind. You might be surprised.