A Farewell to Perfection

Yoshua Wakeham
Nov 3 · 5 min read
Trash is always an option. (from “Getting Things Done”, © David Allen 2015)

I am a perfectionist and a completist.¹

Perfectionism: if I can’t do it perfectly, I’d better not do it at all. Completism: if I can’t do everything, I might as well not do anything. Imperfection is worse than silence, my brain tells me; incompleteness worse than stasis.

How many silences do I owe to perfectionism? How much stasis to completism?

Very soon, in less than six weeks, my partner will give birth to our first child. I’m going to be a father. The months since we got the happy news have been infused with excitement and optimism, but they’ve also been phenomenally busy, and each week busier. As the number of tasks in the inbox has grown, so has the accompanying anxiety. Unfortunately, the less confident I am that I can do everything and do it well, the more I procrastinate. (Witness: the time I spent cleaning out my spam folder rather than working on this essay.)

And perfectionism demands self-delusion. On Saturday mornings, waking up to the consciousness of several unstructured hours ahead of me, I have often been possessed by the feeling that time is infinite: This Saturday, this particular Saturday, will be the day I complete every single task on my to-do list! Hurry, put on the dressing gown! Brew that coffee! Marshal those neurons! Tremble, ye mortals, as you watch this Titan at his work! But come mid-afternoon, the acute angle of the sunlight triggers another mood shift: Time is running out, all is lost! Retreat! Someone find the white flag, and a pole to fly it from!

Actually, the demands of incipient parenthood are endangering that illusion — ever rarer are the days I convince myself I can finish everything on my list. It’s not just the influx of new tasks, either. Even though any sane productivity system acknowledges the need to sometimes “trash” a task — to accept you won’t ever get it done — for a completist, trashing a task isn’t an option. To give up on a task, however stale, is to admit defeat. These zombie tasks persist, multiply, and at some point become a psychic ambience, a background hum: not-there-yet, can’t-sleep-yet, can’t-stop-yet, not-there-yet.

But sometimes even oats are not enough.

Lugging around a millstone of unconsummated ambition makes for a weary existence — and as Joanna Newsom put it, “The longer you live, the higher the rent.” But my well-being isn’t the only problem. I intend to give my child a bedrock of unconditional love, of a regard that has nothing to do with goals, tasks, performance, or productivity. If my perfectionist hang-ups interfere with my ability to give myself that kind of love and regard, though, my child might well inherit those same hang-ups.

Objectively, this game is rigged: there are always more things to do, and always room to complete any task to a higher standard. But that’s not the only way the game is fixed. Perfectionism and completism, though they sometimes seem to be at odds, have the same underlying function: to defend against painful emotions and negative self-beliefs. Inadequacy, helplessness, loneliness, self-loathing, can be relieved by checking that last item off the list, or getting full marks on that news quiz. But as anyone who has had to grapple with these kinds of feelings can attest, trying to squash an emotion with an action doesn’t work for long. The feelings and thoughts return. In my case, no matter how well I play the game — no matter how completely I complete the complete set of completables — feelings of inadequacy always resurface.

The certain result of trying to squash emotions with actions: exhaustion.

So, given my productivity on all non-parental tasks and goals is about to experience a dramatic collapse, how can I make peace with my limitations? There is no royal road to acceptance, of course. But I’m working on being more aware of these patterns, and responding to them more mindfully. When I feel the impulse to do the thing perfectly or the impulse to finish all the things, I try to pause and observe the impulse before I act on it.

Among other tools, I’m experimenting with The Work, a meditation on stressful thoughts that was developed by Byron Katie. The Work consists of a sequence of questions designed to interrogate a stressful thought. For example, in response to the completist thought “I should only feel good about myself if I complete everything,” I can ask:

  1. Is it true that I should only feel good about myself if I complete everything?
  2. Can I absolutely know that it is true that I should only feel good about myself if I complete everything?
  3. How do I react, what happens, when I believe that I should only feel good about myself if I complete everything?
  4. Who would I be without the belief that I should only feel good about myself if I complete everything?

Finally, is it possible that an “opposite” belief is at least as true, or truer? For instance,

  • That I should feel good about myself when I do not complete everything? or,
  • That I should feel good about myself when I do nothing at all?, or
  • That my self-worth has no connection whatsoever to the state of my to-do list?

I’ll leave the corresponding interrogation of perfectionist thoughts as an exercise for the interested reader.


[1] The more recent terms completionist/ism seem thus far to have gained currency only in videogame culture. My hunch is that over time these variants will become dominant over completist/ism, but I enjoy the slightly old-fashioned sound of the latter. Besides, this essay is not about videogames.

Yoshua Wakeham

Written by

Programmer, decent fellow, erstwhile writer, aspiring intellectual.

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