How not to be killed by perfection
In our everyday race to reach perfection — thus ignoring the concept we pursue — we tend to feel unsatisfied and right back to where we were, but why?
We’re not all Jack Bauer
Despite our struggle to expand the allotted 24 hours each day, we often end up doing more harm than good to ourselves. We believe in the necessity of trial and error, in the virtue of accepting failure and thriving from it. We never question our lassitude or the fact that we might be a human exerting herself too much and not some machine.
We confuse struggling for striving and easily replace a means by an end. We dedicate ourselves to our jobs, studies, acquaintances, making less room for those that really matter and for whom we might have started to work so hard in the first place. Our family, our friends, our lovers.
The insanity of micro-managing our life
Having coffee? Going to a yoga class? Speaking to our SO? Check, check, check. Even having fun has become a requirement: “Work hard, play harder”, reaching our to-do list under the shape of but another box to check. We quantify happiness and gamify our lives to the point of forgetting our end-game.
We’ve become our own critical and demanding master, for whom nothing is too good, no one is too bright — especially not ourselves.
A holistic problem
The irony, is that, in the whirl of activities that absorb us each day we never question society. Many of us believe that success depends solely on our own effort and is the result of our “blood, toil, tears and sweat”. We thus raise the bar higher for everyone, making it harder for us to reach our goals, and succeeding in making everyone else’s life — and our own — more miserable.
Our love for concepts and mottoes shares the blame. Reading headlines, rather than an article, remembering concepts instead of exploring ideas, focusing on appearing smart not on becoming so, etc. The list goes on… We are attracted to how cool and glamorous ideas and concepts appear, not to the idea itself.
What can we do?
I don’t have a recipe for happiness. Even if I did, I wouldn’t share it. Not that I’m petty, I simply believe that everyone has its own and that it’s written as far as possible from a self-help or management book.
I believe we are best when we acknowledge and listen to ourselves and not just absorb the prejudices and fears of others. We are best in what makes us human, not in what enslaves us. We are free and beautiful only if we believe we are.
Cheesy? How about those excel sheets of yours?
