Some people are chronic complainers who justify their negativity, irritability and disagreeability self-righteously, “Can’t you see how many things have gone wrong in my life? What else do you expect from me?”

However, complaining is no one’s birthright because everyone suffers, sooner or later; if we could know anyone’s fully life-story, we could see many heartbreaks. Yes, some people suffer much more than others. Still, suffering can’t be objectively quantified with a suffering meter, wherein a reading above a threshold makes complaining right.

Moreover, the universe operates on principles of karmic accountability. What we reap now is what we have sown earlier, even if the action-reaction correlation is often unclear to us.

Additionally, animals often suffer terribly, sometimes far worse than humans. Yet they bear their lot without becoming chronic complainers. Nature makes us capable of resilience, but our minds make us weak and whiny. The Bhagavad-gita (18.35) indicates that chronic negativity characterizes a mind steeped in ignorance.

Speaking of results, complaining has made no one’s birth right because it simply dissipates our emotional energy in unproductive or counterproductive resentment. Of course, there exist many wrong things that need to be fixed. And complaining about them can initiate the process of fixing them. But such constructive specific complaining is far different from chronic generic complaining about the world’s unfairness or our life’s unfairness.

Most importantly, we are at our core souls, who long for and belong to an arena of happiness in the eternal spiritual realm. What, then, is our birth right? Attaining spiritual level of consciousness, not complaining about our present material level of consciousness where we always remain suffering-prone. What will make our birth right? Stoically tolerating suffering by cultivating spiritual consciousness and eventually transcending suffering by absorption in the all-attractive supreme spiritual reality, Krishna.