Comment by electrograv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by electrograv | Hacker News Reader

This paragraph, which seems to summarize much of this article’s position, seems quite dangerous:

> 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.

Everything is a mental health condition these days.

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.

>Honestly I think the mental health care industry is getting nervous over how complex, diverse and non-trivial it is to understand minds

Swap 'rich' in for 'nervous'.

One thing that helps is to remember is that by the standards of the industry, you do not have a condition unless it is materially adversely affecting your life. The mental health industry is not concerned about whether you are a perfectionist; they are concerned about whether you are having a material negative impact on your life because of your perfectionism. This is obviously a subset of people who have perfectionist tendencies.

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.

> they are concerned about whether you are having a material negative impact on your life because of your perfectionism

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.

Also worth mentioning (is pedantry part of perfectionism?) that in addition to the definition of a disorder as when something is adversely affecting your life, is if it affects other people's lives or the society around you. So some disorders may not affect your own life directly, but they do affect others, or they do affect the society. Societies and cultures change and as so some behaviours become acceptable, this leads their re-classification away from a disorder.

I would definitely say pedantry is a part of perfectionism. Attention to detail.

Attention to detail is only a problem when it's labeled a problem.

> Everything is a mental health condition these days.

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.

And everybody has cancer because oncologists love treating patients and drug manufacturers love selling chemo drugs. If you start thinking that way, almost every profession can be seen under a negative light.

That's the problem with mental health care though. Almost every behavior can be seen under a negative light. It doesn't mean it's a negative behavior.

Cancer is nothing like that. It's a very tangible and measurable family of diseases. The explosion of "conditions" is all about pseudo-Neuroscience.

> 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.

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.

Apologies that you found it irksome! When you have authority (which requires an implicit kind of trust to be established assuming individual A can guide individual B) that establishes a unidirectional responsibility over people. It's a balance. If you want that authority you have to police yourself. I personally do not find myself comfortable in such positions. But I'm aware of the dynamic because it forms a feedback loop. If you show signs of 'weakness' and by 'weakness' I mean taking actions orthogonal to the overarching goal of directing, guiding, teaching, counseling, etc - then the group dynamic can easily devolve into a pedantic sorts of chaos. That doesn't always have to be a bad thing (e.g. good dialogue can result, understanding and new awareness can be established).

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.

I was taught that I should care about that and if I dont, I am lacking self co trol and rude and that is wrong. And practically speaking, if you hurt peoples feelings they will retaliate one way or the other or avoid you. Especially insecure people.

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.

I would be careful about the word 'retaliate'. People internalize information differently. If you hurt someone's feelings, they may internalize that, try to reason out exactly what the problem is, and then accidentally project those feelings onto someone random because emotional and empathetic exhaustion is a thing that can happen to anyone. The reason such individuals exist and do such phenomena is because they don't want to hurt anyone.

That's not being insecure in the individual self. Victim mentality ascribes intent. There isn't always intent. Just being human, and not perfect.

Point taken. There are many different reactions to being hurt and possible backslash about me is just one of them.

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.

There's a limit to what you can believe you have control over.

> 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.

> 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"?

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.

Yea, but it also depends. I'm a developer. I like talking on HN at work because I find it helpful to take intermittent pauses between code. I could be paranoid that people are reading my comments. That's a preference I can't expect everyone to understand why if it was happening, it would bother me. It would bother me because it would be double reinforcing my own perspective, which makes it hard for me to interact fluidly with people around me, because I'm not used to people agreeing with me. I'm used to people shrugging off my introspection as insightful but mostly pointless. Everyone validating my own perspective is a dynamic I am unaccustomed to and would prefer not to engage with if it's not grounded in pragmatism, real data.

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.

I agree, I don't like these kinds of articles at all. They observe that something has a bad impact on the lives of a small minority of people, and instead of digging into the factors that make it harmful for those people, they cast a negative pall over the whole thing. You see the same thing with dieting and anorexia. Or, like with your case (happy perfectionism) there are bodybuilders who are extremely strict about their diets and find it to be an immensely fulfilling hobby that provides them a lot of pride and is a springboard for applying discipline in other areas of their life, but other people look at them and assume they are driven by obsession and self-loathing.

Are you guilty of expecting a perfect popular science newspaper article that's merely pointing out what appears to be a recent general trend? :-)

I think the author hit on it somewhat in the article, but from personal experience (yes, I know, an anecdote) the dangerous part of perfectionism is when it slides into a crippling fear of failure.

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.

If it's the journey, it's not perfectionism. Perfectionism is all about results; a person wants the results in their life to be perfect according to the means they define it as, which requires control. The moment you realize you cannot control things and can only enjoy the ride, you are no longer perfectionist. You're negate the actual thing and are calling it perfectionism when it's not, because perfectionism always has the elements of results and control, two things this "healthy" perfectionism cannot have.

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.

"Certainly, pathological corruptions of perfectionism exist"

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com