The Curse of Perfection : When Striving for the Best Brings the Worst
Human life is a cascade of desires — those intricate yearnings that push us toward goals, status, and meaning. Among these, the pursuit of “the best” holds a special allure. Striving for the best house, the best career, the best partner, or the best life — all resonate deeply with our ideals of human flourishing. However, this insatiable drive for the best can also be the cause of some of the worst outcomes in our lives, leading to dissatisfaction, mental suffering, and societal dysfunction. In this essay, we will explore how the desire for the best can paradoxically engender the worst, examining philosophical, psychological, and scientific dimensions of this phenomenon.
The Paradox of Perfectionism
Philosophically, the desire for “the best” is intertwined with perfectionism. Aristotle’s notion of the eudaimonia — human flourishing — asserts that achieving the best version of oneself is the highest human good. But this Aristotelian ideal, when framed in terms of modern perfectionism, can quickly spiral into an unyielding expectation that distorts reality.
The pursuit of perfection in its contemporary sense leaves little room for the messiness of human life. We are imperfect beings navigating an imperfect world, and yet we hold ourselves to ideals of flawless perfection. Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist framework emphasized bad faith, where individuals live inauthentically, adopting external ideals that they cannot possibly meet. The relentless desire to become the best forces us into bad faith — acting as if we are something we are not. This produces internal dissonance, anxiety, and a sense of failure, fueling the worst mental outcomes: chronic dissatisfaction and an endless sense of inadequacy.
The Hedonic Treadmill : When the Best is Never Enough
One of the most profound psychological concepts related to this discussion is the hedonic treadmill. Proposed by psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald T. Campbell, the hedonic treadmill theory posits that humans have a set point of happiness, and no matter how much their circumstances improve, they adapt and return to this baseline. In essence, the more we achieve or acquire, the more our expectations rise, and the further we push the goalposts of what “the best” means.
Striving for the best continually resets this baseline, making satisfaction perpetually out of reach. What was once “the best” becomes the new normal, and soon, it isn’t enough. Our achievements become invisible to us as we fixate on the next horizon. This insidious process creates a cycle of dissatisfaction, where striving for more leads to a psychological deficit, leaving us in a state worse than before we embarked on the pursuit.
The Best as the Enemy of the Good (Decision Paralysis and Opportunity Costs)
The famous adage “the best is the enemy of the good” aptly summarizes another pitfall of the pursuit of the best: decision paralysis. Barry Schwartz’s work on the paradox of choice reveals how an overabundance of options, particularly when people aim to select “the best,” leads to decision fatigue, regret, and reduced satisfaction.
When one is constantly in search of the best outcome, one often overlooks satisfactory or even good options. Schwartz’s research indicates that “maximizers,” those who are obsessed with finding the absolute best option, are less happy than “satisficers,” who are content with good-enough decisions. The cognitive load of always needing the best leads to an overwhelming sense of pressure and missed opportunities, resulting in suboptimal life satisfaction.
Moreover, the opportunity cost of pursuing the best cannot be ignored. For every moment we spend chasing an ideal, we forgo numerous other experiences and opportunities that might bring fulfillment. This relentless pursuit narrows our focus and confines our existence to a singular obsession with perfection, excluding a myriad of other joys and possibilities in life. The search for the best diminishes the present and devalues the ordinary, which often contains the seeds of deep contentment.
From Evolutionary Mismatch to the Neurobiology
From a biological standpoint, our pursuit of the best has roots in our evolutionary past. The evolutionary psychologist Robert Wright, in his book The Moral Animal, discusses how natural selection wired humans for perpetual dissatisfaction. Our ancestors had to continuously seek better food sources, mates, and shelter to survive, leading to an evolutionary drive for improvement. This drive is adaptive in a context of scarcity, but in a world of abundance, it can become maladaptive.
The neurobiology of desire further complicates this issue. Our brain’s reward system, primarily governed by dopamine, incentivizes the pursuit of rewards rather than the enjoyment of them. The anticipation of obtaining the best triggers dopamine spikes, but once the goal is achieved, the reward often feels underwhelming. Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp’s research on the SEEKING system highlights how our brain is constantly pushing us to seek new rewards, rendering satisfaction elusive. Thus, the drive for “the best” creates a neurobiological trap — perpetual wanting without fulfillment.
Societal Ramifications (Inequality, Burnout, and Collective Discontent)
On a societal level, the desire for the best breeds systemic inequalities and widespread discontent. Capitalist structures often capitalize on the human urge for the best, perpetuating consumerism, hyper-competition, and widening inequality. The wealth gap, for instance, is not just an economic phenomenon but also a psychological one. The richest members of society chase the “best” in terms of wealth, power, and status, contributing to economic systems that privilege the few while leaving the majority to struggle with inadequate resources.
The culture of overwork, burnout, and toxic productivity is also a direct consequence of this collective pursuit. The ideology of meritocracy insists that we can achieve the best if only we work hard enough. This creates a societal expectation that we must constantly optimize ourselves — our careers, bodies, and minds — to reach some ideal state of existence. However, this endless pursuit results in burnout, mental health crises, and a sense of alienation from our authentic selves and our communities.
Accepting the Worst to Find Peace (Existential Perspective)
Philosophically, many traditions suggest that the way out of this dilemma is through acceptance of imperfection. Eastern philosophy, particularly Zen Buddhism, emphasizes the idea of wabi-sabi — the beauty of imperfection, transience, and incompleteness. The Western tradition, too, offers Stoicism, where philosophers like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius argued that one should focus on what is within their control and accept the rest.
Existentialist thinkers like Albert Camus also recognized the futility of seeking ultimate meaning or perfection in a chaotic, indifferent universe. Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus presents the figure of Sisyphus, who endlessly pushes a boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down. His acceptance of the absurdity of his fate is his triumph. Similarly, accepting that life will not always yield the best outcome can liberate us from the psychological prison of perfectionism.
The Principle of Least Action
Striving for perfection often goes against the natural flow of minimizing effort and finding balance. By adhering to the Principle of Least Action, we can understand that seeking a “good enough” solution aligns with the most efficient and harmonious use of energy in a system, mirroring life’s natural tendencies. In physics, the Principle of Least Action states that the path taken by a system between two states is the one for which the action is minimized. In other words, natural systems tend to follow the path that requires the least energy or effort.
In life, humans, too, tend to find more harmonious and sustainable results by taking a path that balances effort and outcome rather than relentlessly pushing for the most “perfect” result. A desire for “the best” often leads to over-exertion and inefficiency, whereas a more pragmatic approach — seeking a balanced, minimal-effort path — can lead to more sustainable and harmonious results.
Entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics
Just as entropy increases in a closed system, human systems — be they emotional, psychological, or societal — become more chaotic when constrained by rigid expectations of perfection. The relentless effort to maintain order against natural fluctuations amplifies disorder, reinforcing the idea that the best can indeed lead to the worst.
In thermodynamics, entropy is a measure of disorder or randomness in a system, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in an isolated system, entropy tends to increase over time. The pursuit of perfection can be seen as an attempt to create order or the “best” state, but in reality, systems (whether personal, societal, or even cosmic) naturally tend toward disorder and imperfection. Applying this concept philosophically, any rigid pursuit of “the best” may lead to greater chaos, as it conflicts with the natural tendency toward increasing complexity and disorder. The harder one tries to enforce perfection, the more energy and resources are required to fight this natural trend, often leading to burnout, frustration, and eventual breakdown — analogous to entropy in a physical system.
Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems
Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems reinforce that the pursuit of ultimate perfection or total completeness is fundamentally flawed. Human life, much like formal systems, is always subject to incomplete knowledge or understanding, making the chase for the “best” a futile and self-defeating endeavor.
Mathematically, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems suggest that in any sufficiently complex system (like arithmetic or formal logical systems), there are truths that cannot be proven within the system itself. This concept applies to perfectionism in life: any attempt to find a “perfect” solution or the “best” outcome is inherently limited. Perfection is not only unattainable but also mathematically impossible to fully encapsulate within any given framework. Thus, by chasing the perfect, we are often confronting the limits of our understanding and creating paradoxes that lead to failure. In the context of human desires, Gödel’s theorems imply that there will always be some incomplete aspect to life’s goals and ideals.
Optimization vs. Overfitting
The concept of overfitting illustrates how hyper-optimization can backfire, leading to inflexible and maladaptive outcomes. It emphasizes that chasing perfection often comes at the expense of resilience and general effectiveness, echoing the philosophical argument that the best can cause the worst.
In machine learning, overfitting refers to the phenomenon where a model becomes too tailored to a specific dataset, capturing noise or irrelevant details rather than the general underlying pattern. While the model may perform well on training data (appearing “perfect”), it performs poorly on new, unseen data because it has become too rigid and specific. This concept parallels how striving for the “best” in life can lead to an overly tailored and specific outcome that fails to generalize well to new situations. In life, just like in machine learning, seeking an overly perfect outcome in one context can reduce adaptability and cause failure when faced with real-world complexity.
Hence : Embracing the Good, Releasing the Best
Ultimately, the desire for the best, while seductive, often leads us away from contentment, meaning, and fulfillment. It propels us into a state of perpetual dissatisfaction, decision paralysis, societal discontent, and internal strife. The philosophical, psychological, and scientific perspectives all point toward a need to reevaluate this quest. True satisfaction might not lie in achieving the best but in embracing the good and finding beauty in imperfection.
To escape the tyranny of perfection, we must accept that imperfection is inherent to the human condition. The pursuit of the best can be noble, but it becomes dangerous when it overshadows the joys and meaning found in life’s ordinary moments. Paradoxically, it is by relinquishing the unattainable ideal of the best that we may finally come to rest in the fullness of life’s complexity, messiness, and grace. The art of living well lies not in achieving the best but in being present and whole within the imperfect.
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Disclaimer : Everything written above, I owe to the great minds I’ve encountered and the voices I’ve heard along the way.