Complaining

I’m allergic to complaining.  I don’t want to do it and I don’t want to hear it.  To me, complaining has always been a sign of weak-mindedness, an inability to cope with the stresses and disappointments of daily life.  My allergy becomes even more acute when someone complains when things are actually going pretty well.  It can be disheartening, if not unbearable, to hear someone complain about granular minutiae, when the bigger picture is trending positive.

This might sound callous and cold, but don’t worry, I have way more patience for the complaints of others, than for my own.  When people release their troubles on me, I dutifully listen and nod, and I try to only give advice or my two cents when asked; but often times people just want a listening ear. The allergy is actually a self-imposed mechanism that reminds me to stop complaining as soon as I feel the urge sweeping upon me.  It’s a tool I use in other ways too, like with my aversions to inefficiency and over-spending.

The basic idea is that by ingraining this “allergy,” or an automated mental response, I can combat the natural urge to complain in trying situations.  The short-term result is less (but repressed) complaining, but the real fruits come in the long-term.  With consistent practice of abstention, the urge to complain should eventually disappear and be replaced with a constructive, problem-solving mentality.  My view has always been that complaints are the enemy of solutions – until now.

I spent this summer volunteering with a coral reef conservation group on a small island off the southern coast of Thailand.  After five weeks of (largely) no incidents, my final day of diving exposed me to cyanobacteria (stinging algae) in the water surrounding the artificial reef I had been helping with all summer.  The worst I had incurred up till that point had been intense hand-swelling from touching stinging hydroids (a plant-like relative of the jellyfish), but the stinging algae resulted in an intense rash covering most of my body (gross, I know).

A couple nights later, me and my fellow conservationists had a small goodbye dinner. The weekend had been intense with itching and scratching, and so despite my deepest inclinations to not complain about it, I decided to tell them matter-of-factly what was going on.  This was an absolute revelation.  The antihistamines I had picked up at the local pharmacy had done little to nothing, but my mild form of complaining allowed the group to problem-solve on my behalf, and one of my compadres even had a pill handy that she uses for exactly such occasions.

Voila!  Just like that, a lightbulb went off.  We have such a natural inclination to share our pain with others, that there must be benefits we aren’t necessarily seeing.  Sure, people tend to feel better when they get stress off their chest, but I never thought that was enough to outweigh the clear costs in terms of decreased problem-solving.  The cyanobacteria incident revealed those benefits; it revealed the power of group problem-solving that can result from a simple complaint.

If you are having sincere difficulty with a problem, bring it to a big enough group and you are bound to come up with a solution.  This is especially true when the group members have more experience than you, which was certainly the case in the algae story.  In evolutionary terms, people who complain more would tend to survive longer because they crowdsource their problem-solving and therefore see more solutions.  This is likely true up until a point.  No one likes someone who complains all the time because they will become a drag on group resources.  If someone is branded a “complainer,” they will eventually become an outcast and the crowdsourced benefits are no longer there.  But tactful complaining seems to open a world of benefit.

So once again, it turns out, everything in moderation.  Much to my chagrin, even complaining.