There’s a man in Colorado who, it’s safe to say, is pretty irritated by the noise of aircraft approaching and leaving Denver airport, 30 miles from his house. How irritated, exactly? In 2015, he made 3,555 complaints out of 4,870 received by the airport, according to a new research paper. And he’s not unique. Five people made 61% of the complaints about Portland airport, and in Washington, DC, “two individuals at one residence” clocked up 6,852 complaints in a year against Ronald Reagan Washington National airport. (About the noise, I mean. No word on how many complained about it being named after Reagan.)
As an inveterate maker of official complaints myself, I confess to some admiration for these moaners. Yes, I know the adage that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly, while expecting different results. But there’s a cosmic defiance here that I respect. The world may be enraging and absurd – yet at least someone has the self-respect to keep protesting against that fact.
It won’t make them happy, though. These findings illustrate how irritation and complaint are self-reinforcing: objecting to something you can’t control brings a moment of catharsis, but mainly makes things worse, by increasing the attention you bring to the problem, which makes it more intrusive. You end up listening more acutely for the next noise and getting more irritated when it comes. It’s stressful even when there’s no noise, because you’re on edge, waiting for the silence to be broken. No wonder a single complaint becomes hundreds: the complaining is nourishing the problem. This gets easier to see if you think about these minor irritations like a difficulty encountered in a relationship – in this case, between you and your environment. Railing against them is like falling out with your partner, then continuing, over and over, to pick further fights for the sake of it. And when has that ever helped?
As so often, the Buddhists figured this out before most of us. The “first noble truth” of Buddhism is often translated as “life is suffering”, but that’s a bit melodramatic; it implies constant agony, when for most of us that’s thankfully rare. The word in question, dukkha, means something closer to “unsatisfactoriness”. Life can be wonderful, awful or somewhere in between, but there’s always an undertow of not-quite-right-ness: either what’s happening is unpleasant, or it’s pleasant but you know it must end. The aircraft noise complainer is mired deep in dukkha, unhappy when a plane is passing, and unhappy when one isn’t, because the silence can’t last. One big Buddhist insight is that this dissatisfaction doesn’t arise from our circumstances themselves, but from the way we try to attain happiness, by lining up our circumstances just right, then keeping them fixed in place for good. It’s a quest that’s doomed to fail, since nothing lasts. Planes come, planes go, and you’re happy to the extent that you don’t mind that fact. Though I think the Buddha did make an exception for that “jaunty whistle” Samsung ringtone. That’s just legitimately horrendous.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
