Complain Pots
July 6th, 2006 -- Posted in people | No Comments »The last post brings me back to this thought so I might as well post a blog on it.
Does it help to complain?
The more I ask myself this, the more possible reasons I came up with to why people (esp. Singaporeans) like to complain.
Here’s the list:
- Make displesure known: When someone does something that displeases you, there’s always this awkward worm that has to wriggle out to show itself. You’d just have to announce that you’re not happy.
- Command for power: Slightly different from above. More extreme towards showing off one’s authority. Such complains usually is a demand for immediate attention.
- Asking for solution: When out of your own wits to solve the issue, you complain to make known your problems to others so they might find a possible way out for you.
- Make your problem known: ... so others can learn from it.
- Crying out for help: Not necessarily the same as above. More of asking for empathy from others rather than help… AKA attention seeking method.
- Lazy to think of solution: Also different from asking for solution. This is when one don’t even bother to think of his/her own solution.
- Out of BL-ism: Simply nothing else better to do.
Out of the above reasons I could think of, the only ones that truly help solve the issue of the complain is ‘asking for solution’ reason. The others, though not entirely redundant, are less efficient and sometimes even lead to the expense of other’s time. Unfortunately, these are all evident in the norm of Singapore society today. Parents are teaching their kids to make themselves heard. Since not all of us are actively campaigning for politics, we are resorts to make ourselves heard by complaining on trivial things.
So what’s the line to the definition of ‘trivial’? There is no global standard to how much tolerance we should withstand to understand the word. I have, however, an exercise that can help one understand how much one is complaining and how much of that is really trivial.
Try this: Cut yourself off from the world for a day. Pretend your deaf and dumb. Don’t communicate with anyone verbally. Don’t ask for help in anyway. When you have something you don’t like, write it down. If something gets in your way, find your own way out. Record this.
Think you can do this? Yes? If so, then you don’t need to complain at all, do you?
