The Delusion of Perfect

I used to prepare music playlists for road trips and long drives.

At times, I would get so obsessed with creating the perfect playlist that it turned out nothing would satisfy me.

If you’re the kind of person who listens to music for showers or housework, I’ll bet you’ve experienced this too. “Which 3 songs would perfectly entertain and excite me while I take my 8-minute shower?”

I’ve even gotten so obsessed with having the perfect playlist, that I ended up hating and resenting the music I did choose. Because it didn’t create the perfect movie-scene excitement and tone that I was going for. Because it didn’t create ideal circumstances for me to enjoy myself.

But that’s not the music’s fault. After all, I have excellent taste in music and everything in my phone is great. It’s because I’m a perfection-seeking degenerate who has to remind himself how to just enjoy whatever’s on.

I mean, let’s be honest… whatever’s on, you’re still going to be singing along to it hideously. And so am I. Whether it’s Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ or Nine Inch Nails’ Head Like a Hole, you and I are both going to sing along and love every second of it.

So why couldn’t I help myself? Why was I looking for the perfect playlist?

Drug addicts often have very unhealthy, compulsive, self-coercive personalities — not a surprise. So you add the unaccepting emotional and spiritual tightness of the drug use on top of that, and you end up with insane routines of trying to “prep” to have the perfect day. To have the perfect car ride, the perfect work day, the perfect dose of drugs to feel perfect for the perfect amount of time while you’re out doing something.

It’s absolutely insane.

It’s cartoonishly ridiculous and painful to watch. Drug addicts will even look at each other’s insane routines and think to themselves “what a clown. At least I’m not that bad.”

But they are. I was.

Drug addicts are the extreme example: they have forgotten how to have fun. Or, more specifically, they have forgotten how to look into their futures and see any possibility of fun, outside of having the right buzz or the right external stimulation. An addict feels completely incapable of enjoying himself without planning very carefully how exactly he’s going to ensure he enjoys himself.

And this is also why I limit myself to one cup of coffee at a time. Because if I get in the habit of drinking more than one cup of coffee, I will also fall directly into the habit of gauging my caffeine high like an addict. I will start asking myself “have I had enough? Have I had too much? Should I make one more cup before the meeting? You know, I probably don’t have quite the right amount of energy to get started on that big project, I better go make one more cup (and then procrastinate another 4 hours and just end up getting to it tomorrow).”

It’s insane.

I don’t want to do that anymore. One cup and move the hell on. One cup is still a nice treat. It should be a treat, not an exercising in bullying myself.

Morgan Housel wrote a piece recently in which he talks about a train he used to take. There was a “quiet car,” which people could opt into and enjoy the peace and silence necessary to focus. To get some work done during the ride. Because the only other people in that car were also silent and focused. Win-win, you might think.

But what ends up happening in the quiet car, he says, is that you are so intent on having complete silence, that any tiny distraction becomes a major pain point. You’re so focused on the quiet you expect, that you end up miserable when anything at all interferes with it.

By riding in the quiet car, you’re signing a contract with yourself to be unhappy if the world delivers anything other than a quiet car. And in that case, you’ll probably end up getting less work done than if you’d have just ridden cattle class with everyone else.

That’s where the music playlists took me, and that’s where long-term drug users go. Complete inability to enjoy, because of an internal demand for perfection.

The more time I spend in New York City, the more I realize there is actually a unique tranquility to be found in the noise. A level of tranquility that comes with total acceptance of extreme inconvenience.

I mean, I’m still not wild about New York for other reasons, but it’s not because I can’t focus. I could sit out on the sidewalk and read a book pretty easily now; there’s no need for me to go in my hotel room and have perfect silence. (And let’s be honest, there’s no such thing as silence in New York, even in your hotel room. Somebody is always fucking with your “ideal circumstances.”)

If you want to read about the insanity of hyper-obsessive, hyper-self-centered human behavior (and an unbelievably potent antidote), read Alcoholics Anonymous. It doesn’t even matter if you’ve never been drunk before — you will find yourself in those pages. Because we all do insane things. We all have some degree of compulsion to shape reality to our tastes and conveniences. It’s a book about that. The alcohol is but a symptom of that problem. And everyone I know has some symptom or another of this same compulsion.

This sort of “insistence on perfection” is also why we lie awake at night trying to make decisions.

Something odd happens when you lie down in bed at night: you forget that you’re going to wake up in a few hours and continue being exactly this person, with these problems and these trains of thought. As if, if you don’t solve this problem right now, all of the ideas that you’re currently working on will disappear and you won’t be able to recapture them.

Which of course isn’t true. And if it is, keep a notepad next to your bed and write them down. That’s what I do. It takes the pressure off of you to continue thinking about them at this time.

It’s like we don’t trust the tomorrow morning version of ourselves to make decisions. When, in fact, the tomorrow morning version of us is probably going to be better at making those decisions, by virtue of being well rested and having slept upon it.

All of this perfection nonsense usually boils down to one thing: we don’t trust the future versions of ourselves to adapt properly to life. Or to have enough fun. Or to read that book, or to make good decisions. It’s a matter of trust. We don’t trust the future versions of ourselves to live.

We treat ourselves like our own children who need looked out for. And that’s a wonderful thing, because it leads us to love ourselves properly.

But it also leads us to overprotect ourselves. From the basic imperfections of life, or from having to live it.

In the moment, you always sing your guts out anyway. Just like you’d hope your child would. You always find a way to get through a chapter of a really good book even if it’s noisy around you. You always get work done if that work truly needs done.

If you can lay your head anywhere and get a good night’s sleep, you’re the most powerful person in the world. And if you can sing along to anything someone puts on in the car, you’re probably the happiest person in that car. Because you’re not insisting on anything — anything other than living.

If you were going to have a good day, you’ll have one. And if you were going to have a bad one, music likely isn’t the culprit. Nor is a little bit of noise or an imperfect this or that. You have to trust yourself like a swashbuckling adventurer or a nomad: adapting, improvising, working, and enjoying without “ideal circumstances.” Because there are no “ideal circumstances.” That’s a dream.

So why do we give such little credit to our future selves? They are just our current selves, a little later. We don’t have to prep them. We just have to trust them. We don’t have to make sure they have a good time. That’s their problem. And, like any trusting parent’s child, they’ll figure it out.

Drink some water and don’t blame New York for your lack of reading.

JDR

“The simple willingness to improvise is more vital, in the long run, than research.” - Rolf Potts