Perfectionism: Challenging the drive to be perfect 

Pushing ourselves to achieve five-star excellence can be exhausting. Prof Thomas Curran believes we need to look for a cultural change where being good enough is enough

Pic: iStock

BEFORE we start, this isn’t about Instagram. When we think of perfectionism, it’s often around our immediate selves — wishing we were better looking, better earners, better parents.

Social media can amplify the niggling sense of not being enough or having enough, causing us to ceaselessly strive for more and better.

It’s compare-and-despair on a personal level, weaponised by the advertising industry. Yet bizarrely, perfectionism remains our favourite flaw — think of the clichéd response at job interviews when asked about our weaknesses: “Well, I suppose that would be my perfectionism.”

We are encouraged to harness our perfectionism, so that it drives us on.

But if perfectionism worked, we’d all be perfect people leading perfect lives — which clearly we’re not. It’s a trap.

What, then, if perfectionism is a symptom of something far bigger than the inner critic of any individual person? What if our interpretation of perfectionism is too narrow, so that we need to radically zoom out to see what it really is, and who it serves? What if perfectionism is the product of a system that pits us against each other in unending competition for more, leading to widespread depression and burnout, helicopter parenting, pressure to achieve, terminal discontent, and unending consumerism?

Academic Thomas Curran describes perfectionism as “the defining psychology of an economic system that’s hellbent on overshooting human thresholds”.

Curran, 35, is an associate professor of psychology and behavioural science at the London School of Economics. He recently published The Perfection Trap: The Power of Good Enough In A World That Always Wants More. He argues that perfectionism is not personal but cultural – pressure piled on individuals to relentlessly strive or be deemed failures.

His is certainly not a self-help book. Instead, it’s a call to arms, to question, perhaps even dismantle, a system which tells us, every waking minute of our lives, that we are not good enough and that the only way to be good enough is to consume more while remaining in perpetual competition with each other.

Thomas Curran, writer and recovering perfectionist

Unshakeable insecurity

Curran himself identifies as a “recovering perfectionist.” “I still have struggles, but on the whole, it’s getting better,” he says. “You never really lose perfectionism. Everything is reviewed, rated — you can’t escape the judgement.”

He describes the feeling as something that “lives in our interiors via a lingering and unshakeable insecurity…about what we don’t have, how we don’t look, what we haven’t achieved.” It differs from having high standards, which he says do not involve “a burning need for approval”.

Until quite recently, perfectionism was seen as a positive trait — in 1978, US psychologist Don Hamachek drew a distinction between “healthy” and “unhealthy” perfectionism, although this idea was later debunked by fellow psychologist Thomas Greenspon, who declared healthy perfectionism to be an oxymoron. Another psychologist, Asher Pacht, went further, describing perfectionism as “a kind of psychopathology”.

Unsurprisingly, societal perfectionism impacts women more than men. “It’s deeply gendered,” Curran explains. “We’ve come on a lot, but we still live in a patriarchal world.

“Women are still expected to navigate standards and expectations in parenting and the workplace in ways that are very different to men.

“However, we are starting to see boys struggle too. For the first time ever, there are expectations that are starting to weigh on boys. People like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson are telling them they’re weak and servile. This is having a negative impact – the ‘tyrannies of should’ are weighing on them too. Perfectionism is now coming for everybody.”

These “tyrannies of should” come from German psychoanalyst Karen Horney (1885-1952), whose work, says Curran, was “prophetic”. Her influence on him is clear, when she wrote in 1937: “From its economic centre, competition radiates into all activities. It permeates love, social relations and play…and is a problem for everyone in our culture”

“Horney’s ‘tyrannies of should’ created conflict within women between the person they felt they were, and the person who they needed to present to the outside world in order to function in society,” Curran says.

“This created a deep sense of disconnection, alienation, and neurosis, which is the root of what she called an ‘idealised self’, and what we later called perfectionism.” (Or as Simone de Beauvoir wrote twelve years later in The Second Sex, “one is not born, but becomes, a woman”.)

Socially prescribed perfectionism, he adds, can elevate loneliness, rumination, poor quality relationships, fear of intimacy, lower life satisfaction, and low self-esteem.

The idea foisted upon women about “having it all” is just socially prescribed perfectionism in fewer syllables. And perfectionists of all genders experience burnout, which makes them “no more successful than people who are not especially perfectionistic”.

He reminds us that “failure is essential to life”.

Manufactured discontent

Curran suggests our main sources of perfectionism and “manufactured discontent” come from consumerism (“What I don’t have”), social media (“What she posted”), meritocracy (“You just haven’t earned it yet”) and the pressure to raise exceptional children (“Perfectionism begins at home”).

“The problem is the system,” he says. “It needs to grow to survive, which was fine — it brought us out of scarcity — but we’ve done the heavy lifting. We don’t need to keep doing it.

“There’s nowhere else to go other than to crush everyone under the weight of those expectations to do more than we already have. That’s the big picture, and it’s not talked about enough.”

He mentions how influential thinkers like Malcolm Gladwell, Jonathan Hay, and Brene Brown “focus on the symptoms” — the education system, the workplace, how we parent, how we interact on social media — rather than examining what causes these symptoms to come into effect: “They view them as happenstance, an unconnected set of things.”

Curran urges us instead to view the bigger picture because perfectionism, despite demonstrably not improving our lives, is on the rise — having analysed data from 40,000 students over several decades, he found that it has increased by 33% since 1989. And unlike neuroticism, it doesn’t resolve with age.

In a standard self-help book, this would be the part where a neat solution is offered. Not so from Curran.

“I’m trying to be optimistic, but there isn’t much optimism to be found — we can move people in the direction of change... The climate is rapidly deteriorating, and I think that will be the impetus to take action against the system... Part of me believes if we use our democratic power, we can bring about change.”

He pauses. “It’s society that’s broken, not us.”