It Wasn't Me!

“Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.” Lily Tomlin – US Actress

Life is not nearly as complicated as we perceive it to be. All around us we see people complaining of life being too hard or too unfair. We might have become used to this sort of attitude and might believe that such feelings are an inevitable part of everyday living but simply becoming used to something does not make it the truth.

The importance of such a perception of life must not be underestimated. A continuous belief that life or the world or fate, whatever name one gives it, has been unfair is extremely dangerous. It can lead to unimaginable vice since people who believe that the world is not fair do not feel any obligation to be fair to the world and this is what leads to all kinds of trouble. I have heard a number of analysts explaining the acts of terrorism and barbarism rampant all over the world by saying that this is the way anyone would act if he was subjected to the kind of injustice faced by these oppressed people. Though this may sound logical, it is not.

I believe that rationalizing these perceptions is essential if we want to move towards a comfortable life. For anyone interested in looking in the mirror and admitting his / her faults, the following is a humble effort to show the way.

The most common blunder we make when confronted with our faults is to start by feeling so guilty that no reasonable step can follow. That is not the way to start. The first step should always be an attempt to rationalize our perceptions and emotions with an open mind and then try to figure out if they make sense or not.

Why do humans always have such a huge urge to complain? Regardless of whether our complaints are justified or not, it remains a fact that we take a strange pleasure in shifting the burden of our woes on something or someone else.

First the disclaimer; I am not a scientist or a sociologist or a psychologist or any other gist. I am just your normal person, who is trying to figure things out for himself. I believe that this habit of complaining stems from three simple factors. First, that we want to achieve something, most commonly this something means a certain way of life. Second, that we believe that we have not and / or cannot and / or will not be able to achieve it. Third, that we think this failure is not because of any fault of our own but that certain other factors that are beyond our control are responsible for it.

Anyone, who has experienced or continues to experience these bouts of complaining, must ask himself or herself a few questions. Most importantly, we must re-visit our aims in life and try to figure out if they make any sense or not. What we often forget (or maybe never realize in the first place) is that any aim that is not primarily in our own control is a bad aim. Whether we eventually achieve it or not is secondary.

For instance, if our aim is to make money, it is beyond our control, our aim should be to make the best possible effort to make money. Aiming to win a game, though looks justified, is actually flawed. Aiming to make the best effort to win a game is what we should be looking for.

So, if we continue to keep making the best effort, we can never fail due to any external causes. Our only failure could be a failure to do our best and that will lead to learning from our mistakes and improving ourselves.

In my personal experience, I have always seen two distinct groups of people. One, who are always working hard and continuously learning from failures and getting better, and others who are complaining of how something that they couldn’t help avoid intervened to stop them from achieving what they wanted. I have never met someone, at least not yet, who did both. So, I am forced by my experience to believe that people who complain do not give their best. Not to say that they don’t work hard, but the moment they shift the responsibility of their failure to external causes, their efforts immediately fall short of the mark.

We must never judge people. But what is infinitely more important is that we do not let other people’s judgement about us, affect us in any way. If we believe in God, we must also believe that He is the only one whose judgement matters. If we must look for other judges, then let’s not look any further than ourselves. Only God and we know what resources and hurdles we have in our life. So, only God and we can judge whether we did our best or not.

So, here is the way to go. First, decide on an aim which falls within your control. Second, judge your success or failure by the effort you made, not by the results. Results are based on so many other factors that you can do little about, that thinking too much about them would only waste your time. Give results importance only to the extent of using them to analyze how you could do better in the future. This sort of an attitude will ensure that you never have anything to blame for a failure except yourself since you will face no failure except an inability to do your best. And, believe me, when the only possible complaining is complaining about your own actions, few will feel comfortable wasting their time in this fruitless activity.

Third, and most important of all, don’t let others, who don’t have any right to judge you, or any clue about how to accurately judge you, have any kind of effect on how you judge yourself. Following this line of thinking should give two results. One, you will never feel hard done by the world when you fail and two, you will be able to look at things independently and form much better opinions than those formed under the influence of what others say.

Most significantly, it should help you stop complaining. Life is a continuous learning curve. The only real success is to learn more and develop further as a person. We have no obligation to explain to the world the reasons for our perceived failures. And we will always be in a position to improve and avoid actual failures.