The Benefits of Not Complaining

For Lent this year, I decided to give up complaining, playing online chess, and watching chess videos. (Spoiler alert: I failed miserably.)

In the beginning, the no complaining bit felt easier than when I first attempted it 4 years ago. As a reminder, complaining is more than just describing something negative that happened, or having a negative opinion about something. As I wrote then: “It’s okay to acknowledge negative circumstances in your life as long as it doesn’t become your focus, you’re maintaining a positive attitude, and/or you’re actively trying to fix the situation.”

I had a chance to put this into practice on a trip to Portland with my mom in early March.

I had purchased an expensive tech gadget, and was getting frustrated when I couldn’t activate it. I tried a few things but resorted to calling customer service, something I am normally loathe to do. The representative spent 2 minutes asking me what the problem was, and then told me to bring it to a local store for further troubleshooting. I was…slightly upset, as it was a terrible customer experience after spending a lot of money on this device.

After hanging up the phone I resisted my go-to response of writing a sternly worded e-mail to the CEO, as one might construe that to be “complaining.” Several deep breaths later, I turned my focus to solving the problem at hand — what else could I try? I was thinking there might be something funny with the Airbnb wifi, so I used personal hotspot on my iPhone instead — and lo and behold, it worked. (I complained reported the wifi issue to the Airbnb host, but they said they had no problems using it.)

Within that same hour, in between the deep breaths I was taking to calm myself down, I received an e-mail from TSA notifying me that my Global Entry renewal application was approved. Yes, I know that seems completely unrelated, but let me add that I had been waiting 4 months for an update on my application status (cue first world problem outrage here). More importantly, I was having an existential crisis earlier that day trying to balance my Lent commitment of no complaining and my strong desire to figure out who the CEO of the TSA was.

One might say it was a coincidence these two events happened the same day, but as someone who believes everything happens for a reason, I think God was teaching me that sometimes, you can get further in life if you don’t complain.