Why I Hate Those Who Complain

TED talks would have to be the very contentment of my existence. They offer me a divulging of issues otherwise unknown to me and they bring to light things that have been cowering in darkness.

Being a university student, I experience a lot of complaints on a daily basis, and just when you think that I escape these complaints when I leave campus, you are wrong. These complaints then take the forms of emails, text messages, Facebook statuses or phone calls, and find their ways back to me and I sit there attempting to conjure up an invisible forcefield that blocks all complaints from ever penetrating that forcefield and reaching my ears or my eyes because all I can think about are the necessary complaints that are not narcissistic and that come from those who are forcibly hushed, forcibly silenced, all for the first-world's benefits. And that is still not enough to satisfy.

Years ago, when I was a young child, I had barely anything to play with. I had little technological devices, and I was content. I was content having a shabby camera, a shabby television, a shabby video game console. I was content not having a mobile phone or a computer. I had other things to do, places to be, things to see. I was not spoilt, and I was not selfish, and I had demands only for some things that were advertised to me, naturally. Society, since then, has changed so much.

The other day I saw a toddler with his own iPhone. It was not his mother's, because she was speaking on hers. I stared at him with awe as his fingers kept flicking all over the screen as he walked by. He was immersed in it. If he tripped over at the time and hurt himself, he would not cry from the pain - he would cry from being torn away from his device for the length of a minute. He would cry if he could not achieve a certain score in the game or if his battery was running out.

Juxtaposed with a crying toddler from Ghana who has to carry slabs of stone held up by a piece of cloth hanging from his head, tied to a piece of stick and supported by his head and neck, this display of modern city indulgence is disgusting. Lately I have been exposing myself to a lot of social justice issues and I am continually shocked at how many problems there are with the world and at how little effort is put into fixing these. Why are these people still enslaved?

And to think my peers complain about the cold weather, the hot weather, the mild weather, the lack of weather, the existence of weather, the overly burnt piece of steak, the undercooked corn kernels, the fact that class is running two minutes after the scheduled finish, the fact that teachers share personal anecdotes, the fact that we study about basic human rights, the fact that we study at all. The list, if I record it and write it down, will exceed the length of lightyears and reach Pluto and make Pluto thank its God that it is no longer considered a planet by the peoples of Earth, no longer in their sights and no longer in their thoughts.

Open your eyes. Make a change. Bring things into the light. Watch the video above and indulge yourself in what real problems are. Stop complaining about little things in life, because out there in the real world is a person your age who has nothing. Not even a voice.