Currently, I am reading a book titled Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. Intense title, I know. The author, William Deresiewicz, talks at length about the pressure students face to be “the best” and do their “best.” I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard these sentiments.
At some point in our life, it seems we have all been encouraged to do our best. We are told that if we work hard, it will pay off. We will become successful. Our parents, teachers, and advisors push us to our limits simply because they want “the best” for us.
Indeed, we often become very good at delivering on expectations. We manage to score top grades, participate in many extracurriculars, and do this all in a way that may appear effortless. But many times, the pressure to be perfect is overwhelming.
People of all ages are starting to fall victim to the intense pressure to be “successful.” In an article titled, Vacation Days and Productivity in the U.S. vs. Other Countries Paid Vacation Days in the United States, Journalist Samantha Stevens reported that:
83 percent of workers in the U.S. suffer from work-life induced stress… Approximately 1 in 5 U.S. adults (that comprises of 18.3 percent or 44.7 million people) are affected by mental illness due to imbalanced work life…and 71 percent of adults show symptoms of stress like headaches and intense anxiety.
So, what’s happening? Why does being “accomplished” and “successful” not guarantee happiness? What should we do with this knowledge?
Perfection
The pressure to be perfect has become all-consuming. It’s not enough to be on the basketball team, you must be a star. It’s not enough to get an A on the test, you should be getting every question correct. At first, this pressure to be perfect comes from our parents, teachers, and coaches who simply want the best for us. Yet, our subconscious recognizes the pressure they put on us as conditions that must be met for their love.
As Deresiewicz puts it,
The child gives his parents what he understands they want, becomes the person they need him to be. But the demand is insatiable, because its satisfaction is always provisional. The child is “never good enough” (“only as good as his last sales quarter”) and so he tries to be perfect.
Before long, we internalize this desire to be perfect. We begin to desire perfection not only for the approval of others but also for the approval of ourselves. Every mistake becomes an invitation for stress, anxiety, and depression to roll in. Perfection becomes a prerequisite for self-love.
This craving for perfection pervades the social, physical, and mental aspects of our lives.
We stress that our Instagram post did not get enough likes or that we have too little followers, deluding ourselves into conflating “likes” with genuine love.
We go to the gym not so much for our health, but for our appearance, telling ourselves we will be satisified when we look like that fitness model on Instagram or our friend who seems to be in perfect shape. When we reach our fitness goals, we find ourselves overwhelmed with the anxiety of maintaining or improving our appearance. We chase a perfect body that is impossible to obtain.
Of course, we chase perfection in our academic and professional lives as well. We want to be the best student, the best worker. Unsurprisingly, we are always on edge, afraid that someone is smarter, more talented, or working harder than us. We find ourselves jealous of our friends and coworkers who perform better than us. The feeling that we aren’t doing enough to be the best overwhelms us. Stress, anxiety, and depression ensue.
What is so enticing about being perfect that we willingly engage in stress inducing activities? Well, many of us chase perfection because we want to be successful. But what does that mean?
What is success?
When we think of successful people, we tend to assume they have it all figured out. From what we can see, they are basically perfect. Yet we are told that this success is attainable to us too. Success is guaranteed by hard work. If we simply “put in the work,” we will open the doors that allows us to be anybody we want. But is this guaranteed? And is becoming “anybody we want” even desirable?
Zygman Bauman, a social theorist, had some thoughts on the “sweet taste of freedom to become anybody”.
This sweetness has a bitter after taste, though, since while the ‘becoming’ bit suggests that nothing is over yet and everything lies ahead, the condition of ‘being somebody’, which that ‘becoming’ is meant to secure, portends the umpire’s final end-of-game whistle: ‘you are no more free when that end has been reached; you are not yourself when you have become somebody.’
What good does it do us to be “anybody we want”? Sure, we all want to be successful, but what does success look like to you? Would you recognize it when you see it? More importantly, what if your parent’s vision (or anybody else’s for that matter) of success is not your vision of success? Is studying all day and devoting all your time to become “successful” worth sacrificing your health and happiness? Must you become someone else to be successful?
Can we be artists of our own life?
Society pressures us to “make something of ourselves”. In a way, we are all supposed to be the artists of our own life. We want to take all our talents and skills and mold them to create an identity that we consider beautiful. It appears this is the goal of life. The people we look up to, celebrities and other successful people, seem to have “made” themselves. We feel that we should do the same.
Yet, while we tend to believe some people are perfect humans who have crafted a beautiful, fixed identity, this is a myth. The desire to be artists of our own life is misguided. Bauman elaborates:
‘Everyone tries to make his life a work of art’… The search for identity is the struggle to arrest or slow down the flow, to solidify the fluid, give form to the formless. We struggle to deny or at least cover up the awesome fluidity just below the wrapping of the form. Yet far from slowing the flow, let alone stopping it, identities are more like the spots of crust hardening time and again on top of the volcanic lava which melt and dissolve again before they have time to cool.
We have heard the phrase, “think outside the box.” Yet, we have been trying to form our identity by putting ourselves into boxes. But as a wise friend of mine recently told me, there is no box. Our identity cannot not be encapsulated and expressed as artwork; it doesn’t fit on the canvas.
What is more important than making our life a work of art is learning who we are and learning to love and accept ourselves in our “formless” state. (For more on understanding who you are, see my blog https://ponderingwithpete.com/the-value-of-thinking-like-a-four-year-old/)
Self-love
What does it mean to love ourselves? The 14th Dalai Lama’s definition of love is,
“an utter, absolute, and unqualified wish for the happiness of another individual”.
Love is unconditional. It does not require getting A’s on your tests. It does not require that you participate in eight extracurriculars and are the president of three of them. It certainly doesn’t require you have 10k followers on Instagram. Self-love is recognizing that you are enough simply because you exist. Nothing you do makes you more or less worthy of love.
Marcus Aurelius has this to say on the subject:
Which of these things derives its beauty from praise, or withers under criticism? Does an emerald lose its quality if it is not praised? And what of gold, ivory, purple, a lyre, a dagger, a flower, a bush?
The pressures to be perfect and successful make it difficult to love ourselves. But we must not forget what love is. It’s a wish for happiness. Don’t we all want to be happy?
Genuine self-love entails recognizing that one’s tally of accomplishments does not equate to one’s worth. Self-love leads to the realization that accomplishments are secondary to authenticity, which is all you can offer this world. More importantly, being authentic is all you can offer yourself.
Authenticity
Our worth is not contingent on our talents, our popularity, or our success. Life is not a competition. In Excellent Sheep, William Deresiewicz tells the reader of the moment he broke free from the pressures to be perfect:
“I suddenly felt that I was missing my chance to be happy, missing my chance to be free. I was also missing something else: the joy that comes when you stop feeling threatened by other people’s accomplishments and let yourself be open to the beauty that they bring into the world… I wasn’t going to be guilty anymore. I wasn’t going to punish myself by looking for reasons to be miserable. I wasn’t going to feel bad about feeling good.”
Success is not a bad thing. Indeed, success provides opportunities to do great things for yourself and others. Sacrificing authenticity to be “successful” is what we must avoid.
When we become our authentic self, our happiness increases. Our sense of purpose is strengthened. The burden of perfection is lifted off our backs. Isn’t that real success?
As it is said in the Tao Te Ching, “True perfection seems imperfect, yet it is perfectly itself”.