June 1, 2025
The other day I heard someone mention that people who are over-privileged complain more than those who have experienced a certain degree of suffering or hardship in their existence. A child who is spoiled rotten, for example, may possess a tendency to bleat more about the little things that are not going her way, than a child who is rarely used to receiving much of anything that is considered playfully positive at all. Are grownups any different?
Buddha Nada
What type of suffering are we talking about? Not having a ton of nice stuff would certainly fall short of the criteria that defines suffering, but just because someone showers themselves with a lavish lifestyle does not inherently mean she has managed to steer clear of any hardship. The same goes for being a cranky shopper.
If you’ve ever worked in customer service, the employer will say that “the customer is always right” (it’s true and it’s in every employee handbook ever created). I don’t ever really feel like shopping, so if I’m having a bad day the last thing on my mind is to go wandering up and down constricting aisles in an enclosed space with a bunch of other zombies gazing upon endless racks of junk, until we try to beat one another to a swelling checkout line.
Once we get up there, making a fuss about anything can lead others to believe that we’re either having a bad day, or that we’re just generally an unhappy person, at which point one might ask, “You’re buying shit in an air-conditioned department store, where exactly is the struggle?”.
According to the employer(s), life is suffering and everyone, sans laborers, gets a pass (ala Buddha). This sure would be a lovely philosophy if it applied to everyone and if it wasn’t solely based on corporate efforts to stave off liabilities and litigious employee behavior, while banking millions. Still, it’s odd that the person who complains the most, seems to be heard the most, perpetuating a suggestive, cyclical play between privilege and discontent.
Maybe it’s simply that people who seem to “have everything” should therefore have nothing to complain about, but I think that we’d be missing the point entirely with this thought trajectory. By now we all know that wealth, status and material accumulation do not make a person happy. And while it’s an oversimplification to say that: gaining = complaining, the opposite of this is actually quite often how we identify one another. We are conditioned to believe that the man on the street corner, clad in threadbare clothing and humming to himself, is a less happy person than the woman vrooming past him in her Escalade.
What we’re forgetting is that judgements and stereotypes have everything to do with how we perceive others, how we interact with them and why we flock to our “kind”. Whether we’re complaining or gloating or rejoicing, the person on the other end of it has their own conditioned codes which inform them on how to evaluate us through the system they’ve adopted, before they can formulate a snap judgement. In other words, if we are the type of person to scoff at the wealthy elite, then we could search and find plenty of evidence to support such a broad claim.
Affirmation Station
Let us get back to this idea of suffering. Many people, rich and poor, suffer from mental illnesses such as anxiety and depression, substance abuse, obesity, financial instability, poverty, starvation and grief. Some of these issues can begin to fuel the others, which creates a dark, downward spiral that easily falls within the criteria defining what it means to suffer. But, unless we have extremely intimate knowledge of this information, we seldom take these circumstances into consideration and chronically resort to judging one another based on what we can see in the moment and what little we may know.
The reason for this hovers upon surface level processing: the superficiality within which we get to decide, who deserves what. Social media, status races, materialism and corporate power have certainly painted the lines for us to follow, so that we can paint ourselves an ultimately dehumanizing shade of grey. For instance, some of us may witness people struggling because of the choices they’ve made- “So why would we go out of our way to help or understand them when they don’t seem willing enough to improve their own situation?” Hardly ever do we ask this question out loud, because: 1) it’s shallow and dismissive; and 2) deep down, we are well aware that these are often the people who need help the most.
Too easily we forget about what’s causing the vast range of problems that everyone has to deal with on a daily basis; sadly, we’re replacing support groups with hate groups and constantly searching for ways we can affirm how we feel, instead of changing it. These are first-world problems that we are collectively failing to address, the solutions for which are embedded in the cosmos and presumably unattainable for anyone not meditating religiously…or taking ayahuasca.
We can continue to dive: What role does money play in how much a person complains? Does complaining serve as a proper measurement for a person’s happiness/discontent? Is everyone actually suffering? How often do I catch myself complaining? To what extent have I suffered enough to earn the right to pessimism? At this point it seems silly to attempt to answer these questions (though I’ve tried and deleted multiple “answers”). Within the bigger picture, if we pay close attention, most of us will catch ourselves in cynical thought, frequently; and while we can all choose to have plenty to complain about, just where in the literal hell does that get us?
Jerry, Jerry!
Let’s look at death for a minute, for it is one of the few major “absolutes” we can conceive of: Just because you haven’t yet lost a dear loved one, doesn’t mean you are spoiled and privileged. In the same breath, there is no such thing as “spending a little too much time grieving”- grieving takes all of the time we have left on this earth. It’s a matter of how you spend your time with the people you hold dear to you and how you grieve when they are no longer able to share your life with you.
It seems almost trite to proclaim that we should really try to be kinder to each other and to ourselves (-JS). But if we want to say that life is suffering and therefore, everyone is suffering, then we can start to develop what is known as compassion. Instead of labeling someone who complains a lot as an over-privileged “dick”, perhaps we might get to know a little bit more about them and what they are going through. Any approach that is less benevolent should only stand as a hindrance to the progress of life itself, which can be challenging enough as it is.
Most of us have a tendency to pull away from the toxic personalities that seem to surround us, myself included; but if we champion this idea that life, for everyone, is suffering, then it’s possible that we can invoke a bit of empathy and understanding when it comes to interacting with one another. After many breaths, maybe then we can begin to see our common struggle, support each other, and rise above the noise. And, maybe then we’ll find fewer reasons to complain about who’s complaining more.