When the band split, I just needed a break. I took five years but I got pulled back into music. It's been a struggle. That's the main thing. I want it to be great, but I've got the pressure of having been in R.E.M. and it's a high bar, because I want this to be as good as that, and that's near impossible.
A child who only hears praise when they perform, who never hears 'I just like having you around' or 'You don't have to do anything special for me to love being your parent,' learns something far more corrosive: that their baseline state is insufficient. The lesson isn't explicit. No parent sits their child down and says, 'You are only lovable when productive.' The lesson is absorbed through thousands of micro-moments.
At the beginning of the series, we learn of his dream to be the next Fred Astaire. With all of Fred's talent, Bob appears bereft of a quality repeatedly noted but never fleshed out, that thing that makes someone a star. Whether it's agreeableness, charisma, some combination, or something else altogether, Bob can't grab hold of what lies beyond himself. So, he's forever left settling-for Oscars, Tonys, and Golden Globes. In conjunction, they reflect back to him the person he'll never be.
Noted psychoanalyst Don Carveth wrote, "The point of analysis is to get over yourself." While we often think of therapy as a support system, which it is to an extent, it doesn't merely aid self-esteem; good therapy helps curtail pride as well. Consider the implicit demands of what people tend to complain about. We're heartbroken over disapproval, breakup, failure, and loss, some of which is obviously more objectively meaningful.
Ever feel like you're stuck in this weird paradox where everyone thinks you're brilliant, but inside you feel like you're constantly falling short? I've been there. Actually, I'm still there some days. After getting laid off during media industry cuts in my late twenties, I spent months wondering if maybe I wasn't as smart as I thought I was, or if being smart even mattered when I couldn't seem to get my life together.
I've often asked patients why they're so preoccupied with becoming the best in some domain, why they need something so much that they're willing to organize their lives around it, sacrificing all types of pleasures for it. Most of the time, there isn't much of an answer. It's like a game, a distraction, and a fantasy; there's no rhyme or reason, no sense of why they do it or what's to come, and no understanding of how being the best generates long-standing happiness.
Last week at a dinner party, I watched two of my friends get into a heated discussion about, of all things, whether dishes should be rinsed before going in the dishwasher. What started as playful teasing quickly escalated into accusations about control issues and wasted water. It got me thinking about all those tiny household habits that reveal so much more about us than we realize.
Some feverishly court them while they repulse another. We're taught that we need to love ourselves, to find solace in our own self-image, while also told that others often know us better than we know ourselves. For those apt to distrust, and who are not only cynical but also self-loathing, both options may feel impossible, so out of reach that one may even come to treat both with disdain, rejecting them to mask their deep-seated needs and fears.
As someone who comes alive at 2 am and can easily sink into an hour-long vortex of consuming YouTube shorts, I started using an Oura ring to act as a sort of pseudo-parent. It's motivated me to stand up from my desk more often, swap my mid-day social media breaks for 20-minute meditations, and develop a more calming before-bed routine than letting one episode of Vanderpump Rules turn into three.
We are approaching the end of the year, an opportunity to reflect on the progress you have made toward personal goals and set new ones for the upcoming year. According to a 2024 Pew Research survey, 30 percent of U.S. adults make at least one New Year's resolution. New Year's resolutions reflect a desire for personal growth. The majority of resolutions revolve around health goals such as exercising more often or eating healthier, reaching personal financial milestones, and addressing interpersonal relationships.
My grandmother strove for perfection, convinced that it was an attainable goal if only you worked hard enough. This meant eating less to lose weight. Food deprivation became a family bonding activity when my grandmother was on a diet. Diets lasted decades. We had marathon cleaning weekends while friends went to the mall. Play clothes were swapped out for school clothes for our rare trips to Burger King.
We, of course, make any changes she requests and respect that she takes every single thing we do so seriously, but you know, sometimes it's a Wednesday, and you just want to do your job and be done with it without being bogged down by changes that weren't actually necessary but perhaps made the work just a little bit more perfect.
Sacks was referring to specific points in the past, which we may cite as examples of nostalgia. But his comment reveals something deeper, which applies to obsessiveness, broadly, and perfectionism, specifically. Both often entail a preoccupation with a lost past, but one that substantially differs from anything resembling reality. While nostalgia romanticizes the past, it, at least, captures some part of it. With perfectionism, the longing is often for the possibilities of one's past, rather than for the past itself.
It isn't an oversimplification to say that perfectionism, at its core, is about a deep and irrational need for emotional and often even physical security. As much as I dislike searches for abstract "root causes," because causes tend to be complex, we can safely (no pun intended) conceive of the specific goals and specific desires in perfectionism as being in service of self-preservation, feeling protected from external and, thus, internal skeptics and critics.
Bipolar disorder I and II are each marked by lengthy periods of a depressive episode, which is expressed in a change in appetite (more or less eating), a change in sleep (more or less of it), anhedonia (i.e., the inability to experience pleasure in activities in which one did), and apathy (i.e., not caring about anything, including, at times, even pursuing treatment).
Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, unfortunately, didn't have much to offer us in his consolations about death, but, more importantly, he succeeded in helping us believe that life was worth living, even if this was somewhat unintended; he was a nihilist through and through. Philosopher David Bather Woods, in his new book Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy's Greatest Pessimist, chronicles Schopenhauer's life and thought in a manner resembling a parable.
