Complaining is easy...

... but life gets better when we shift our attention to the positives in our life. This may sound clichéd, but the sheer number of people (including myself sometimes) who suffer due to focusing on "what could have been" is astounding. For most of us, if we could take a moment to think of all the very plausible ways in which life could have been much worse than it is right now, we would be much happier! 

For me, so many things could have gone wrong, right from college when, in the initial two years, I was NOT doing well at academics. Soon, I had a mentor who agreed to guide me on physics research. I complained about his unavailability; there was even an entire year when he was gone and didn't respond to emails, but in hindsight, the fact that back in 2006-7, I even got to do research as a clueless undergrad in India was not something a lot of others had access to and I should have been thankful to that adviser whose courses actually taught me quite a bit about nonlinear dynamics that I still use to this day. He also did what he could to set me up with some code to analyze scaling laws. Little did I know then that many years later, my first published paper would be related to the work I did with this mentor and that even my grad school admission, which was a rejection, would be overturned after an interview. In the interview, they asked me all about scaling laws and interpreting them in some of the interviewer's published work, which I could answer satisfactorily, thanks to my research experience. 

I then found another undergrad mentor who believed in me more than I myself ever did and introduced me to cognitive science. I ended up turning to cognitive science research and that has led to a career that I really enjoy. I had great mentors in grad school and during postdoc. Not a lot of people have had similar luck. 

I then got a position at IIITH but also had other leads. Not a lot of people have such options due to how competitive faculty recruitment processes tend to be. I have gotten calls from other reputed institutions in the country strongly "encouraging" me to apply for positions at those places even after I joined IIITH. And yet, I have this very human tendency to focus on the negatives of my situation and surroundings and look to other places and get frustrated about the facilities and resources at those other places. However, when I meet people from those places, they complain about other aspects of their surroundings. So it seems like everyone is focused on what is wrong about their lives and situations rather than focusing on the positives and imagining how much worse it could have been. 

This is something I'm working on actively myself. I now see some students developing such bad habits early. Very eager to complain, both privately and publicly. Very rarely able to express gratitude. Very prone to criticizing those around them. Note, I said *some*. Thankfully, such students are in the minority but I feel a bit sad for them because they are really talented and could be leading much happier inner lives if only they would work on this single aspect: practicing gratitude and being more expressive about such gratitude. Don't take my word for it; there is a lot of evidence for it. 

But before I end this post, let me not be a hypocrite. I am prone to all of these issues and it takes active work to improve on these aspects. Some of it can be traced back to our upbringing. Perhaps some of us were brought up in environments where praise and gratitude weren't easy to come by and instead, criticism for the smallest of errors was available in generous doses. Even if that were the case, I believe we have the agency to work on such issues in adulthood.