Complaining is Just Noise

I've relearned something simple about complaining last year that I've seem to have forgotten from my days in the military. As I was working my way out of a hard hike in knee-deep snow in the canadian pacific north-west, near Whistler, I came again to the same conclusion: complaining is just noise.

It doesn't solve any problem. It doesn't fix the fact that cellphone technology in this country is backwards, or move the cars in a traffic jam right outside Manhattan, or change anyone's politics. It just creates noise that annoys the crap out of everyone around me and myself.

And here's the thing about that noise: it accomplishes nothing.

Sam Alaimo writes:

"complaining is the condition of neither wanting to live while suffering in silence nor to die and be free from the burden of suffering."

That definition hit me. Because complaining is this weird middle ground where we want to keep going but also want everyone to know we're unhappy about it. Fuck that.

Like Sam put it, we've stripped our lives of real consequences for complaining, so we've gotten comfortable with it. Too comfortable.

But what if we stopped? What if we just learned to suffer well?

I don't mean suffer as in wallow in misery. I mean suffer as in "things are hard, and ok, so?" Just work the problem. Get tough. Come on! The WiFi is spotty. People walk slow in front of you. The crappy coffee you bought is scalding hot and your tongue now pays for it. These things exist. Complaining doesn't change them.

There's this quote from Frictionless Living that stayed with me:

"We can be our own worst enemies. Getting angry and upset when things don't go to plan. We try to control the uncontrollable. We fret and get stressed about what we don't have or haven't achieved. We complain. Never feeling like we have enough or are enough."

That's it. We complain because we're trying to control things we can't control, which goes against the way. We're trying to make the world bend to what we think it should be instead of just dealing with what it is.

I'm learning that the answer is simple: suffer in silence and build resilience. Not because silence is noble or virtuous or makes you some kind of stoic warrior, but because it's just more effective. If something can be fixed, fix it. If it can't be fixed, why waste energy complaining about it?

“Relish the challenge of overcoming difficulties that would crush ordinary men... Learn to suffer.”

Things are not easy. They never were. Deal with it. Build a tougher skin. Like Sam very clearly and eloquently wrote in Why We Should Suffer In Silence, the Frogmen on Omaha Beach didn't complain their way through Nazi fire and steel obstacles. They suffered in silence and blew up what needed to be blown up. We're not storming beaches, but the principle holds. Complaining doesn't move the obstacle. Action does. Or acceptance does.

So I'm working on this. And it's fucking hard. I, we, have big mouths. When I feel that complaint rising up, I try to disconnect and ask myself whether this does solve anything. Will this move the needle? And if the answer is no, then I'm trying to just be quiet. Either find the solution, or just shut up and deal with it.

I know. Not easy. Yeah.

It took me a while to get here. Going back through some of my own posts on this blog, reading my own bullshit and rants, I found myself getting annoyed with myself. All that noise. What was the point?

Because complaining, in the end, is just noise. And noise doesn't get you anywhere.