The intolerable rise of perfectionism

This ^

This paragraph, which seems to summarize much of this article’s position, seems quite dangerous:

> Perfectionism is a personality trait rather than a mental health condition. There is no World Health Organization diagnosis code for perfectionism and it is not listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It can fly under the radar and masquerade as the pursuit of high standards, yet it overlaps with a plethora of disorders from eating to obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, body dysmorphia, depression and suicide.

Note how it simultaneously says “perfectionism is not a mental health condition”, then proceeds to immediately insuinate it is effectively a mental disorder. This continues throughout the rest of the article.

The domain of neurodiversity as a whole is far more complex than reducing the whole of a phenomenon to such simplistic and IMO damagingly derogatory terms as “interolerable rise of perfectionism”.

Despite the author’s attempt to interleave a few studies with personal stories, it conveniently neglects to tell the stories of “happy perfectionism”: There are many like myself, for whom pursuing this internal motivation for perfectionism turns out to be immensely intrinsically rewarding. In fact, I believe this intrinsic pleasure some (small percentage of the population) take from striving for perfection to have played (and continues to play) a pivotal role in humanity’s rise in technological advancement.

It is not the destination, but the journey (to asymptotically approach a vision of perfection), that healthy perfectionists find so rewarding. Certainly, pathological corruptions of perfectionism exist (for example, any such case where you experience distress or suffering for not achieving infinite perfection, despite it being obviously unattainable) — but this is true for all personality traits.

Perfectionism is fine if you can concretely define measurable goals before you start working, and trust yourself to have a process of refinement that doesn't feel like a circular loop to you. This can be very validating for some people in a sense that it's autonomous - independent from validation via the economy and independent from validation via culture, both being dynamical systems and consequently difficult to predict shifts in preference.

Establishing dependency primarily on anything besides your own standard is a shortcut to misery when someone just doesn't care enough about every little detail you lovingly put into something.

You may annoy the fuck out of everyone around you if you are actually successful, and it's important to be in a social environment where people are tolerant of perfectionism and thrive from it.

It's just called being devoted. It doesn't have to be trivialized to a pejorative and mapped to a set of things approximately related to whatever goal you define. People can pick up on all of these things and get it wrong because unless you explain to them the point of all your work they won't necessarily understand it. It's then easy to internalize their issues as your own, which can implicitly shift your own standards, preferences.

'Better' in comparison to others is a state of mind that is ultimately destructive. If you like details and like feeling a sense of progress you define, better is perfectly fine to want to be. Muted, dull sameness has it's own tormented unchanging cyclical state that can be just as challenging to direct oneself out of once you convince yourself into it.

Everything is a mental health condition these days.

Honestly I think the mental health care industry is getting nervous over how complex, diverse and non-trivial it is to understand minds.

It's easy for the field to operate on the premise 'but these poor people, we are trying to help them!'. It's at the least, a bit absurd to be hypercritical over every little detail of thinking, acting, behaving, processing, etc and consider that 'help'.

I agree with you that perfectionism doesn't have to be a bad thing. It seems more that one has to be cautious with who one displays those characteristics towards because it can easily provocate insecurity in others, unintentionally. Which can be a totally reasonable reaction, life sometimes sucks and happens and things one wants to be devoted to may have to be deprioritized.

But if you want to be a perfectionist and are in a place in life where you can afford to devote yourself that much, then you shouldn't let the fact that other people made different choices get to you to the point that it halts your own ability to progress.

You sound like you are projecting, honestly. Maybe you've been around perfectionists that worked against you rather than with you.

The point of perfectionism is to be more talented. If you read too deeply into that and don't look at the whole picture, of course it's going to be annoying. But the root starts with a desire to be better because the feeling of stagnation is intolerable.