“Instead of crying over what I don’t have, and wishing my life were different, what am I doing with what I’ve got?” (ODAT, 9 September)
Resentments are always about what I’m being ‘denied’ or what is being ‘threatened’.
These are in inverted commas, because typically no one is really denying me anything, I am not entitled to the thing that is being denied, the thing denied has substitutes, the thing denied is of no real value, or I am responsible for not having the thing, and, on the subject of threat, apart from the same points applying, there is the fact of constant change: things are supposed to come and go from my life; that’s the very design. Security lies only in stasis, and stasis is death.
For each thing which I am ‘denied’ or which is ‘threatened’, there are one hundred things that are given and relatively secure.
Complaint is matter of perspective.
There’s a pleasure in complaint: victimhood, blame, guiltlessness, and self-righteousness condemnation.
The real cause of the complaint is not its apparent subject matter but the pleasurable payoff.
The desire to complain precedes the identification of the apparent cause.