Why I Complain

When I was in my early teens and twenties I remember feeling like just about everybody middle aged or older that I encountered was constantly complaining. It could have been serious complaints—major health problems, for example, or some genuinely heartbreaking development. More often, though, the complaints were incredibly vapid, almost to the point of feeling obligatory.

Conversations could barely start without some kind of discontented remark about the government, or the weather, or “people these days.” Everything was wrapped in a complaint; good things came despite so-and-so’s best efforts to stop them, and happy moments inevitably highlighted some deficiency with such-and-such. It wasn’t so much that these folks couldn’t be happy. Rather, to me at least, it seemed that complaining was a kind of happiness.

I’m 36 now. And like a genetic predisposition that you swear off in adolescence and surrender to later, the complaining-as-happiness mind virus is alive and well in me. Recently I was driving home after what anyone would consider to be a successful and happy day, filled with much grace, and realized I had spent nearly the entire drive ruminating on a few things that were frustrating to me.

In my mind I confronted various people over their negligence or incompetence. I let my wife know that we were going to be making big changes that these problems made unavoidable. It was a full-on silent struggle session…and for no reason that anyone who had followed me around that day could possibly discern.

I was complaining. Just like the people I had been tuning out for years.

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Here’s what I think happens:

As you leave childhood, you face the fact that life is harder than anyone told you it would be and more disappointing than you were prepared for. As you realize this, three different options—specifically, two delusions and one truth—appear in front of you that you can believe.

The Young Person’s Delusion: Life Can Be Easier If I Myself Change

The young person’s delusion is how you cope with the hardship of life when you’re young and you believe with all your heart that life really is meant to be easy and fulfilling. The fact that you don’t experience it that way means, according to the young person’s delusion, that something is wrong with you. Your spine is out of alignment (either metaphorically or literally). You have the wrong productivity hacks. You are not hustling hard enough. You are not emotionally present enough. You haven’t eaten, prayed, or loved enough. You haven’t drawn enough boundaries. You haven’t seized the day.

In our younger days we respond to life’s pain by trying to fold ourselves into a shape that the pain cannot penetrate. We believe such self-reinvention is possible, not so much because we see it successfully done, but because we believe it must be possible. It’s a coping mechanism. Along the way, we often do pick up things that are beneficial—the habits that stick, the instincts that mature with time and experience. But in youth we ask these things to change us, to make us fly high above the anxiety and sorrow that we’re quickly realizing we cannot control.

Of course, they don’t. Suffering finds a way. So in time, we proceed to the next step:

The Old Person’s Delusion: Life Can Be Easier If Other People Would Change

Photo by Bruno Martins on Unsplash

This is where those old people I heard in my 20s were at, and it’s where I appear to be entering now.

Self-optimization hasn’t worked. Maybe I tried hard, maybe I didn’t, but the result is the same: Life is still disappointing. Things fall apart. My control over my life, my health, my prospects, etc., slips away even faster. So, my eyes drop and I start to look around. I see people who disappoint me. I see churches that let me down. I see teachers that didn’t go far enough with me. I see parents that should have anticipated their errors. I see books that promised what didn’t happen. I see leaders that just don’t get it. And I think: “The problem is them.”

This, too, is a coping mechanism. There is a limit to how much personal responsibility a person can assume for what they feel is undeserved unhappiness. Actually, it’s not even unhappiness. Happy people complain. Why? Because the frictionless idea of “happiness,” the version where we forget all else but joy and sail through life feeling perfectly understood and vindicated, doesn’t exist. In fact it never did, but somewhere we absorb this myth, so that even the happiest moments of our lives don’t even digest correctly in the moment. Only years later, looking back, we say, “Man, those were the good old days.” We call this foolish nostalgia but sometimes it’s actually the truth. Those were the good old days, and we didn’t know it because we weren’t even looking for good days.

Those middle-aged and older people that were complaining all the time weren’t worse people than me. They were just ahead of me. Their eyes had already dropped to look at the people and institutions and circumstances that had not rescued them from the curse. And that’s where I am now. Discontentment comes to a home cooked dinner and wonders why it’s not a banquet. Or it comes to a banquet and is wounded by not having a better seat.

And what we have to learn is this.

The Truth: Life is Hard, There is No Unmixed Joy, and The More You Try to Control This the Worse it Will Get.

Life is hard. You spend so much of it trying to accumulate friends, knowledge, money, relationships, etc., and you don’t get most of what you want, and even what you do get can move away, become obsolete, be lost, or decide you’re not all that. There is no easy version of life. There is no existential financial freedom seminar that can teach you how to put away 10% of your hopes and desires in an account that will one day mature and be available to withdraw. There is no guarantee, not from your parents or lovers and certainly not from God, that you will succeed. You may, you may not.

There is no unmixed joy. If you do succeed, you will have to watch people you love fail. If you find true love, your spouse will not quite get you, or get tired of your needs, or need something that’s not you. If you have kids, they will get sick and wake up really early. If you get a great job, you will have impostor’s syndrome. If you find a wonderful church, you will wonder why you didn’t get that invite, or why your family doesn’t seem to fit in, or why the pastor doesn’t talk more about XYZ. The constant grind of these mixed joys is significant.

And the more you try to control this—the more you try to spin the plates in the right direction, the more you try to manipulate people and circumstances in your favor—the worse it gets. Hartmut Rosa’s great book is just flatly and unquestionably true: Control and joy lie on opposite ends of the compass.

My hypothesis is this: because we, as late modern human beings, aim to make the world controllable at every level—individual, cultural, institutional, and structural—we invariably encounter the world as a “point of aggressions” or as a series of points of aggression, in other words as a series of objects that we have to know, attain, conquer, master, or exploit. And precisely because of this, “life,” the experience of feeling alive and of truly encountering the world—that which makes resonance possible—always seems to elude us. This in turns leads to anxiety, frustration, and even despair, which then manifest themselves, among other things, in acts of impotent political aggression.

Our technological age cannot and will not admit this. We log on every single day to a digital multiverse that trains us in the delusion of control. Computers promise user-designed paradise. That’s why we live in them. That’s why the old pictures, the old friend requests, the old YouTube commercials, the old music, appeals to us so. There is safety in the digital time capsule, because we made it, it’s ours, we can control it. In the modern, digitized control age, we are God.

And that is why Solomon concluded history’s greatest struggle session with this:

Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, “I have no pleasure in them”; before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return after the rain, in the day when the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent, and the grinders cease because they are few…

To remember the Creator is more than paying lip service. It means to see God as the source of life. It means to see your pleasure and pain, your dreams and disappointments, as belonging to him. The moon and stars will darken. Life is hard, but even it stops. The question is: What’s left? God is left. God is greater than life. There is no depth of joy or pain that is greater than God. When the day comes when you and I will feel neither, we will feel God.

God is my portion and strength. He catches my tears and records my laughs. He saw when my hopes were formed and was near when they were dashed. God is the source of my life. Never more so than when I forget.