Ms. Perfection Died

Evolution has spent 3.8 billion years testing and proving the idea that some inefficiency is good — Morgan Housel

The quote above comes from master of brevity and clarity, Morgan Housel, in his book Same as Ever and in a chapter aptly titled “Casualties of Perfection”. It reveals a powerful idea, one that I keep coming back to, that perfection is not just unachievable, it is a bad goal in the first place.

Imagine that you are in an all-perfect romantic relationship: one that’s never dull and has no room for growth. All your needs are met the second they develop. You never have to sit in boredom, discomfort, sadness, or frustration. Your partner knows everything you need and are fully equipped to provide it. The two of you never fight or even raise your voices at each other. You are soft, cute, and fit together in every way. You never misunderstand each other. No one ever has to apologize for anything, and you never have to stress or think about anything. It’s all sugar, spice, and everything nice

You’re happy, right? It’s everything you ever dreamed of, isn’t it?

You’re wrong, and to prove it, we need to turn to the only two people who’ve had such an experience.

Adam and Eve in the Christian Creation story lived a perfect life. God had created them perfect as he had everything around them. They lived in a beautiful world, surrounded by beautiful creatures and creations, and were in perfect fellowship with each other and with God. They had no quarrel with each other nor with anything in the Garden of Eden. Nothing was demanded of them except the occasional naming of an elephant here, a giraffe there, and plants everywhere. There were no conflicts to be resolved and no worries to be had. It was all perfectly perfect.

It makes absolutely no sense that anyone would mess that up, but they did. Furthermore, it took very little to convince them that there was more to be had from life. A doubt crept in their minds placed there by the silliest of creatures. Truth is, they probably weren’t content living in the perfect. They wouldn’t admit it, but it was probably boring, unimaginative, and (given the results) undesirable to them. They needed something more.

They needed to know and grow. They needed evil and the knowledge of it. They desired imperfection, which, ironically, is more than perfection.

Back to earth. You may think that the only reason you stop shy of perfection is because you are unable to reach it, but you are wrong. Truth is, you wouldn’t and shouldn’t even want to reach it. Life exists and thrives in imperfection, and it would probably cease to exist if it ever attains perfection. A perfect universe is the one that doesn’t exist, and that only lives in an imaginary state of sufficiency, happiness, and contentment. Narnia. The garden of Eden. Bag End. All perfect and all imaginary.

Real life requires necessity, friction, and growth. It is punctuated by friction and growth.

A good example here is GenAI: this powerful, magical force that can do everything perfectly and, in less time than it takes the best of us to chew and swallow a bite of food. Error-free prose, perfectly exposed images and designs, sound legal arguments. All of it perfectly regurgitated, and all of it perfectly boring.

It’s why most of us find it difficult to care about its outputs. Good writing is not just good technical writing. It is writing that is alive and that comes from lived experiences and thoughts. It is slightly imperfect. The odd word choice here, an ambiguous phrase there, a silly misplaced joke, and one too many run-on sentences to top it all off.

A good film is slightly darker, less conventional, longer, raunchier, and has less-than likeable characters who don’t learn the right lessons all the time. Ted was an insufferable protagonist and an unreliable narrator, but that’s what made How I Met Your Mother a good show. Django Freeman’s main motivation was rather selfish, but we can relate to him and root for him.

The point here is simply this: Life is not about the attainment of excellence; it is about the pursuit of it. It’s a spectrum between horribly bad and perfectly excellent, and we all fit somewhere in the middle. However, the ends don’t and could never exist. Nor should they. Nothing is completely irredeemable and nothing completely unimprovable.

Perfection sucks, and thank God it doesn’t exist. The perfect body is a lie concocted by makeup, good lighting, good editing, and a good pump. The perfect job would be flipping a switch to turn rain on and off or, failing that, flipping a switch to destroy GenAI and take the world back to 2019. All the perfect spouses died years ago, and they all decayed so perfectly they left no retrievable trace.

Good riddance.

We are all casualties of perfection. We imagine that our lives, jobs, relationships, and thoughts would be better if they were perfect. Well, they wouldn’t. They would be worse. Dramatically worse.

So, we don’t need to worry about it. All we need to worry our little, imperfect heads about is how we can make our lives marginally better and more livable every day.

That’s it.

“Just like evolution, the key is realizing that the more perfect you try to become, the more vulnerable you generally are” — Morgan Housel

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This post was previously published on medium.com.