"Though most of us have a perverse love of wallowing in our misery—a human trait amplified a thousandfold by the internet—complaining rarely makes things any better. As in the Buddha's parable of the 'second arrow,' our griping can make our sufferings doubly painful; as in the parable of the 'poisoned arrow,' it can postpone or substitute for the constructive actions we need to take in order to heal or improve our condition."
"The Buddhist arrow stories are, after all, at least a couple thousand years old; lamentation more or less constitutes its own genre in Biblical literature. Even older still than these religious sources is the first documented customer service complaint, a specific variety of complaining that we might be forgiven for associating mainly with a modern, consumerist age—and one of the few kinds of complaints that can generate positive results."
The Complaint Restraint project promotes creating a positive life by eliminating negative statements and habitual complaining. Complaining often amplifies suffering, mirroring Buddhist parables about the 'second arrow' and the 'poisoned arrow,' where griping intensifies pain or delays healing and constructive action. Complaining is not merely a modern phenomenon; lamentation appears in ancient religious traditions and literature. Evidence of customer complaints reaches back to ancient Babylon, where an irate purchaser inscribed a complaint on a clay tablet around 1750 B.C., showing that targeted consumer complaints have long produced concrete results.
Read at Open Culture
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