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culture, faith, insanitybytes22, life, opinion, perfectionism
One of my favorite sayings is, “the perfect is the enemy of the good.”
Through a series of unfortunate circumstances I grew up with a tendency towards perfectionism. One problem with perfectionism is that it is a fast track to insanity, assorted mental health issues, and negative coping skills. The thing about perfectionism is that one can never attain it. So if your goal is perfectionism you just become an epic failure at everything.
Some people stop trying. Since I can’t do it perfectly, I won’t do it at all. Actually, I just won’t do anything. Then there are those who try to dance faster, work harder, drink heavier, until they are a complete train wreck.
In America, in the modern West, I almost can’t say such a thing because we are so addicted to the idea of people being in complete control of all outcomes. Working harder, faster, and more intensely is supposed to produce good results. We culturally reward such things with social approval. Back when people were more likely to be farmers, we understood that you can work hard, do everything right, and a bunch of locust can still come along and devour all your efforts.
Back when we actually read the book of Job, we understood such things, too..
Perfectionism is not attainable. Ever. If you had a parent who you could never please, you might need to hear this reminder over and over again. Heck if you live in America, the land of perfect selfies and Instagram influencers, you might need this reminder, early and often. LOL, and new moms and dads really need to avail themselves of this wisdom!
Along with all the other cultural rubbish, we have tried to teach people that they need to be financially secure, emotionally healed, well educated, and basically perfect before having kids. No surprise that people in their late 30’s still say things like, we’re not ready yet…
One problem with perfectionism is that it is also devoid of all grace. One can never attain perfection, but also, one can never be forgiven for failing to attain it! Welcome to cancel culture and vengeance politics. I hope you have attained full ideological purity and you hate all the right things. I hope you look perfect, feel perfect, and are totally convinced of your own righteousness. I hope you drive an electric vehicle and recycle. I hope you never forget your reusable grocery bags. I hope you are aware you have cameras on you 24/7 waiting to catch you in some error….
I hope for none of these things! Just making a point. I actually am heartbroken about how prevalent it all is, heartbroken about what a huge emotional burden I see heaped on young people these days. I fear that many of us have failed to teach young people about the importance of grace, the importance of availing yourself of the mercy and forgiveness of Christ, so you always have a surplus left over to extend to others.
Jesus says in the Bible, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” You don’t hear that much in the world of Big Eva and modern cultural Christianity, but it’s really true. We are not perfect creatures, we are sinners in need of grace. God is not that parent who demands perfection and is never pleased. There is so much legalism going on in the world today, not just within Christianity, but within secularism too. It is very performance based and it places an unrealistic and unattainable burden on far too many of us.
See, there's this thing called biology... 
Many thanks. I note with interest that ‘Perfectionism’ has a one word anagram ‘imperfections’. More interesting is ‘me proficients’ which I think conveys the actual meaning when we read Jesus’s words in the Bible ‘Be pefect as God is perfect.’
In fact the Greek word ‘teleioi’ means ‘complete’ and in fact I see is the plural of teleios used of God’s completeness in the verse.
So we should be complete but the stress is complete WITH OTHERS, i.e a whole. A whole sound like hole and a circle or 0, zero. They represent the cirlce of life or love and love covers a multitude of sins.
And God is love and complete.
P.S. ‘CEO feminist PR’ is another anagram of ‘Perfectionism’ which may be why feminism has driven women to distraction seeking the unobtainable.
P.P.S. I see Shirley Conran has died who wrote ‘Superwoman’.
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Ah, good point about completeness! Perfectionism really is the complete opposite of being whole or complete. It is more like trying to earn grace, trying to justify your ownself.
And yes, I also believe feminism has driven women to distraction trying to achieve the unatainable. We simply can’t do it all, be it all, and attain it all.
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Good points—especially how people are being trained to accept being recorded and filmed and having to put on performances for anonymous censors. What makes it even worse is that the cultural elites keep shifting what’s a ‘new normal,’ 180 degrees and holding people responsible for what they did or said under the ‘old normal.’ That makes the stress and anxiety even worse (and discourages taking risks or taking a stand of any kind) because nobody knows what might be used against them tomorrow.
When I was a kid, some of the older people used to shrug, ‘You can’t please everybody.’ But now, there are consequences threatened for not pleasing everybody. They’re getting even more blatant about it—in the case of the anti-Genocide protests, there are threats online that border on cyber-terrorism telling protesters to ‘think about how taking a stand will negatively impact your future’ and such.
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So very true! Young people, even my own kids, don’t understand my objections to these huge invasions of our privacy. They’ve never known anything else, for them this is just “normal.”
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