#Firstworldproblems: Complaining VS Being Thankful

There has been a slew of negative events happening in Singapore for the past weeks and netizens have been fairly active, sharing their opinions on these events. One of these events was a complete breakdown of our train system during the peak hours and it lasted almost throughout the entire night.
The breakdown occurred in BOTH the NS and EW line affecting 250,000 people. That's 250,000 people who cannot wait to go home after a long day of work and ended up taking one whole night to get home. Some were cursing the company like hell, understandably and others were calling the rest to be thankful.

Which brings me to the question, how should we be thankful and when should we complain?

In my opinion, being thankful is a very personal thing and you can be thankful for all sorts of stuff - that you have wonderful parents, you have three meals to eat or that you have finally found a job. What I dislike the most though, was how some people love to attach strings of comparisons and tell the rest to be thankful.

For example,

Be thankful that you have food today ok. Some people in Africa have no food at all.  

I am thankful that I am happily married with kids, look at Sandy, she is still SINGLE. 

Be thankful that our trains do not breakdown often ok, you look at UK they have strikes. 

I just find it ironic how whenever we were told to be thankful, we were more often than not be compared to a situation that is worse than ours. Why should 'being thankful' mean that there should be some sort of strings attached? If everyone has enough food or the exact same quantity and quality of food today, does that mean that we should be less thankful or worse, not be thankful at all? Occasionally, I count my blessings  but never had I saw the need to insult the less fortunate simply to to feed my own ego about myself or the things I am thankful about.

Being thankful means...
Being happy with what you have and not what you have RELATIVE to others.



Now moving on to complaining.  I think these two can co-exist happily and it is really not "you can only be thankful OR you can only complain, there is no either or". For example, I can be thankful that I have food on the table, but it does not mean that I cannot comment anything about the quality of the food (of course, if your mother have cooked it for you, then I suggest you do not utter a word at all for your safety lol).

As society advances, people begin to attach'quality' to their lives. That is why we have the various international surveys ranking countries according to 'human development index' or 'standard of living'. Obviously as we develop, we demand more things, (ideally) from ourselves and also from others. I think there is nothing wrong with expressing dissatisfaction when things do not perform as expected. The only question to debate about is of course, what is expectation and how high or low should one's expectations be? Let's not talk about that today. 

People who disregard complaints as noises or whining are foolish because there lie valuable feedbacks in these complaints. Not all complaints of course, but if you are willing to listen with humility, you can get more out from complaints.

If I were to ask, how is the food today? (sorry, I am hungry while I wrote this post lol!) and the responses were as such: 

A: oh they are ok/great!

Me: oh thank you! Is there anything I can improve on?

A: oh no, I am THANKFUL that you provided the food to me. 

Me: oh no problem! So what is good about the food?

A: that it exists. The very existence of the food is something I am very grateful about.

This is an exaggeration, but you see my point. 

Versus..

Me: How is the food?

A: It sucks.

Now this is when people stop listening. They think, 'oh god another whiner again, if you are so damn great why don't you cook the food then?' 

But if you were to ask further...

Me: How so? Could you let me know?

A: The steak is a little too over done, the sauce is too salty, the fish is too dry. 

Now you may or may not believe what the person say unless maybe ten other people tell you the same thing, but instead of seeing that as a negative, these are valuable feedbacks for the kitchen don't you think? 

Finally, I would also like to make a point that just because someone is not skilled at doing something, it does not mean that he/she cannot complain. This is like saying only chefs can complain about the quality of food or that only an athlete can complain about how tough a match is. These people may know better, but no one can claim they know everything yes? 

I shall end this post abruptly since the whole purpose of the post was written in response to some comments on Facebook :P