I had actually written the better part of a really decent blog post, the best in a while, maybe the best ever? and then I accidentally deleted it. (That’s a joke. It’d be funny to say I had written a pulitzer prize-worthy blog post, but it was lost because the platform I use, and still have not upgraded despite threatening to for a full year, deleted it. It’s like that Tenacious D song.)

The most ironic bit is that it was about complaining and how I suspect we’d complain about our circumstances regardless of how much better or worse they were from the hypothetical now. Complaining is, within a certain threshold, a choice. If not a choice, then an attitude. 

We know the things that are imperfect in our lives better than we know the backs of our hands. We worry over them like stones. And that’s silly and more than a little sad. 

One of the most influential books I’ve ever read was A Canticle For Liebowitz. There’s a lot to that book, but one part, right at the end always stuck with me. Future governments had used dirty bombs against one another and in respones they had set up euthanasia camps to ease suffering. The final chapter of the book focuses on a monk as he escapes a camp with a mother and daughter doomed to die horrifically from radiation poisoning. He wishes to spare them suicide by caring for them. 

Slowly succumbing, in great pain, to radiation poisoning with your young child is so horrific that it’s a bit beyond complaining about, isn’t it? Complaining seems far, far, far beneath  something so dire as all that. So what good is complaining then? 

It just feels childish,
like swearing. 

If things are really worth complaining about, you’re in the hands of God. If they’re not, then you’re being a bit of a baby. I suppose complaining serves a social purpose, you can bond with someone over complaining about something, but you can bond with someone over music or poetry or ltierature, and doesn’t that feel nicer? I think I’d rather do that. 

Anyways, when I was writing this I was thinking of the Radiohead song No Surprises. I thought it had something about complaining in the lyrics, but it doesn’t. Either way, it has what might be my favorite music video of all time and you should watch it.