The Fine Art of Complaining, and How to Avoid It

A Taxing Point of View

 

The conversation with this young lawyer was taxing, to say the least.  To embrace the vernacular of a friend back home, it “plum wore me out.”

 

He was well-educated, with so much going for him.  He had a master’s in tax law and a solid academic record.  He was a good-looking kid with an engaging presence.  At least when he would stop complaining. 

 

He had run through associate’s positions with three fine firms, opportunities many young lawyers would have loved to have had.  They just didn’t work out. None of that was his fault, of course.  He recited a long litany of schools, firms, people, and circumstances which had done him in.

 

I wondered at first if it was a tax lawyer thing.  I thought about being a tax lawyer for a brief, demented period of my life. (My apologies to my tax lawyer buddies reading this.) But I was pulled away by kind, unseen hands from the vagaries of the Internal Revenue Service Code and its applicable regulations and rulings.

 

A survey shows that unhappy people spend more than twice as much time thinking about unpleasant events in their lives while happy people tend to think and rely upon information that brightens their personal outlook.  There is no job in existence that does not have its failings.  And no life is so great that it does not have some challenges.  If you think that what you do or the money you make or the status you have will clear all of that up, you are mistaken.  But if you ignore the good and you focus only on the challenges, you are going to have a rough go of it.

 

Here is a way to look at this:  Every single day has several different decision points where you can focus on the positive or the negative, or just pass it by without a conclusion one way or the other.  The day of the week, what you have to do that day, the weather, how you feel physically, and feelings about what happened yesterday, what will happen today, and what will happen tomorrow.  How you feel generally about those closest to you, how you view the economy, your weight, or your finances.

 

We all have unpleasant experiences in life, experiences that would be objectively viewed as such.  But when our really good experiences in life are passed through a cynical life-distorter that sorts out only the less than fully stellar parts, which you download on your internal Ipad to watch over and over, you are never going to have a good day.

 

This dilemma some of us have reminds me of that ancient story about the man with challenges who had come to the well to take advantage of its legendary healing powers.  He never really got in the water, but he was always hanging on the fringes, prompting an insightful teacher who was taking all of this in to ask:  Do you want to be made well? 

 

We have a lot of required warnings on consumer products which warn us of toxic components in some of those products if they are taken in excessive quantities.  Like you, I enjoy a good griping session every now and then. But we should program in on our internal Outlook software program a recurring warning:  Excessive quantities are dangerous to your health and happiness.

 

What I’ve learned about life on the way to the courthouse is this:  You really ought to stop and listen to your life’s narrative.  If you find that the story gravitates to the negatively skewed view of things, or you review objectively challenging experiences over and over in your mind’s eye, you are never going to get much good out of life.  A little griping now and then is not a bad thing. Just don’t let a set pattern overtake you.  At some point you just have to buck up and quit complaining.  Life for most of us on our worst days and worst jobs just ain’t that bad.