The Dark Side Of Being A Perfectionist - Oliver Burkeman

Why do you think that so many of us have such an obsession with being productive?

Wow. These, these kind of causal questions I always feel like you can answer on so many levels, right? So this could be an ar- this could be answer about the Protestant work ethic, about sort of Anglo-American culture and the religious idea that to try to get on the right side of God you have to spend your life being very industrious. Could be like a capitalism, uh, that is a capitalism argument, but it could be a sort of late capitalism argument about how we feel that so intensely today. It could be psychotherapeutic, about how so many of us are raised with some kind of sense that we need to prove ourselves, that we're gonna be, that we're, that we get love from the world for, through our accomplishments instead of just being ourselves. Um, and, you know, then there's kind of more positive and less, uh, less pessimistic accounts, like, it, it, we live in times when it's possible for all sorts of reasons for, to, for relatively, you know, ordinary people to do exciting and interesting and meaningful things that, you know, in a very different era they might not have been able to. So it's, it's cool to try to figure out how to make sure that happens.

I think about all of those things all the time. The Protestant work ethic was something I was intimately familiar with, especially in my 20s. Uh, I, I even used to feel guilty if something had gone well but I hadn't suffered enough-

Right. (laughs)

... in the achievement of it.

Yeah, yeah.

Which is a particularly malignant version of what we're talking about.

Yeah, totally. That, um, that way in which it is easier, it's actually easier to ex- to have it be hard, i- in a, in a sort of upside-down way, and that for lots of us, I, I expect in this respect we are similar, me and you and plenty of people, uh, in the audience. Um, it actually feels kind of strange or, or dangerous or subversive or something to, to wonder if something could actually be quite, quite easy. Um, I read a, there was a comment to a New York Times piece that, that, well, the comment went viral, r- um, on social media, which doesn't often happen, where, um, uh, a woman was, was referring to this concept, uh, that she'd come to call, um, uh, maximum economy of ass.

Huh.

About how, um, actually it, often it's the right thing to do to half-ass things, that's where the, that's where the idea comes from, right? The idea that you should always be spending as much ass as possible in the, in the completion of a task. It just makes no sense, right? It doesn't, it's not how... it's not how it should work. There should be no shame in the idea that if something comes easily to you, it should feel easy to do, and then you save your-