CHAPTER 7
Why You Should Never Complain
Nothing needs to annoy you if you don’t add your annoyance to it.
—Seneca, Letters 123.1
THERE’S NOTHING WORSE THAN HAVING TO SPEND time around someone who complains constantly. But don’t worry, that’s just an observation. It’s not a complaint.
As you might imagine, Seneca and the other Stoics were vigorously opposed to complaining, moanings and groanings of all types. This is not unexpected. But the reason why they rejected complaining will be surprising to many readers. We’ll explore their thinking about why you should never complain at the end of this chapter. In the meantime, let’s take a look at how people view complaining today.
My first hope, though, is that you’ve never had to spend much time around someone who complains all the time. Chronic complainers remind me of Pig-Pen, the cartoon character from the comic strip “Peanuts.” As Pig-Pen walked around, he was always surrounded by a large cloud of dust and dirt, wherever he went. A chronic complainer, though, isn’t surrounded by a cloud of dust. Instead, he or she is surrounded by a cloud of negative psychic energy, which follows the complainer everywhere. Within that cloud floats a lot of irritation and dissatisfaction, always ready to express itself, along with the desire that someone will respond to the complainer’s emotional discontent.
“A BAD DAY AT THE OFFICE”
For many people today, an office environment is a fertile breeding ground for irritation and complaints. Seneca even mentioned this in his writings. He noted that people piled high with business tasks are likely to become irritated. As he said, “When a person is rushing here or there and constantly attending to many matters, a day will never pass so smoothly that some irritation won’t arise from someone or something and prepare the mind for annoyance.”1
The amazing thing, though, is just how much time people waste complaining at work. According to a study by Marshall Goldsmith, quoted by the Harvard Business Review, most employees spend ten hours or more per month complaining about their bosses or management, or listening to others complain. Even more striking, almost one-third of all employees spend twenty or more hours per month complaining or listening to complaints!2 Yes, that statistic even surprised me!
Of course, all that energy spent complaining at work is a massive waste of time and productivity, because complaints usually don’t lead to any change. In fact, “the more we complain, the more likely the frustration, over time, will increase.”3 But as Peter Bregman, the author of the article, points out, those complaints could lead to change if framed as constructive criticisms instead, and if they were seriously discussed. But many people find the idea of having a real conversation, which could change things, to be a bit threatening. By contrast, it’s much easier to complain.
But what is complaining, anyway?
If my son performed badly at school today by biting a girl’s foot—yes, that happened when he was in first grade!—I could say, “Benjamin acted poorly today,” and it would not be a complaint. But if I said, “Benjamin acted poorly today. What a rotten little kid!,” that would be a complaint. (Of course, I didn’t say that!) The first statement is just an observation. The second statement is negative emotional “venting,” which usually appears in complaints. In the end, complaining involves expressing emotional dissatisfaction.
For most people, complaining comes so easily that they’re often unaware of it: for many, it’s a kind of ingrained bad habit. So the only way to break the bad habit is to take a mental step back, notice when complaining happens, and try to stop the behavior.
Noticing this to be the case, and noticing how toxic complainers can be, some years ago Will Brown, a Kansas City pastor, came up with a Twenty-One Days Without Complaining Challenge. As the title implies, the goal of the challenge is to go three full weeks without complaining once. The clever trick is that the challenge involves wearing a little purple bracelet, which Pastor Brown will gladly sell to you. Once you start his A Complaint Free World® challenge, you start counting the number of days you can go without complaining. But as soon as you do complain, you need to move the bracelet to your other wrist and start over, resetting the count back to Day One. As he notes somewhat shockingly on his website: “The average person takes four to eight months to complete the twenty-one-day challenge [emphasis added]. But stick with it! Just remember, you can’t complain your way to health, happiness, and success.”4
Given the fact that there are so many complainers in the world, over ten million people have now taken the challenge, which must have resulted in a tidy number of purple bracelet sales, too.
What, however, would the Stoics have thought about this approach? My best guess is that they would have approved, especially with their emphasis on practical, cognitive exercises. For example, Epictetus taught his students how to break bad habits, step by step, over a thirty-day period. Once someone reached the end of the month-long period without repeating the bad habit, he suggested offering thanks to the gods.5
Also, while most people complain, some kind of hands-on exercise like this would be beneficial for someone who is a chronic complainer, and perhaps even necessary. One psychologist, Guy Winch, tells an amusing story about complainers. “Optimists,” he says, “see a glass half full.” “Pessimists,” he goes on, “see a glass half empty.” But this is what chronic complainers see:
A glass that is slightly chipped holding water that isn’t cold enough, probably because it’s tap water even though I asked for bottled, and wait, there’s a smudge on the rim, too, which means the glass wasn’t cleaned properly and now I’ll probably end up with some kind of virus. Why do these things always happen to me?6
What, then, would a classical Stoic see?
A Stoic would see a glass of water and view it with gratitude, as a gift from the universe, and be grateful for its life-giving properties. Because in the end, when you complain, you are no longer living in harmony with nature. Instead, according to the Stoics, your lack of gratitude is a condemnation of the harmony and beautiful order of the cosmos, which brought you into being in the first place.
This leads us to a much deeper understanding of why you should never complain, which doesn’t rule out the many obvious psychological reasons against complaining. Instead, it points toward a more profound vision of human nature and our own relationship to the greater world.
“FOLLOW NATURE” AND DON’T COMPLAIN
Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, said that the goal of his philosophy was to “follow nature” or “live in agreement of nature.” If we could live in agreement with nature, it would result in “a smooth flow of life,” which implies a kind of happiness or tranquility of mind.7
This idea to “follow nature” was taken up by the later Roman Stoics, too, like Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. But, as you might expect, while “follow nature” is a saying that might fit on a bumper sticker, what it means is something far more profound than just an attractive slogan.
For the Stoics, to follow nature, we need to understand nature—both human nature and the cosmos as a whole. And, as they pointed out, we can’t fully understand ourselves without understanding the greater universe first.
For the Stoics, the world is permeated by logos, which can be translated as “rationality,” “intelligence,” and by many other terms. What makes human beings unique, they stressed, is that we are creatures capable of rational thought, which makes us different from other animals. This allows us to do science, create societies based on law, launch astronauts into space, write love letters, and many other fine things. But the reason we can understand nature scientifically is because there is some connection between the rationality present in nature’s laws, the world’s structure, and the rational structure of our own minds. In the end, the Stoic belief in logos simply means that there is a rational structure to nature and our own minds.