We spend years searching for the dream job, the perfect partner, or creating absolute order in the house. It seems that if you put in a little more effort, the puzzle will form the perfect picture. But as soon as the goal is achieved, the feeling of satisfaction quickly disappears, giving way to new claims and anxieties. This is not your personal failure, but a fundamental law of the structure of the world and the human psyche.
An evolutionary race without a finish line
Our brains were never programmed for a state of eternal bliss. His main task is survival. If our ancestors, having found a warm cave and food, had stopped in their development, deciding that they had achieved the ideal, humanity would have died out. Nature has built into us a mechanism that constantly demands “more” and “better”.
This phenomenon in psychology is called hedonic adaptation. We get used to good things incredibly quickly. A new car makes me happy for a month, a salary increase for two. Then the level of happiness returns to the baseline level, and the brain again begins to scan reality for shortcomings. The pursuit of the ideal is a race beyond the horizon, which recedes with every step.
Mathematics of Chaos
The ideal presupposes staticity. For something to be perfect, it must remain frozen at that point forever. However, the Universe is in a state of constant entropy and dynamic chaos. Conditions change every second: the cells of our body are renewed, the economy, climate and the mood of others change.
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Any “ideal” system is destroyed under the influence of time.
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Trying to capture the moment only leads to control neurosis.
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Rigid standards break under the pressure of unpredictable reality.
What seemed the standard yesterday may become outdated or irrelevant today. The desire for a frozen form of perfection contradicts the very essence of life, which is movement and change.
Perception Error and Filters
We often build an ideal image based on fragmentary information. This has become especially noticeable in the digital age. We see edited photos, read success stories without mentioning failures, and compare our inner sense of self with someone’s external facade.
This creates a cognitive distortion. The brain completes the missing details of someone else’s life, automatically attributing to them a perfection that is not there. We fight not with real people or objects, but with phantoms created by our imagination. This battle cannot be won because fantasy will always be brighter than the raw matter of reality.
Beauty is in flaws
The paradox is that it is deviations from the norm that make things and people valuable. In Japanese aesthetics there is a concept wabi-sabi – the art of seeing beauty in imperfection, fleetingness and incompleteness. A crack in a vase makes it unique, a scar tells a story, and a mistake in a design can lead to an unexpected discovery.
The ideal is sterile and boring. It does not involve development. Living things always have roughness, asymmetry and flaws. It is these details that create character and depth for which we appreciate art, nature and loved ones. Giving up the search for the absolute frees up a tremendous amount of energy that was previously consumed by the anxiety of inadequacy.
Accepting the fact that perfection does not exist does not mean giving up development or lowering the bar. This is a change of focus from an unattainable result to the process itself. Life becomes fuller when we stop waiting for everything to be “right” and start interacting with the world as it is. True harmony does not arise in the absence of chaos, but in the ability to flexibly exist within it.
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