Perfectibility

Have you thought about perfectibility. Not perfection or perfectionism but perfectibility.

The optimism that makes me the most uncomfortable is what I’ve been calling the myth of perfect perfectibility. This is the belief that :

(a) there’s some perfect life in the future waiting for us and 

(b) we can achieve anything we want, as long as we try.

Again, this sounds a lot like the idea of heaven, but repurposed in a way that a skeptical mind can accept. Heaven isn’t in the afterlife; It’s here, now. You just need hard work and the right 10-step program to get you here. If paradise is here and now and all you have to do to get there is to believe, one has to wonder why nobody in history (as far as I know) has managed to get there.

Here’s philosopher Julian Baggini in Microphilosophy praising concert pianist James Rhodes’ critique of self-help: [Rhodes] main complaint is that the self-help culture encourages us to think we are more perfectible than we are. The “good-enough human being” should indeed be good enough. “The human condition is one of fragility,” he said. “Just because we are not happy it doesn’t mean that we are unhappy. There is a huge amount of space between happiness and unhappiness and someone in between is OK.” 

Not everything is perfect. Not everything will be great.

You will not get everything. Not really. 

Well said. Very well said... Its Ok to be Ok.