Perfectionism: Opportunity with Obstacle or Obstacle in Opportunity

 

I'm a bit of a perfectionist. Now, how many times have you heard someone saying this? A social get together, maybe, with friends, or perhaps with family at festive days. It's everyone's favourite defect, it's that now quite common response to the difficult, final question at job interviews: "My biggest weakness? That's my perfectionism." You see, for something that apparently holds us back, it's quite remarkable how many of us are quite happy to hold our hands up and say we're perfectionists. But there's an interesting and serious point because our complaining wonder for perfection is so pervasive that we never really stop to question that concept in its own terms. 

 

What does it say about us and our society that there is a kind of celebration in perfection? 

We tend to hold perfectionism up as a badge of worth. The emblem of the successful. Yet, in understanding perfectionism, its has seen limited evidence that perfectionists are more successful. Quite the contrary, they feel unhappy and dissatisfied amid a slow sense that they're never quite perfect enough. We know from reports that perfectionism conceals a host of psychological difficulties, including things like depression, anxiety and even suicidal thoughts. And what's more worrying is that over the last 25 years, we have seen perfectionism rise at an alarming rate. And at the same time, we have seen more mental illness among young people than ever before. Rates of suicide in the India alone increased by 25 percent across the last two decades. 

 

Young people today are more preoccupied with the completion of the perfect life and lifestyle. In terms of their image, status and wealth. Young people borrow more heavily than did older generations, and they spend a much greater proportion of their income on image goods and status possessions. These possessions, their lives and their lifestyles are now displayed in vivid detail on the global social media platforms of Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat. In this new visual culture, the appearance of perfection is far more important than the reality. 

 

If one side of the modern landscape that we have so abundantly furnished for young people is this idea that there's a perfectible life and that there's a perfectible lifestyle, then the other is surely work. Nothing is out of reach for those who want it badly enough. Opportunity, the self-made person, hard work. The notion that hard work always pays off. And above all, the idea that we're captains of our own destiny. These ideas, they connect our wealth, our status and our image with our innate, personal value where it is a complete fiction. Because even if there were equality of opportunity, the idea that we are captains of our own destiny disguises a blunt truth for young people that they are subject to an almost ongoing economic trial. Metrics and rankings have emerged as the benchmarks for which merit can be quantified and used to sort young people into schools, classes and colleges. 

 

Education is the first arena where measurement is so publicly played out and where metrics are being used as a tool to improve standards and performance which starts young. No wonder young people report a strong need to strive, perform and achieve at the centre of modern life. They've been conditioned to define themselves in the strict and narrow terms of grades, percentiles and lead tables. 

·  This is a society that preys on their insecurities about how they are performing and how they are appearing to other people. 

·  This is a society that amplifies their imperfections. 

Every flaw, every unforeseen setback increases a need to perform more perfectly next time, or else, bluntly, you're a failure. That feeling of being flawed and deficient is especially penetrative; just talk to young people. 

 

"How should I look; how should I behave?" "I should look like that model, I should have as many followers as that Instagram influencer, I must do better in school." 

 

In many young people these lived effects of perfectionism first hand. And one student sticks out in my mind very vividly. Mayank, not his real name, was ambitious, hardworking and diligent and on the surface, he was exceptionally high-achieving, often getting first-class grades for his work. Yet, no matter how well Mayank achieved, he always seemed to recast his successes as horrible failures, and he would talk openly about how he'd let himself and others down. Mayank’s justification was quite simple: How could he be a success when he was trying so much harder than other people just to attain the same outcomes? 

 

See, Mayank's perfectionism, was only serving to expose what he saw as his inner weakness to himself and to others. Cases like Mayank's speak to the harmfulness of perfectionism as a way of being in the world. Contrary to popular belief, perfectionism is never about perfecting things or perfecting tasks. It's not about striving for excellence. Mayank's case highlights this intensely. At its root, perfectionism is about perfecting the imperfect self.

 

And you can consider it like a mountain of achievement that perfectionism leads us to imagine ourselves scaling. And we think to ourselves, "Once I've reached that peak, then people will see I'm not flawed, and I'll be worth something." But something perfectionism doesn't tell us is that soon after reaching that peak, we will be called down again to the fresh lowlands of insecurity and shame, just to try and scale that peak again. This is the cycle of self-defeat. In the pursuit of unattainable perfection, a perfectionist just cannot step off. And it's why it's so difficult to treat. 

 

Now, we've known for ages that perfectionism contributes to a host of psychological problems, but there was never a good way to measure it. Until now, the first is self-oriented perfectionism, the irrational desire to be perfect: "I strive to be as perfect as I can be." The second is socially prescribed perfectionism, the sense that the social environment is excessively demanding: "I feel that others are too demanding of me." And the third is other-oriented perfectionism, the imposition of unrealistic standards on other people: "If I ask somebody to do something, I expect it to be done perfectly." 

 

Now, research shows that all three elements of perfectionism associate with compromised mental health, including things like increased depression, increased anxiety and suicide thoughts. But the most problematic element of perfectionism is socially prescribed perfectionism. That sense that everyone expects me to be perfect. This element of perfectionism has a large correlation with serious mental illness. And with today's emphasis on perfection at the forefront of my mind, I was curious to see whether these elements of perfectionism were changing. 

 

To date, research in this area is focused on immediate family relations. All three elements of perfectionism have increased over time. But socially prescribed perfectionism saw the largest increase, and by far. Remember, this is the element of perfectionism that has the largest correlation with serious mental illness, and that's for good reason. Socially prescribed perfectionists feel a compelled need to meet the expectations of other people. And even if they do meet yesterday's expectation of perfection, they then raise the bar on themselves to an even higher degree because these folks believe that the better they do, the better that they're expected to do. This breeds a profound sense of helplessness and, worse, hopelessness. 

 

But is there hope? 

Of course, there's hope. Perfectionists can and should hold on to certain things they are typically bright, ambitious, conscientious and hardworking. But a little bit of self-compassion, going easy on ourselves when things don't go well, can turn those qualities into greater personal peace and success. And then there's what we can do as supporters. 

Perfectionism develops in our formative years, and so young people are more vulnerable. Parents can help their children by supporting them unconditionally when they've tried but failed. Mom and Dad can resist their understandable urge in today's highly competitive society to helicopter-parent, as a lot of anxiety is communicated when parents take on their kids' successes and failures as their own. 

 

But ultimately, the research raises important questions about how we are structuring society and whether our society's heavy emphasis on competition, evaluation and testing is benefiting young people. It's become every day for public figures to say that young people just need a little bit more strength in the face of these new and exceptional pressures. But I believe that is us washing our hands of the core issue because we have a shared responsibility to create a society and a culture in which young people need less perfection in the first place. Creating that kind of world is an enormous challenge, and for a generation of young people that live their lives in the 24/7 spotlight of metrics, achievements and social media, perfectionism is inevitable, so long as they lack any purpose in life greater than how they are appearing or how they are performing to other people. 

 

What can they do about it? 

Every time they are knocked down from that benchmark, they see no other option but to try scaling that peak again. So long as we teach young people that there is nothing more real or meaningful in their lives than this hopeless quest for perfection, then we are going to condemn future generations to that same futility and despair. And so we're left with a question. When are we going to appreciate that there is something fundamentally inhuman about limitless perfection? No one is flawless. If we want to help our young people escape the trap of perfectionism, then we will teach them that in a chaotic world, life will often defeat us, but that's OKAY. Failure is not weakness. If we want to help our young people outgrow this self-defeating snare of impossible perfection, then we will raise them in a society that has outgrown that very same delusion. But most of all, if we want our young people to enjoy mental, emotional and psychological health, then we will invite them to celebrate the joys and the beauties of imperfection as a normal and natural part of everyday living and loving. 

WHY ARE WE UNHAPPY?

I love travelling & I also am a motorcyclist by passion. Living this passion led me to different destinations in India. I happened to come across various individuals suffering who left me shocked. I was not shocked to see them with problems of poverty or disability or being left undiscovered and unheard for relief. I was shocked to see them being CONTENT. Their happiness was confronting every problem I could perceive. Not all of them were as happy but shockingly they were so genuinely satisfied. Ever since I am fascinated about knowing the true means to attain happiness. I have thought about it from both economic and social perspective.

 

What is fascinating is, it’s not just me, you or somebody it adds largely everyone who are bad predictors of happiness. We are wealthier than ever but unhappier than ever, we are prosperous but more depressed and being less satisfied. We have fast means of transport but we have faster means to criticize than before. There are places I have heard have more suicides than homicides and comparatively we have better resources, goods, services, innovation and technology rising exponentially but we don’t see the corresponding change in our happiness and our life satisfaction. Perhaps it is one of the greater PARADOXES of our time. It obviously rises a question to "why are governments and individuals such bad predictors of happiness and why is it that we get it wrong so often". I think it is because we fail to understand the reason behind we often being unhappy. Through research, readings, observation and analysis  I found an explanation far more compulsive and persuasive than others. The explanation isn’t about we getting so many choices making us stressed nor we are economically worst-off in many cases we are better than others. The explanation which is convincing and compulsive is EXPECTATIONS. At a very basic level when our expectations of reality do not match the experiences of our reality, simply expectations and realities do not match that makes us unhappy. The difference is termed as an EXPECTATION GAP. We humans form our expectations on majorly three decision making models & reasoning viz. imagination gap, inter personal gap and inter-temporal gap. 

 

Firstly, the imagination gap is something when imaginations and realities do not match. Like when we travel some place for a vacation or buy a car we do have many options to choose from. We tend to choose the one that we 'think' is going to be the best. So, we maximise our utility at given price of our thinking, that’s how most of us make our decisions. To think otherwise can be the choices we made that we thought wouldn’t be as good. Now the problem is the very decision depending on what we 'THINK' is good, that imagination is the reason that undermines our happiness. The choices we made as per our imaginative expectation has far more possibilities that it will not match the reality leading to disappointment.Primarily we check details on digital platforms on our smartphones or tabs and get fascinated wherein those images have filters or either have been enhanced to make it look attractive. Advancement in technology is one of reasons for our perseverance and imagination.What technology does is distorts reality and makes unreal seem real. When we are the happiest we tend to stubble upon things never expected. We are in a phase were our expectations are rising and realities are crushing them. When you have the technology of persuasion and selection bias it means we imagine, demand and expect more from what reality has to offers us. When the limitless nature of our minds is confined by the nature of earth we are unhappy and disappointed making imagination expectation the first reason for making us unhappy.

Mona Lisa Painting on the left we see as sponsored posts or advertisements on digital platforms
Mona Lisa Painting when we actually spend go to France 

Secondly, the interpersonal gap is when we compare our realities with the realities of others. We judge ourselves depending on what we experience around us. When athletes competing in a Running Race Event, the winner of the race gets a Gold Medal is the happiest, the athlete coming second in or Runners-up gets a Silver Medal is not quite happy lastly the second runner-up getting a Bronze Medal is smiling considering at-least procured a place in the winners stand. Your gain is someone’s pain and your pain is someone gain unfortunately it’s a zero-sum game. Its not just relative income that matters its also relative appearance that sometimes matter as well. One person’s plastic surgery is another person’s psychological loss making it yet another reason for our unhappiness.

 

Finally, the inter-temporal gap is where we compare our past experiences with our present reality. We anchor ourselves to our past and if we are constantly improving, exceeding expectations and constantly moving forward you're generally happy. As parents, often we end up spoiling our children as we give them the best but often the best intensions don’t lead you to the best outcomes. Yes we should support our children and give them everything we can but not to forget if we give them everything it is harder for them to get a positive inter-temporal gradient making it harder for them to improve over time in life and undermines their happiness. Another problem in parents, we tend to repeatedly tell our children about how special, different and unique they are and they will either do better than their parents or anyone more famous/successful like Bill Gates or Britney Spears. We are in turn increasing their expectations and when they start with an average job or fail in the business like most do, they are disappointed and unhappy because their expectations aren’t satisfied. 

 

Happiness is largely determined by expectations and expectations are determined from what we consider as normal. This normal depends on our imagination, things around us and depends on our past. So we have this constant battle between expectations and our reality. We need to self-accept that reality can or cannot have a part of our imagination. In terms of the interpersonal battle we should realize something called as self-development and self-achievements learn to compete with ourselves rather than others. Finally for the intertemporal battle, we should support our kids and give them what we can and also make them realize when its impossible. We should avoid feeding them unrealistic expectations.