98. Whoever complains less wins.

how long can you go — how many days — without griping?

Hello. I’m Lou Blaser, and you’re reading We’re All Getting Older, a newsletter about personal growth and intentional living in midlife.

My dear reader friend,

To get better at being grateful, I challenged myself to stop complaining for a week and promised to share my results with you. And I will, but first, can I tell you something I discovered?

Made this with DALL-E

There’s a global Complaint-Free movement underway — and it’s huge! It began modestly in 2006 when Will Bowen (then a minister of a small church in Missouri) invited his congregation to try breaking the negative habit of complaining by going 21 consecutive days without uttering a single gripe. He gave each of them a purple bracelet as a mindfulness tool to use during the challenge.

The “rules” of Bowen’s no gripe challenge are simple.

You wear the purple-colored bracelet and commit to go 21 days without complaining. Each time you complain, you have to switch the bracelet to the other wrist and start again from Day 0.

The challenge struck a chord. He wrote a book about it in 2008, which became a national best-seller (revised and updated in March 2024), and fifteen million Complaint-Free bracelets have been distributed worldwide since. The challenge (and the movement) has been written up and featured in media and talked about by people like Oprah and Tim Ferris. Late-night talk shows made fun of Will Bowen, his bracelet, and his challenge.

Goodness, I must have been under some massive rock. I didn’t know anything about this movement until I did some research to support my own little experiment.

The rules may be simple, but it’s not an easy challenge.

According to Bowen, it typically takes 4 to 8 months to reach 21 consecutive days. People tend to repeat Day 1 many, many times. It took Bowen half a year to get to 21 complaint-free days. Tim Ferris, who says he’s not a massive complainer, got there in three months.

I am now, predictably, reading Bowen’s book and furiously highlighting passages. I’m going to end up highlighting a third of this book, by the looks of it. 😂

I’ll share my book notes another time, but I want to share something from it with you today. Bowen had an audacious goal of presenting the six-millionth bracelet to Dr. Maya Angelou¹, who inspired the movement.

“If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain.” — Dr. Maya Angelou

When they finally met, Bowen told Dr. Angelou of their vision to get 1% of the world’s population to take the challenge and kick their complaining habit. He asked her what she thought about a Complaint-Free world, and this was her response:

Just imagine, people would speak more kindly to each other. Courtesy would be invited back into the living room, and to the bedroom and to the children’s room and into the kitchen.

[…]

If we were just one percent Complaint-Free, we would stop blaming others for our mistakes and hating them because, in our minds, they caused the mistakes.

Just imagine if we laughed more frequently, if we had the unmitigated courage to touch each other; it would be just the beginning of paradise — now.

Imagine that.

I finished my 7-day experiment with interesting results about my complaint triggers. I did have days when no griping was done at all. Hooray! But now I want to take on this 21-day challenge. I promise to let you know how it’s going from time to time. But I do expect this challenge to take me MONTHS to complete. 😊

In the meantime, I hope you’ll be inspired by this movement as well. Maybe you’ll be called to read the book. Maybe, like me, you see breaking the complaining habit as another step toward becoming the best version of yourself. And maybe you’ll feel the call to join the 1%, too.

💭 muse

“A man’s mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild; but whether cultivated or neglected, it must, and will, bring forth. If no useful seeds are put into it, then an abundance of useless weed seeds will fall therein, and will continue to produce their kind.” — James Allen, As A Man Thinketh

👤 a midlifer in profile

Meet Gen Xer

Yi Xue

.

Yi writes stories about her family of origin living through different times and from faraway places, being a first-generation immigrant redefining herself, being a woman of color navigating corporate America, and finding the power to make her own decisions and living life on her own terms.

"I work not for financial gain but for being kind and loving."

🍹 reader shout-out

A huge shout-out to WAGO reader Yvonne Marchese, age agitator, author, and founder of The Age Agitators Club. This community brings together women committed to busting through their Midlife Funk to inspire, support, share our stories, and reimagine what’s possible as we grow older. Learn more about The Age Agitators Club.

💬 last word

I was mostly listening to this one while drafting this edition. Don’t you just (still) love Prince?

Here’s to an awesome week ahead.

Cool Beans,
Lou Blaser

1. There’s a whole story of how that happened because he didn’t know Dr. Angelou when he set that goal.