Stop Waiting To Be Perfect To Be Happy

Our culture has a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad problem.

It celebrates finality. Perfection. Success. And most of all, completeness. It deifies the end result and ignores the process, encouraging us to be quiet about the hard work, struggles, and challenges, in favor of appearing as though we always have everything under control. And most of all, it tells us that we are only good when we are done, fully baked, and complete.

Being done, in our culture, means having a lot of success, power, money, influence, and stuff. Big house(s). Lots of online followers. Winning. Being recognized.

I’ve written at length about this culture’s impact on how we conceptualize success and define a happy life. But lately, I’ve also realized there is another harmful impact upon us, one that is more about our inner expectations: we start to imagine that, when we are ‘perfect’ or ‘complete’, in whatever way we define it, we will enter into some marvelous world where we are forever happy, life is forever easy, and there is no work required of us ever again.

Completeness not only comes to signify success in our culture, but it also means that because of that success, we’ll never again need to know pain or suffer. Completeness means that we won’t have to reckon with the realities of being human ever again.

I think that all of us, deep down, have something that we believe will absolve us from the challenges of our humanity: our own version of a magic cure-all that removes all the struggle from our lives. It could be a job (or a job title), a certain amount of money, a possession, an achievement, a role, or even a relationship. In our minds, it comes to represent the thing that will save us.

And there might be many versions! In pondering this, I’ve realized that one of my magic cure-all fantasies is that I will be free when I finally finish everything on my to-do list. How absolutely unrealistic this belief is, my rational self knows; but yet, inside of my psyche, it is deeply embedded, and so hard to wrestle with.

If you’ve ever bought a product because it offered you a temporary whoosh of cure-all, you’ve experienced this: the skincare products that magically promise eternal youth, the fancy juice that magically promises instant health, the car that magically promises a higher status. They’re all just little cure-alls that quickly become insufficient, inviting us to turn our attention to the next thing.

It’s almost even more tragic when you see what happens when someone actually does acquire their fantasy cure-all, and then has to go through the crushing disappointment of seeing that their pain, stress, and suffering still exist. As Mathieu Ricard recounts in his book Happiness:

So, what are you waiting for? What’s the thing that you think will complete you? Learning to name it will help you to tame its power over you.

There is no magic cure-all. But - good news! - there is still magic, though it is the kind of magic that comes from showing up every day and embracing every element of the process: the hard work, the learning, the growth, the challenge, the rejuvenation, the setbacks, and the milestones. There’s no magic found in escaping our humanity; it only comes from embracing every part of it.

We’re all works in progress, and we always will be. I don’t want to delude myself with striving for completeness. I want to find joy in the pursuit of trying, fulfillment in the experiences of each day, and create a life that expresses humanity to the fullest and deepest extent. This week, I’m choosing not to delude myself with any cure-alls, and instead, am choosing to love every step of the journey as a chance to learn, contribute, and evolve.