Breakfast with Seneca: A Stoic Guide to the Art of Living

CHAPTER 7

Why You Should Never Complain

Nothing needs to annoy you if you don’t add your annoyance to it.

—Seneca, Letters 123.1

THERE’S NOTHING WORSE THAN HAVING TO SPEND time around someone who complains constantly. But don’t worry, that’s just an observation. It’s not a complaint.

As you might imagine, Seneca and the other Stoics were vigorously opposed to complaining, moanings and groanings of all types. This is not unexpected. But the reason why they rejected complaining will be surprising to many readers. We’ll explore their thinking about why you should never complain at the end of this chapter. In the meantime, let’s take a look at how people view complaining today.

My first hope, though, is that you’ve never had to spend much time around someone who complains all the time. Chronic complainers remind me of Pig-Pen, the cartoon character from the comic strip “Peanuts.” As Pig-Pen walked around, he was always surrounded by a large cloud of dust and dirt, wherever he went. A chronic complainer, though, isn’t surrounded by a cloud of dust. Instead, he or she is surrounded by a cloud of negative psychic energy, which follows the complainer everywhere. Within that cloud floats a lot of irritation and dissatisfaction, always ready to express itself, along with the desire that someone will respond to the complainer’s emotional discontent.

“A BAD DAY AT THE OFFICE”

For many people today, an office environment is a fertile breeding ground for irritation and complaints. Seneca even mentioned this in his writings. He noted that people piled high with business tasks are likely to become irritated. As he said, “When a person is rushing here or there and constantly attending to many matters, a day will never pass so smoothly that some irritation won’t arise from someone or something and prepare the mind for annoyance.”1

The amazing thing, though, is just how much time people waste complaining at work. According to a study by Marshall Goldsmith, quoted by the Harvard Business Review, most employees spend ten hours or more per month complaining about their bosses or management, or listening to others complain. Even more striking, almost one-third of all employees spend twenty or more hours per month complaining or listening to complaints!2 Yes, that statistic even surprised me!

Of course, all that energy spent complaining at work is a massive waste of time and productivity, because complaints usually don’t lead to any change. In fact, “the more we complain, the more likely the frustration, over time, will increase.”3 But as Peter Bregman, the author of the article, points out, those complaints could lead to change if framed as constructive criticisms instead, and if they were seriously discussed. But many people find the idea of having a real conversation, which could change things, to be a bit threatening. By contrast, it’s much easier to complain.

But what is complaining, anyway?

If my son performed badly at school today by biting a girl’s foot—yes, that happened when he was in first grade!—I could say, “Benjamin acted poorly today,” and it would not be a complaint. But if I said, “Benjamin acted poorly today. What a rotten little kid!,” that would be a complaint. (Of course, I didn’t say that!) The first statement is just an observation. The second statement is negative emotional “venting,” which usually appears in complaints. In the end, complaining involves expressing emotional dissatisfaction.

For most people, complaining comes so easily that they’re often unaware of it: for many, it’s a kind of ingrained bad habit. So the only way to break the bad habit is to take a mental step back, notice when complaining happens, and try to stop the behavior.

Noticing this to be the case, and noticing how toxic complainers can be, some years ago Will Brown, a Kansas City pastor, came up with a Twenty-One Days Without Complaining Challenge. As the title implies, the goal of the challenge is to go three full weeks without complaining once. The clever trick is that the challenge involves wearing a little purple bracelet, which Pastor Brown will gladly sell to you. Once you start his A Complaint Free World® challenge, you start counting the number of days you can go without complaining. But as soon as you do complain, you need to move the bracelet to your other wrist and start over, resetting the count back to Day One. As he notes somewhat shockingly on his website: “The average person takes four to eight months to complete the twenty-one-day challenge [emphasis added]. But stick with it! Just remember, you can’t complain your way to health, happiness, and success.”4

Given the fact that there are so many complainers in the world, over ten million people have now taken the challenge, which must have resulted in a tidy number of purple bracelet sales, too.

What, however, would the Stoics have thought about this approach? My best guess is that they would have approved, especially with their emphasis on practical, cognitive exercises. For example, Epictetus taught his students how to break bad habits, step by step, over a thirty-day period. Once someone reached the end of the month-long period without repeating the bad habit, he suggested offering thanks to the gods.5

Also, while most people complain, some kind of hands-on exercise like this would be beneficial for someone who is a chronic complainer, and perhaps even necessary. One psychologist, Guy Winch, tells an amusing story about complainers. “Optimists,” he says, “see a glass half full.” “Pessimists,” he goes on, “see a glass half empty.” But this is what chronic complainers see:

A glass that is slightly chipped holding water that isn’t cold enough, probably because it’s tap water even though I asked for bottled, and wait, there’s a smudge on the rim, too, which means the glass wasn’t cleaned properly and now I’ll probably end up with some kind of virus. Why do these things always happen to me?6

What, then, would a classical Stoic see?

A Stoic would see a glass of water and view it with gratitude, as a gift from the universe, and be grateful for its life-giving properties. Because in the end, when you complain, you are no longer living in harmony with nature. Instead, according to the Stoics, your lack of gratitude is a condemnation of the harmony and beautiful order of the cosmos, which brought you into being in the first place.

This leads us to a much deeper understanding of why you should never complain, which doesn’t rule out the many obvious psychological reasons against complaining. Instead, it points toward a more profound vision of human nature and our own relationship to the greater world.

“FOLLOW NATURE” AND DON’T COMPLAIN

Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, said that the goal of his philosophy was to “follow nature” or “live in agreement of nature.” If we could live in agreement with nature, it would result in “a smooth flow of life,” which implies a kind of happiness or tranquility of mind.7

This idea to “follow nature” was taken up by the later Roman Stoics, too, like Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. But, as you might expect, while “follow nature” is a saying that might fit on a bumper sticker, what it means is something far more profound than just an attractive slogan.

For the Stoics, to follow nature, we need to understand nature—both human nature and the cosmos as a whole. And, as they pointed out, we can’t fully understand ourselves without understanding the greater universe first.

For the Stoics, the world is permeated by logos, which can be translated as “rationality,” “intelligence,” and by many other terms. What makes human beings unique, they stressed, is that we are creatures capable of rational thought, which makes us different from other animals. This allows us to do science, create societies based on law, launch astronauts into space, write love letters, and many other fine things. But the reason we can understand nature scientifically is because there is some connection between the rationality present in nature’s laws, the world’s structure, and the rational structure of our own minds. In the end, the Stoic belief in logos simply means that there is a rational structure to nature and our own minds.

Because we are rational creatures, we are born with the task of trying to understand the world—Nature as a whole—along with our own human natures, and the relationships that exist between the greater world and our inner selves. And since rationality is the defining characteristic of human nature for the Stoics, we are born to develop our rational capabilities; this will allow us to live peacefully and thoughtfully, develop good inner characters, and contribute to society.

There’s nothing unscientific about the fundamental Stoic belief in Logos, and there’s nothing irrational about the Stoic belief in Fate either. While “Fate” might sound spooky or superstitious at first, it merely refers to the chains of cause and effect that exist in nature, which modern scientists also believe in. In fact, most of classical physics in Newton’s time was based on the idea of “Fate”: cause, effect, and deterministic relationships. The Stoic belief in Fate simply means that we must acknowledge and honor the laws of nature, which are unavoidable.

While Logos and Fate are uncontroversial, the final Stoic idea that some modern readers (and modern Stoics) have difficulty with is Providence, because they see it as being a religious idea, which is a misinterpretation. Importantly, the Stoic concept of Providence had nothing to do with the Christian idea of providence, and the Stoics didn’t believe in a kind of Christian God that exists outside of nature. For the Stoics, “God” was Nature.

The Greek word for “providence” is pronoia, which means “foreknowledge,” and I personally think that the Stoic idea of providence came from the study of living organisms. For example, as we can still see today, living organisms are repositories of biological intelligence and possess the ability to heal themselves, which implies a kind of knowledge. For instance, if I cut my hand, my hand “knows” how to heal itself. If you cut the head off a flatworm, the flatworm knows how to grow a new head. There is also an incredible amount of biological intelligence embodied in the development of a human embryo into a full-grown person. Today, we understand this intelligence to be a by-product of biological evolution, which makes it no less astonishing or worthy of admiration.

From the perspective of the earliest Greek Stoics, however, we modern people would be mistaken to treat Logos, Fate, and Providence as different concepts. For the earliest Stoics, these terms were just different, interchangeable terms for the same thing. According to ancient sources, “Nature,” “Logos,” “Fate,” and “Providence” were seen as being identical.8

While modern Stoics sometimes reject these terms, which they mistakenly see as being antiscientific, if they do so they’re often overlooking something vital. One significant dimension is the kind of attitude that these ancient concepts led to—a rational yet inspired way of seeing and valuing the world—which has stimulated the development of science for centuries. For the Stoics and some other Greek philosophers, we live in an incredibly beautiful tapestry of a cosmos, governed by universal laws and harmonies, which we ourselves have emerged from, and to which we ourselves are inextricably bound. Moreover, through rationality, we’re able to understand the universe from which we’ve emerged. Importantly, this ancient philosophical attitude is not in conflict with modern science—science itself is an outgrowth of it.

Albert Einstein, in his famous essay on “Religion and Science,” referred to this as “the cosmic religious feeling,” which he found to be “the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research,” and the Stoics would have agreed with him.9 Regardless of the terminology the Stoics used, their overall way of looking at the cosmos and our place in it remains significant today. Einstein himself rejected belief in a personal God (as did the Stoics), and he was not religious in a traditional sense. Despite that, he noted that everyone who has made genuine advances in science “is moved by profound reverence for the rationality made manifest in existence”—a very Stoic observation indeed.10

Ultimately, we can see that the Stoics valued nature highly. They believed that nature does nothing in vain, that a kind of rationality is expressed in the laws of nature, and, because of that rationality, nature is wholly good. In other words, if we could see and understand how the universe operates as a whole, from a cosmic vantage point, we would see it as a perfect and beautiful model of excellence.

AT THIS POINT, we can fully grasp what the Stoics meant by “Follow nature.” In order to live a happy human life, we must align our minds and wills with nature. In that way, we will strive to be perfectly rational and virtuous, just as nature was, in their view. We will accept Fate, and honor all of nature’s laws without complaint. And once we do so, life will flow smoothly, because we’ll be living in harmony with reality, in the deepest possible way, and living as rational human beings.

Even though we are mortal and fragile beings, and although we live in a world where pain and suffering are destined to strike our individual lives, there is also something perfect about the workings of nature, taken as a whole. Therefore, when we complain, we are expressing disappointment with nature’s perfect order.

This is why the Stoics were so opposed to complaining. Since everything in nature follows a rational pattern, even if we can’t see its totality at once, complaining about some trivial event is an insult to the goodness of the universe itself.

As if offering an explanation of Zeno’s command to “follow nature,” Epictetus wrote: “Don’t wish things to happen as you desire, but wish them to happen as they do. Then your life will flow smoothly.”11 That is an essential part of his Stoic formula for happiness, freedom, and peace of mind. Put another way, we need to accept Fate and whatever the laws of nature are destined to bring. If not, we will never experience peace of mind.

Going back to the earliest days of the school, the Stoics used a story to illustrate the nature of Fate. This story involves a dog tied to a cart with a leash. As the cart rolls down the road, the dog can happily run alongside the cart, smiling and panting as they move forward together. Alternatively, if the dog fails to keep up with the cart, it will get dragged down the road instead, which would be a painful experience.12 This is a metaphor about following nature and accepting Fate. It is possible to resist Fate, but not successfully: you’ll get dragged along to the same destination, even if you struggle against it. In the words of Cleanthes (c. 330–c. 230 BC), the second head of the Stoic school in Athens, “Fate guides the willing, but drags the unwilling.”13

That said, the Stoics were not “fatalists” who believed that we couldn’t change the world. Because we are part of the web of Fate, our own actions and decisions, through cause and effect, will influence the future and the Fate of others. The important thing to remember, though, is that fate and the workings of nature will place us in certain situations beyond our control. But we need to accept or respond to these things gracefully rather than complain because they are mandated by nature, which is beyond reproach.

Seneca explained that everyone who is born enters into a contract with life, and part of that contract involves accepting that certain things will happen. And when it comes to these inconveniences, there’s no point in complaining about them or being upset. One obvious instance of this is death, because everyone who is born is fated to die. Rather than moan or groan about your impending death, you should accept it peacefully, and see that it’s part of life itself.

In one of his funniest remarks, Epictetus said that if someone has a runny nose, it’s just silly to complain about it. Because the universe has given us two hands, it’s better to wipe your nose instead.

In his Letters, Seneca portrays his friend Lucilius as being something of a complainer. And in several letters, Seneca, like the good Stoic therapist he was, helps Lucilius see the futility of complaining. For example, at the beginning of Letter 96, Seneca writes back to Lucilius, and explains why his complaining is wrong:

You are still upset about something—you still complain. Don’t you see that the only bad thing in these situations is your own annoyance and complaining? If you ask me, nothing can be upsetting for anyone unless he thinks something perfectly natural should be upsetting. I will no longer tolerate myself on the day I cannot tolerate something else.14

Seneca then describes the annoying events everyone must face as merely being “the taxes of being alive”:

I will accept whatever happens to me without growing sad or showing an unhappy face. I will pay all my taxes without complaint. All the things at which we groan, and from which we recoil, are just the taxes of life—things, my dear Lucilius, you should never hope or seek to avoid. A long life includes all these things, just as a long journey includes dust, mud, and rain.15

For Seneca, it makes no sense that people complain about trivial things that should be expected, rather than living in agreement with nature and accepting the inevitable bumps on the road of life:

To become upset about these things is as laughable as complaining about getting splashed in public or stepping in some mud. Our experience of life is like being in a bathhouse, in a crowd, or on a journey. Some things will be thrown at you and others will strike you by accident. . . . It is amid mishaps like this that you must make this rugged journey.16

As he notes, “We shouldn’t be surprised by any of the things we are born to encounter. Nor should we complain, because they are faced by everyone.”17

AMOR FATI: LOVE YOUR FATE

The nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche used the phrase amor fati, “love your fate,” but the idea goes back to the Stoics. Seneca said that the Stoic should “experience whatever happens as though you wanted it to happen to you,” because the universe approved of these events. “Crying, complaining, and moaning,” he wrote, “are rebellion” against the good order of the universe that brought us into being, and the laws of nature that actively maintain the world.18 This is just like the advice of Epictetus, quoted earlier: “Want things to happen to you as they do, and not as you desire them to.”

But the most beautiful expression of amor fati, at least in my mind, comes from these loving lines of Marcus Aurelius, which almost resemble a prayer:

Every thing that is harmonious with you, oh Universe, suits me also. Nothing is too early or too late for me that is timely for you. Everything that your seasons bring is fruit for me, oh Nature. All things are from you, in you, and all things return to you.19

That is certainly a case of following nature and celebrating its wisdom and goodness, coming from a man who experienced a vast amount of personal suffering. (Of his thirteen children, only five survived until adulthood.) We can sense in these words the deep sense of gratitude Marcus Aurelius felt for everything he had received from the beautiful and generous universe, of which he, too, was a part.

For a Stoic, everything we have from the universe is a gift, something on loan to us, which we will one day need to return. But our underlying mindset should be one of gratitude. Because even if we stumble on life’s journey or get splashed by a bit of mud, that’s no reason to complain about the beautiful world that brought us into being.