There’s a great bit that a comedian did a while back about disgruntled air travelers. In short, he notes that they’re all essentially living a miracle. Sitting in cushioned seats, eating hot food and watching movies while hurtling through the air near the speed of sound — and they’re furious that the wifi is slow. This is an experience beyond the wildest imaginings of our great-grandparents, and more convenient, comfortable, and even sanitary than any form of transportation devised. And yet — how is it that we manage to snatch irritability from the jaws of delight so easily?
I’d like to say I’m above all this, but that would be untrue. Just this morning, while listening to some of the greatest music ever performed (for free) on my wireless device, I was briefly flummoxed when my Bluetooth ran low on batteries and cut out. I was forced to use the speaker function, which I found deeply inconvenient. And so it goes. We are bathing in abundance, and yet we somehow tease out the minute imperfections and elect to sit with those. It’s so human. And so tragic.
Last week’s piece was about radical amazement — the mirror image of this phenomenon, where even the most ordinary objects and experiences can suddenly seem radiant, brimming with significance. This is the opposite. Complaint dims everything it looks at. It’s like putting pants on a lightning bug, or watching fireworks through two pairs of sunglasses — it takes the luminous and simply blows out the light. Complaining is how we un-see the good.
Complaints arise easily on the lips. But what seems like harmless venting may in fact be erecting the scaffolding of a worldview — a kind of attention training. The wrongness of the world is always available to notice. But so is the good, in equal measure; the question is which one we teach ourselves to see. This isn’t a naive call to blithely ignore real problems that need solving. It’s a reminder that the more we rehearse what’s wrong, the more fluent we become at finding it. Complaining doesn’t just describe a faulty universe. It creates one.
There’s a name for part of this: the hedonic treadmill, coined by Philip Brickman and Donald T. Campbell in their 1971 essay “Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society.” The basic idea is that we revert to a stable baseline of happiness after any positive or negative event. We absorb the new good thing, get fully acclimated to it, and then stop registering it as good at all. The reflex, once the good goes quiet, is to reach for the next hit of “better” — and to grow strangely intolerant of what was, a moment ago, astonishing. The good doesn’t stop being good. We just stop seeing it. Which is precisely the opening complaint needs.
It bears saying plainly: there’s a world of difference between identifying a real problem in order to solve it and finding the bad in an essentially good situation and marinating in it. The former is necessary and productive. The latter is worse than a waste of time — it’s a corrosive way of seeing that quietly degrades the quality of your life. Legitimate grievance sees and moves; chronic complaint un-sees and stays. I’ve watched many people get pulled into that whirlpool — myself among them, more often than I’d like — and it stands to reason, as the research on gratitude bears out, that a life spent noticing and connecting with the good is a far better one.
The wisdom traditions saw complaint as more than a bad mood — they treated it as a spiritual failing, a corrosion of gratitude and even a kind of blindness to the good. Epictetus put it plainly: it is easy to praise Providence, he wrote, “if a man possesses these two qualities, the faculty of seeing what belongs and happens to all persons and things, and a grateful disposition.” Seeing and gratitude, paired. Complaint is the failure of the first — a refusal, or an inability, to take in what’s actually there. I’ve come to believe that complaint is a kind of shut-off valve on our spirituality. It keeps us tangled in the material plane.
Complaining rarely presents itself honestly. It usually comes packaged as sophistication, intellectualism, worldliness. The cynic — the habitual complainer — gets to feel like the one who knows what’s really going on, and it comes with a bonus: a little contempt for anyone naive enough to be hopeful. And sure, look around and it’s a target-rich environment; there really is plenty to gripe about. But complaint doesn’t make you the wise one in the room. It doesn’t help you see more clearly — just the reverse. If you erase the good from the picture and declare the result dark, it doesn’t follow that it really is. Epictetus had a phrase for it: most of us are “walking in blindness.” The trouble is that this particular blindness feels like wisdom.
The good news is that the deleting of the good that comes with habitual complaining is reversible. The good never went anywhere; like in radical amazement, it’s free for the taking. Nothing needs to be added — only re-noticed. When you catch yourself shrinking the frame to include only what’s wrong, pause, and try to widen it again. Proactively look for something — anything — good. This isn’t about donning rose-colored glasses. It’s the opposite — taking off the smudged ones you didn’t know you were wearing. Fuller sight, not foolish sight.
You’re still, after all, sitting in a chair in the sky. The wifi may in fact be slow. Both things are true — but only one of them is a miracle, and it’s the one we’ve trained ourselves not to see.
"Complaining doesn't just describe a faulty universe. It creates one" connects directly to something you wrote last week about radical amazement. Both pieces are really describing the same mechanism from opposite directions, attention as trainable, and whichever half of reality gets rehearsed becomes the half that shows up automatically the next time. Amazement and complaint aren't different information about the world. They're different fluencies, built the same way, through repetition.