Mistakes Tell A Story

“Perfectionism is the root of most human evils” - Alber Ellis

We fall prey to the sickness of wanting perfection, despite all conventional wisdom and research showing us that a perfect life is unsustainable and unhealthy for our brains. We are creatures of assessing potential threats, which leads to striving for solutions to avoid pain. But a life free of pain is a life free of any activity or progress. To live in this “perfect” state of being would be stagnant existence in an isolated ecosystem, where any threats to our physical or psychological health are blocked off. It would drive up our sensitivity to difficulties, reducing the threshold of resiliency that makes us better at problem solving and more attuned to the values that make life beneficial, and optionally enjoyable.

A life free of problems is impossible for the human mind to accept because we are wired to be aware of problems and solve them. When we are no longer told we have to make a decision our minds drift away to find a problem to solve. When people are given utopian conditions, they will find problems where none were really seen or considered. We see this sickness through modern social media, where we have an abundance of information, not just empirical but social because we can see the lives of other people every day, whether they are being transparent or performing an identity they want you to believe. This is where we as the flawed observers make judgments about people, often with little or no evidence other than the theory we want to be true. This drive to uncover the truth can make us reject any information that quashes that judgment. But that is more of a problem of creating false narratives over limited information, but it ties to this delusional notion that perfect is an achievable metric.

There is no perfect anything!

Take any example and you will find flaws when you look at it long enough. Nothing in life is permanent nor perpetual so it cannot be that the concept of perfect applies. When people fixate on beauty in terms of perfection you find that the individual striving for an alluring appearance is plagued by self-doubt of their features, haunted by the notion that they aren’t in some magical nirvana of universally accepted beauty. That’s because beauty is a subjective thing and while tastes and preferences fall within similarities and some features of the human body are more commonly admired than others, it doesn’t mean that one particular appearance will be loved by everyone in the world. Not gonna happen.

It saddens my core to see people still trapped in these unyielding pilgrimages for perfection when they want to work or create or improve themselves. We are conned when we are told there’s some magic solution or some hidden secret or some hack that are hidden behind a paywall and kept in vague layers of misdirection until we are so caught up in the yearning for the perfect that we buy into such bullshit.

I know this argument against perfection is vague and abstract but that is because its insidious nature infects too many aspects of life. It is a poison that infests our psychology, so it falls into just about any example. I gave the standard notion of perfection with beauty standards, but it can be applied to other parts of life; a job, a relationship, a family, friends, personal performances, and being entertained. The more we cling to the delusion of perfection, the more we are disappointed by life. The people who demand perfection tend to hold narcissistic traits where no one else succeeds and nothing satisfies them. They are forever doomed by the belief that nothing can be enjoyable because nothing it perfect. Such a belief leads towards the dogmatic demand for control, the dehumanizing of differences, and the vicious seizure of ways to dominate to demand this delusion of perfection.

There is an admirable quality to strive for grand standards and seek utopian ideals but when dreams and ideas refused to listen to the realities of plans and action, then you come into the sickness of perfection. People make mistakes, and through trial and error we learn how to improve. Learning begins with the lack of skills or information that we must achieve. If we were perfect, we would not have to achieve and we would have no need to act. We would be stuck in one spot forever and nothing would be worth the sentience we have in our lives. If perfection is a fixed state of being, it would need to be stagnant to remain in that state, therefore no progress would be made which would mean that stagnation would shortly turn to a hellish boredom.