The right to complain

Created 8 Sep 2009 • Last modified 7 Jan 2015

It is widely believed that if person A experiences misery of degree x and person B experiences misery of degree x + 1, then A has no right to complain. This is nonsense. All of us suffer, and all of us are comforted when we complain and receive sympathy in return. The individual differences in terms of quality and quantity of suffering are irrelevant here; everyone deserves compassion. Otherwise, people like you and me could never justifiably complain about anything, since most people in the world experience a few orders of magnitude more suffering than we do. We're lucky we can afford computers, Internet connections, and time to waste on silly essays on personal websites, but this luck doesn't let any of us escape from the human condition.