The Cost of Complaining
For some people, the world will always remain broken, imperfect, and conspiring against them. They are the ones who first notice anomalies in the system but have no intention of fixing them. It’s easy to say that at least they can spot the anomalies, but when your entire existence depends on how quickly you can spot flaws in everything, you are more likely to discover them.
Why would someone want to find anomalies around them? Anomalies imply that things are not perfect, so their failure is also not entirely their fault. This is a way of avoiding accountability with clever reasoning. They use their intelligence against their progress to avoid judgment from both themselves and the world.
We are not guilty of everything that happens to us, but we are responsible for it. A speeding car hitting us while we are walking on the pavement is not our fault. But it is our choice what to do next. We could blame the world, or we could get up, go to the hospital, and then decide on the legal side of things. When things are not as immediate as an accident, we often forget what the right thing to do is.
Complaining too much and too often sends a signal to our brain that we don’t need to change anything in our approach. We begin to think things are bad because of external factors, forgetting that while it's not our fault, it's still our responsibility. Misleading the world can often lead to misleading ourselves. Our brain creates a defensive personality that never places the blame on our own shoulders. When every wrong thing in our life is attributed to external factors, we start believing the world is conspiring against us. Maybe the planets aren’t favorably aligned.
This leads to suffering. The only way to end the suffering is to fix the internal dialogue. You need to break down the circumstances into what’s in your control and what’s out of your control. Train your brain to focus on solutions—alright, you screwed up. Now, what can you do to fix it?
Some things can never be fixed. In such cases, you need to reflect on the choices and feelings that influenced those choices, which emphasized your suffering. This reflection will help you learn about your deep-rooted emotions, biases, and desires. The next time you face a choice, you will be smarter because you have fixed the internal dialogue and identified the emotions that caused the suffering.
It all boils down to truth preference. You need to train your brain to accept the truth and work towards fixing it—whether by finding a solution or accepting that suffering was a result of certain choices.