I appreciate you talking about suffering. It's an important topic that doesn't get nearly as much attention as it should. However I'd like you to go more into avoidance. I'm not sure complaining about the suffering you're already experiencing really counts as avoidance. It seems more like a misguided attempt at endurance. Or maybe it's an attempt to solicit external help, help that may remove the suffering?
I guess part of where I'm coming from is a story that I keep coming back to. A western gentleman wanted to become a buddhist monk. One of the things he had to do was take ice cold showers. This annoyed him, and he suffered. His internal monologue was all complaints. But at some point one of the monks told him he should spend less time objecting to what was happening to him and more time experiencing it. This completely changed the cold shower from something that was all suffering into something that was just one more experience.
I fear I'm not explaining it as well as I could, but I've tried this methodology, and it totally works. All of which is to say that complaining, rather than lessening suffering, may actually increase it.
This is a great anecdote. My response is to concede that this is a real phenomenon (namely, complaining can increase suffering) but maintain that complaining is a suffering avoidance strategy. This leaves me with the burden of explaining this apparent paradox. The way I understand it is that our consciousness is really more like meta-consciousness. Our feelings are, in some sense, strategic and largely explainable as attempts to achieve some social objective (even if there are no other people around!)
Why would we evolve the ability to complain to ourselves about suffering? So yes, I do think the evolutionary objective of complaining is to elicit external help. With perhaps a little bit of a means of budgeting our own attention. That is, we may have evolved not to solve our own problems unless they hurt enough, and our consciousness of suffering may play into that a bit.
But like many emotions, we aren’t necessarily conscious of the these evolutionary objectives. When we frown, cry and complain we feel like it is a natural, almost inevitable consequence of the suffering…not a strategy. But the very fact that you can stop yourself from frowning or complaining means it is a choice. There is an incestuous relationship between what we are feeling, what we think we are feeling, and how we act on our feelings. So one way of thinking about it is that when you complain you engage more of your brain in an action associated with suffering so you feel it more. But this does not really change the underlying reason why such a phenomenon (namely, expending energy to express suffering or amplify an expression of suffering) would exist in the first place.
Okay I'm still thinking about this. I'm wondering if complaining was an evolution or cultural adaptation which worked great in the past, but is maladaptive now. You could imagine that if you're in a small hunter-forager community, or even a small agriculture community that you would be complaining about issues which were tractable. (Maybe it's even a subtype of gossip) to people who could do something about those problems. You might also imagine that complaining among the old (where it is even now endemic) could have had a useful role in cultural evolution. In which case your thesis of avoidance makes sense.
However we are now buffeted by problems that aren't tractable, complaining to people who can't do anything about them even if they were, surrounded by old people making complaints of limited cultural utility because everything is changing too damn fast!
yes! I like that model. I think I read somewhere (ACX maybe?) about how in ancient societies people complain, insult, and nitpick each other much more. I don't think it's completely maladaptive, though. It works pretty well for kids! And it seems like there were plenty of things in the ancient world that people didn't have control over.
But part of my objective in this essay was to convey that you should evaluate and take ownership of your complaining. Sometimes it really does work, but when it doesn't it is costly.
I appreciate you talking about suffering. It's an important topic that doesn't get nearly as much attention as it should. However I'd like you to go more into avoidance. I'm not sure complaining about the suffering you're already experiencing really counts as avoidance. It seems more like a misguided attempt at endurance. Or maybe it's an attempt to solicit external help, help that may remove the suffering?
I guess part of where I'm coming from is a story that I keep coming back to. A western gentleman wanted to become a buddhist monk. One of the things he had to do was take ice cold showers. This annoyed him, and he suffered. His internal monologue was all complaints. But at some point one of the monks told him he should spend less time objecting to what was happening to him and more time experiencing it. This completely changed the cold shower from something that was all suffering into something that was just one more experience.
I fear I'm not explaining it as well as I could, but I've tried this methodology, and it totally works. All of which is to say that complaining, rather than lessening suffering, may actually increase it.
This is a great anecdote. My response is to concede that this is a real phenomenon (namely, complaining can increase suffering) but maintain that complaining is a suffering avoidance strategy. This leaves me with the burden of explaining this apparent paradox. The way I understand it is that our consciousness is really more like meta-consciousness. Our feelings are, in some sense, strategic and largely explainable as attempts to achieve some social objective (even if there are no other people around!)
Why would we evolve the ability to complain to ourselves about suffering? So yes, I do think the evolutionary objective of complaining is to elicit external help. With perhaps a little bit of a means of budgeting our own attention. That is, we may have evolved not to solve our own problems unless they hurt enough, and our consciousness of suffering may play into that a bit.
But like many emotions, we aren’t necessarily conscious of the these evolutionary objectives. When we frown, cry and complain we feel like it is a natural, almost inevitable consequence of the suffering…not a strategy. But the very fact that you can stop yourself from frowning or complaining means it is a choice. There is an incestuous relationship between what we are feeling, what we think we are feeling, and how we act on our feelings. So one way of thinking about it is that when you complain you engage more of your brain in an action associated with suffering so you feel it more. But this does not really change the underlying reason why such a phenomenon (namely, expending energy to express suffering or amplify an expression of suffering) would exist in the first place.
Okay I'm still thinking about this. I'm wondering if complaining was an evolution or cultural adaptation which worked great in the past, but is maladaptive now. You could imagine that if you're in a small hunter-forager community, or even a small agriculture community that you would be complaining about issues which were tractable. (Maybe it's even a subtype of gossip) to people who could do something about those problems. You might also imagine that complaining among the old (where it is even now endemic) could have had a useful role in cultural evolution. In which case your thesis of avoidance makes sense.
However we are now buffeted by problems that aren't tractable, complaining to people who can't do anything about them even if they were, surrounded by old people making complaints of limited cultural utility because everything is changing too damn fast!
yes! I like that model. I think I read somewhere (ACX maybe?) about how in ancient societies people complain, insult, and nitpick each other much more. I don't think it's completely maladaptive, though. It works pretty well for kids! And it seems like there were plenty of things in the ancient world that people didn't have control over.
But part of my objective in this essay was to convey that you should evaluate and take ownership of your complaining. Sometimes it really does work, but when it doesn't it is costly.