The intolerable rise of perfectionism
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
You never see mediocrity anymore, everyone has curated Instagram and Facebook feeds of their best moments. If you do see it, it's the process of something like America's Got Talent where it's laughed at.
Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters said it really well [0]. Everyone that we see doing almost anything online is really really good at it, so people get intimidated that they can't do what 8 year old prodigies are doing. There is such a gap between good and great that people are afraid of taking the time to make the jump since the other side feels so far away. It's ok to be bad at things, it's ok if your art or passion doesn't change the world. It's ok if you enjoy the journey and the destination isn't the top of the charts or a world championship in whatever.
[0] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/the-hot-button/dave-gro...
Not everyone is curating profiles, not everyone cares what other people are doing, not everybody wants to be told what to think from someone else.
But you will never know if you don't turn that shit off and start to do what you want to do without fear.
People like to imagine that most gained popularity organically, but there's a lot of expensive marketing, gaming of algorithms and outright cheating (paying for followers/comments/reviews/likes, paying other personas to promote their own without disclosure etc).
It's a reminder that there are probably a lot of very capable, talented people out there who aren't as dedicated to making an online presence for themselves.
and i feel, more often than not, people in the positions of acclaim and power got there more by luck and being in the right place at the right time while having supplemented this with hard work and some intelligence, and not the other way around. it is much more difficult to exist as a person who thinks outside the box versus one who thinks inside the box but knows the right people.
It basically says that 27% of the population are night owls and are in an evolutionary sense our natural night watch and when forced into a daytime schedule, always tired.
It completely misses the underlying point.
Further nobody questions the legitimacy of "early risers" and blames it on lifestyle. In fact most consider it a positive and something to aspire to. When you go your whole life having to dispel the initial impression of laziness due to your natural sleep rythmn it becomes personal. I'm fortunate that I've come to a place in my career where I can simply live with my natural rythmn, but most people don't get the chance.
Because being an early riser is adaptive. We're not at all well adapted to operating at night given our sensory apparatus, we're quite well adapted to operate in daylight.
Furthermore, humans aren't genetically predetermined creatures, it's entirely possible to change virtually all of our behaviours and inclinations with the right environmental changes.
Even if being a nightowl were adaptive at one point, that doesn't mean it's adaptive now, and a maladaptive behaviour needs correcting if you want to function in modern society.
> When you go your whole life having to dispel the initial impression of laziness due to your natural sleep rythmn it becomes personal.
Don't go pushing your personal prejudice on a factual discussion. No one here called "nightowls" lazy.
Second sleeps used to be very common with people getting useful work and liesure done during the time between. Activity at night is normal.
"Maladapted" in this case literally means "poorly suited to functioning in typical jobs". Society's normal sleep schedule is exactly what makes night owls maladapted to most jobs.
Of course, you're incorrectly reading some sort of moral judgment in this classification, as you have with many other posts. You should try to be a little more impartial when discussing basic facts.
You are recounting society as it exists today which is abnormal in a historical context. I am speaking of a society that could exist. One where 1/5th the population is not needlessly forced through life exhausted and under performing. Not only would productivity be higher, but we'd get more use out of our otherwise vacant buildings at night. Rush hour would be greatly diminished if not everyone had to arrive at work exactly the same time.
Flex hours are a simple and mainstream solution that more companies should adopt. But it has to start with an appreciation that night owls are not "defective" or as you say, "maladapted".
It doesn't matter if it's arbitrary, what matters is whether a person's habits can easily conform or adapt to its environment. Those that do not, or that cause other problems are maladaptive by definition.
> But it has to start with an appreciation that night owls are not "defective" or as you say, "maladapted".
Defective and maladaptive are not synonyms.
The comment you replied to neither said or implied anything of the sort. He merely conveyed a personal anecdote of an environmental change that allowed a self-identified night owl to function well on a daylight schedule. What's so offensive about that?
I think people are naturally predisposed to certain behaviors but it's not a sealed fate. Diet, exercise and environment might even be more dominant factors.
What is terrible is that we don't accept that some people have different sleep schedules.
Bodies are different though so no doubt our experiences may be very different.
On the one hand our lives will be easier if we just got with the program. But things will never get better if we acquiesce.
Parent didn't say anything about forcing.
> Perfectionism is a personality trait rather than a mental health condition. There is no World Health Organization diagnosis code for perfectionism and it is not listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It can fly under the radar and masquerade as the pursuit of high standards, yet it overlaps with a plethora of disorders from eating to obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, body dysmorphia, depression and suicide.
Note how it simultaneously says “perfectionism is not a mental health condition”, then proceeds to immediately insuinate it is effectively a mental disorder. This continues throughout the rest of the article.
The domain of neurodiversity as a whole is far more complex than reducing the whole of a phenomenon to such simplistic and IMO damagingly derogatory terms as “interolerable rise of perfectionism”.
Despite the author’s attempt to interleave a few studies with personal stories, it conveniently neglects to tell the stories of “happy perfectionism”: There are many like myself, for whom pursuing this internal motivation for perfectionism turns out to be immensely intrinsically rewarding. In fact, I believe this intrinsic pleasure some (small percentage of the population) take from striving for perfection to have played (and continues to play) a pivotal role in humanity’s rise in technological advancement.
It is not the destination, but the journey (to asymptotically approach a vision of perfection), that healthy perfectionists find so rewarding. Certainly, pathological corruptions of perfectionism exist (for example, any such case where you experience distress or suffering for not achieving infinite perfection, despite it being obviously unattainable) — but this is true for all personality traits.
Honestly I think the mental health care industry is getting nervous over how complex, diverse and non-trivial it is to understand minds.
It's easy for the field to operate on the premise 'but these poor people, we are trying to help them!'. It's at the least, a bit absurd to be hypercritical over every little detail of thinking, acting, behaving, processing, etc and consider that 'help'.
I agree with you that perfectionism doesn't have to be a bad thing. It seems more that one has to be cautious with who one displays those characteristics towards because it can easily provocate insecurity in others, unintentionally. Which can be a totally reasonable reaction, life sometimes sucks and happens and things one wants to be devoted to may have to be deprioritized.
But if you want to be a perfectionist and are in a place in life where you can afford to devote yourself that much, then you shouldn't let the fact that other people made different choices get to you to the point that it halts your own ability to progress.
Another topical example is "internet addiction"; they're not pathologizing "being on the internet a lot", they're pathologizing "being on the internet so much it materially adversely affects your life". I know plenty of people in 2018 who are on the Internet in one form or another "a lot", but at the moment don't know anybody for whom it is materially adversely affecting their life. But I knew someone circa 1997 in college for whom that would be true. (Arguably at one point I came close, but I never quite crossed the threshold of playing Quake II online to the exclusion of the things I needed to do. I perhaps did not do them as well as I should have, but I did them well enough.)
Of course there's a lot of give in that boundary, and there are people who cross it. But at least conceptually, the proliferation of pathologies is less bad than it looks. Nominally they're not creating new ones, but merely recognizing more ways in which you can be materially negatively impacted that already existed.
Attention to detail is only a problem when it's labeled a problem.
Sometimes you have to go through the hard stuff to get things to be perfect. Mental health care can sit there and explain every cliche aphorism while you wait to get to that point, but that doesn't mean it's doing anything useful for some individuals. It could just be a waste of time, resources, energy, and distract from focus - especially if you have a problem solving mind you value and accidentally wind up syncing into 'the problems of mental health care' while going through the process of re-correcting maladaptive perfectionism.
It has to be taken a possibility that for some people, mental health care itself can have an adverse effect on the mind. If a person isn't getting that validation in their life, it's very easy to jump to other types of problems, like psychological ones. This can give a sense of progress but is ultimately unfilling.
Anything can be made to be seen as a problem and anything can be made to be seen as a solution when mental health care is so generalized to the point that literally anything you do can be connected or related in some way to everything you do. That doesn't mean a directional rule of causality can be inferred. The obvious is that anything you do is related directly through the fact that your own existence defines the relation between what you did and what you do. There is that obvious connection. But just because some stuff you do yields results and other stuff does not, doesn't mean there exists an intrinsic rule one can rely upon eternally as though it were gospel.
Perfectionism becomes maladaptive when individuals are not willing to be adapative. The mental health care industry is not precluded from this very normal, very characteristic trait of being human. Nothing granted it that authority absolutely and nothing ever will. The industry is made of people just as capable of being flawed as the ones they identify as ill. It doesn't mean they understand all perspectives of being human.
This sentence seemed to irk me; because at what point does someone have to police themselves to ensure they don't "hurt someone else's feelings"? My generalization is a bit crass, but that's how this sentence came off.
Controlling what you say is seen as bad thing online, but it is a thing that majority of people in real world do constantly and are expected to.
That's not being insecure in the individual self. Victim mentality ascribes intent. There isn't always intent. Just being human, and not perfect.
I may also end up doing harm to hurt person, either because my hurt will influence them to their detriment (they will internalize my angry outburst etc) or because of how third parties will perceive them due to what I say.
I did not meant retaliation as purely bad act on the side of hurt person. It may he just answering in kind. People who don't stand up to insults end up being bullied. If I don't have to care about hurting their feelings, they don't have to care about mine.
> If I don't have to care about hurting their feelings, they don't have to care about mine.
That's something you have to assume initially. The problem is it's only true over time. It's something that may be true at the moment of interaction, or it may be something that is true because of the interaction.
My perspective in the U.S. we are living in a time where this kind of authority is desired highly by lots of people because it's being reflected as 'the standard' with the current leadership. The problem is it's fundamentally built on principles that operate like a pyramid scheme. If you want that authority, the more you must conform. The more you conform, the more sameness you see. The more sameness you see, the more you can pretend you are the one with the authority. Carrot, stick, etc.
So if you aren't the literal leader that allows you to be manipulated very easily. I'd rather just have the awareness. My individual autonomy of reasoning is not something to be sacrificed because it goes down to my own personal core and it is fundamentally vital for me to believe I am sane, which is absolutely essential when I have time to myself to think for myself (not to mention essential for survival, I reason for a living - software). It's clearly easy to get caught in the waves of group thinking. People all make mistakes.
Only to the point they appreciate being well liked by others.
The people I know who do this the least definitely have a much harder time with other people then the people I know who do this the best.
Well liked is difficult to define from the perspective of someone who devotes less resources to processing social information. Social information becomes hard to process when there is extreme diversity or extreme uniformity in perspectives. Extreme diversity means, it makes no sense to process social information internally because it's easier to just listen to people when they have things to say. There's the expectation that people will all behave in assertive manners. Extreme uniformity is additionally difficult to process because it's a blind spot. There's always that tiny little margin of error that occurs when people engage in group think. An overload of uniformity compels the individual to establish a difference. These differences add up over time, and can be generalized as 'being difficult' but that trivializes the phenomena and attributes all that build of behaviors to an individual when it really could just be that an individual is manifesting a collected set of behaviors of a group dynamic in the attempt to maintain some sense of external consistency and cohesion.
Furthermore, it consistently doesn't account for the person's perspective who has the hard time with other people. No one bothers understanding that person. Why would anyone try to? It would seem logical to assume having empathy or understanding for that person would lead to social ostracism. But it doesn't always have to - that's a choice people can make when understanding turns into awareness, and that's just the point. It would be nice to feel as though one were not constantly teetering on a balance of everything devolving into chaos.
This duality of categorizing behaviors into well liked behaviors and disliked behaviors, it is a problem that has no solution, because it doesn't have to be a problem if it's not a problem.
Perfectionism, silly. People are people. Can't please everybody. It leads to a lot of inconsistencies. Forming expectations about people. Good or bad. Perspective, hindsight bias. It is inconsistent reasoning. Uses the past to interpret the present. It misses a portion of the present in exchange for an understanding of the past. Future prediction, mind can not work that way. It is perpetually terrifying to live an existence this way, sometimes. Bad things sometimes happen. Can't control everything.
Swap 'rich' in for 'nervous'.
It's practical because if you have a condition, you can be sold a bunch of products and services you did not need in the first place! Progress.
More seriously, the explosion of conditions not based on anything tangible (pseudo, unvalidated criteria) and supported by health professionals trying to capitalize on it is the real issue. It becomes a serious issue when they convince legislators and health bodies that it's real, using lobbying and other tactics.
In fact, I think actually calling it this, a fear of failure, vs. calling it "perfectionism" is actually a lot more constructive because it makes it easier for people to agree on the problem. I think most people would agree that having a willingness to try and perhaps fail is a good thing, and a deep fear of this failure is unhealthy and unproductive. Contrast that with "perfectionism", which many people (you) argue is more about the striving to succeed and do better, and most people I think would agree that is a good thing.
Please don't define what you have as what it is. There are too many odd people who define what they are as on the spectrum and talk of bullshit like neurodiversity when people legitimately suffer and have serious negative consequences in their lives from it. Perfectionism ruins lives and warps relationships with people precisely because its not about striving while realizing you can't ultimately have it. That's just what normal people do, try and do the best they can while realizing a lot is out of their hands.
I submit that that is exactly what perfectionism is which is, for all intents and purposes, a variation of scrupulosity. What you may be describing is something like a desire for high standards or a general love of growth.
Perfect isn't even an unchanging state. The better you are, the higher your standards become.
The conclusion of the study was that the first group, who was just focused on volume of output, actually produced more creative works than the group specifically focused on "creativity".
[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-always-trumps-quality...
Establishing dependency primarily on anything besides your own standard is a shortcut to misery when someone just doesn't care enough about every little detail you lovingly put into something.
You may annoy the fuck out of everyone around you if you are actually successful, and it's important to be in a social environment where people are tolerant of perfectionism and thrive from it.
It's just called being devoted. It doesn't have to be trivialized to a pejorative and mapped to a set of things approximately related to whatever goal you define. People can pick up on all of these things and get it wrong because unless you explain to them the point of all your work they won't necessarily understand it. It's then easy to internalize their issues as your own, which can implicitly shift your own standards, preferences.
'Better' in comparison to others is a state of mind that is ultimately destructive. If you like details and like feeling a sense of progress you define, better is perfectly fine to want to be. Muted, dull sameness has it's own tormented unchanging cyclical state that can be just as challenging to direct oneself out of once you convince yourself into it.
By deeming yourself a perfectionist, you openly state that you do not meet you own standards.
Resolution lies on either end, depending on how possible/practical it is to improve a given skill.
My dictionary defines 'exigence' (which I had not encountered before) as "an urgent need or demand", and I find that hard to parse. Is either of the parses "… who is more demanding than talented" or (like "grasp exceeds reach") "… whose demands exceed his or her talent" correct? If not, would you mind clarifying?
Many French words built on that template (direct latin root + -ent/-ence suffix) can be used as is in English, but it is not always the case.
Without such a connection, the reasoning for stating this is unclear to me. Could you clarify?
There's a vast pool of vocabulary that is common to both languages, from which I draw words indiscriminately (Latin roots and the same formula to derive verbs/nouns/adjectives, with minor variations for each langage (e.g. add "-ate" for verbs in Englsih and "-er" in French)). Some of these are so-called "false friends", with different meanings in both languages.
I have a spidey sense that works most of the time in the English => French direction (e.g. "consistent"), less so in the other.
As a native English speaker who has learned French, I’ve often run into “faux amis”. Perhaps the most embarrassing was “préservatifs”, which I expected to mean preservatives but actually meant condoms.
"Préservatif" is such a weird euphemism.
Isn't it (less bizarre)? My dictionary gives the medical meaning of prophylactic as "intended to prevent disease"; using it to refer to contraception just requires a more generous conception of 'disease'.
By contrast, if 'préservatif' in French were translated to 'preservative' in English, it would mean, again according to my dictionary, "a substance used to preserve … against decay." I find it a bit more of a stretch to generalise this to pregnancy.
On the other hand, maybe it is just my English-speaker-ness showing through that I can think of pregnancy much more easily as a disease (it literally causes dis-ease …) than as decay.
And while pregnancy may well be viewed as a disease or a cancer, after a fashion, at least condoms protect from a wider range of affliction.
Me neither, in this context - though there's the US legal concept of "exigent circumstances" which allows police officers to enter property without a warrant if they believe a crime is in progress.
Indeed, I had encountered 'exigency' and so had some idea of the general idea—just never 'exigence'.
Don't these two sentences contradict each other? Taking 'orthogonal' to be loosely synonymous with 'uncorrelated', if they were so, then you would expect to see roughly the same number of untalented perfectionists as talented ones.
In my mind I had an explanation for that. I realize that I mainly hang out with people that I went to university with (since I moved to a new city to study) as well as collegues (which also have higher than average education).
And I figured that untalented perfectionists would have a hard time enjoying/coping with higher education and thus possibly quite underrepresented in my social circles.
Anecdotally, from what little I've spent thinking on this, my experience seem to match that (untalented perfectionists are generally not well educated).
That was my theory/reasoning at least.
Edit: In other words, it's easier to have good taste than it is to be good at designing/producing something.
The point of perfectionism is to be more talented. If you read too deeply into that and don't look at the whole picture, of course it's going to be annoying. But the root starts with a desire to be better because the feeling of stagnation is intolerable.
Spot on.
> Maybe you've been around perfectionists that worked against you rather than with you.
That would have been me :-)
> The point of perfectionism is to be more talented.
That's part of what I meant when I said "Resolution lies on either end, depending on how possible/practical it is to improve a given skill."
Another way to resolve the tension is to accept to have lower standards and go on with your life.
Both options can be valid, depending on the circumstances.
Edit: Also sometimes, no one can humanly become as talented as one would like, yet going at it over and over until you're satisfied is the right thing to do.
For myself, long run, that is going to increase tension for me internally. I can't force myself to be satisfied with myself if I am not. I'd rather believe in a world that lacks absolute standards in perpetuity and have to consider myself perpetually adaptive than believe I've either succumbed to some group think ideology of 'relaxing' because it's comfortable for people who are fine with me being substandard (and then I get stuck with the problem of - is this because they are using me for their own comparison?), or been indoctrinated into stupid thinking that is fine with lowering my standards because it judges me based on a particular context that may not be indicative of an overall trend of my life absolutely.
> "Resolution lies on either end, depending on how possible/practical it is to improve a given skill."
At the end of the day pragmatism must be valued. Competition between people is useful but if it turns into a downward spiral of stepping on one another arbitrarily without reason, logic, without any ends tied to the means - then there is no united sense of progress from which every person inside a group can orient direction in thinking, and unifying action into something beautiful. I'm a software developer and computer scientist, so, all the spaces between coding (thinking, interacting) need to be filled in and can't always be explicitly stated. People have to make assumptions, it's easier to just decide - do you like where you are? Do you like the people around you? Can you see value in all of this?
If you can't do that, that is when competition becomes destructive rather than productive. Being able to identify these things in real time, continual process of living life. I wish I could be weak sometimes just because it's easier, but my life hasn't allowed me to be. I make mistakes continuously and sometimes they are plain to see, not only to myself, but to everybody. The awareness of this - in perpetuity. This connects people to systems that are always attempting to correct behavior. So people who go over and over and over at it - it's the same thing. No judgment, being totally neutral is most simple. Functioning like a machine. It's easier to just call it aspergers or neurologically distinct. Can't know people's intentions and inferring them to be intentionally malicious can lead to disaster. The problem of wanting to avoid the truly worst things that could happen in life. Not just because bad things have happened, but because, hyper-awareness. We are always connected to things that say 'bad things happen to people' and not everything can be explained away.
Talent, necessity, etc. Survival instinct. Calling it talent seems to be a diminutive, it directs the focus towards something narcissistic, vain - easy to prejudice against. Some things are born from necessity. Process of continual refinement, it's a compulsion because it says "I need to survive".
I suspect there’s a triplet at play here, with either discipline or bravery as the other side. A demotivated perfectionist never rises to their own challenge. With a motivated one, get out of the way or get run over.
it explains why many scientists are self-denying and perfectionistic: failure is the rule during experimentation, and progress is not guaranteed or even knowable sometimes.
i think that eventually it gets inseparable from the person. the reaction becomes a habit, and then it sticks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2wLP0izeJE
This guy is perfect.
This is one reason why I think we need a school reform where exams aren't rated as much on perfectionism, but more on broad knowledge.
I.e. if you can only solve a part of the questions but more of the questions then you can still receive a good grade. Basically make the tests longer and more broad than what you expect and give 150% of the points. That way you can either solve 2/3 like normal, or you solve more of the problems imperfectly and get the same result. It allows for more learning styles.
This way you could probably cover much more knowledge in a shorter time frame. Because a lot of the imperfect knowledge will get better over time eventually when you learn knowledge that builds upon it.
I thought it would be more about working conditions which at least for me and with control and checks everywhere in place leaves less and less space for humans to err, favouring perfectionists.
> ‘Even exercise doesn’t sound like a total escape for Tom Nicol: he is training to beat his dad’s personal best mile time.’
Oh wow, training to beat another runner's time. What pathos, what suffering! Give me a break.
I know I have OCD tendencies, and I've found that if I can harness it properly (mostly by just being aware of when I am in a obsessive state) I can really internalize the topic at hand and add the new knowledge/skill to my everyday repertoire.