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The intolerable rise of perfectionism

theguardian.com

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Re: The intolerable rise of perfectionism

#21

Post by pygy_ »

s-shellfish wrote: post #19
pygy_ wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily untalented, but not as talented as they wish they were. Edit: In other words, it's easier to have good taste than it is to be good at designing/producing something.

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.

> You sound like you are projecting, honestly.

Spot on.

> Maybe you've been around perfectionists that worked against you rather than with you.

That would have been me :-)

> The point of perfectionism is to be more talented.

That's part of what I meant when I said "Resolution lies on either end, depending on how possible/practical it is to improve a given skill."

Another way to resolve the tension is to accept to have lower standards and go on with your life.

Both options can be valid, depending on the circumstances.

Edit: Also sometimes, no one can humanly become as talented as one would like, yet going at it over and over until you're satisfied is the right thing to do.

Re: The intolerable rise of perfectionism

#22

Post by creaghpatr »

s-shellfish wrote: post #17
electrograv wrote: post #13

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…

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…

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

Swap 'rich' in for 'nervous'.

Re: The intolerable rise of perfectionism

#23

Post by RoutinePlayer »

electrograv wrote: post #13

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…

Are you guilty of expecting a perfect popular science newspaper article that's merely pointing out what appears to be a recent general trend? :-)

Re: The intolerable rise of perfectionism

#26

Post by jerf »

s-shellfish wrote: post #17
electrograv wrote: post #13

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…

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…

One thing that helps is to remember is that by the standards of the industry, you do not have a condition unless it is materially adversely affecting your life. The mental health industry is not concerned about whether you are a perfectionist; they are concerned about whether you are having a material negative impact on your life because of your perfectionism. This is obviously a subset of people who have perfectionist tendencies.

Another topical example is "internet addiction"; they're not pathologizing "being on the internet a lot", they're pathologizing "being on the internet so much it materially adversely affects your life". I know plenty of people in 2018 who are on the Internet in one form or another "a lot", but at the moment don't know anybody for whom it is materially adversely affecting their life. But I knew someone circa 1997 in college for whom that would be true. (Arguably at one point I came close, but I never quite crossed the threshold of playing Quake II online to the exclusion of the things I needed to do. I perhaps did not do them as well as I should have, but I did them well enough.)

Of course there's a lot of give in that boundary, and there are people who cross it. But at least conceptually, the proliferation of pathologies is less bad than it looks. Nominally they're not creating new ones, but merely recognizing more ways in which you can be materially negatively impacted that already existed.

Re: The intolerable rise of perfectionism

#28

Post by implements »

JadeNB wrote: post #4
pygy_ wrote: post #2

A perfectionist is someone with more exigence than talent. By deeming yourself a perfectionist, you openly state that you do not meet you own standards. Resolution lies on either end, depending on how possible/practical it is to improve a given skill.

> A perfectionist is someone with more exigence than talent. My dictionary defines 'exigence' (which I had not encountered before) as "an urgent need or demand", and I find that hard to parse. Is either of the parses "… who is more demanding than talented" or (like "grasp exceeds reach") "… whose demands exceed his or her talent" correct? If not, would you mind clarifying?

> (which I had not encountered before)

Me neither, in this context - though there's the US legal concept of "exigent circumstances" which allows police officers to enter property without a warrant if they believe a crime is in progress.

Re: The intolerable rise of perfectionism

#29

Post by s-shellfish »

jerf wrote: post #26
s-shellfish wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One thing that helps is to remember is that by the standards of the industry, you do not have a condition unless it is materially adversely affecting your life. The mental health industry is not concerned about whether you are a perfectionist; they are concerned about whether you are having a material negative impact on your life because of your perfectionism. This is obviously a subset of people who have perfectioni…

> they are concerned about whether you are having a material negative impact on your life because of your perfectionism

Sometimes you have to go through the hard stuff to get things to be perfect. Mental health care can sit there and explain every cliche aphorism while you wait to get to that point, but that doesn't mean it's doing anything useful for some individuals. It could just be a waste of time, resources, energy, and distract from focus - especially if you have a problem solving mind you value and accidentally wind up syncing into 'the problems of mental health care' while going through the process of re-correcting maladaptive perfectionism.

It has to be taken a possibility that for some people, mental health care itself can have an adverse effect on the mind. If a person isn't getting that validation in their life, it's very easy to jump to other types of problems, like psychological ones. This can give a sense of progress but is ultimately unfilling.

Anything can be made to be seen as a problem and anything can be made to be seen as a solution when mental health care is so generalized to the point that literally anything you do can be connected or related in some way to everything you do. That doesn't mean a directional rule of causality can be inferred. The obvious is that anything you do is related directly through the fact that your own existence defines the relation between what you did and what you do. There is that obvious connection. But just because some stuff you do yields results and other stuff does not, doesn't mean there exists an intrinsic rule one can rely upon eternally as though it were gospel.

Perfectionism becomes maladaptive when individuals are not willing to be adapative. The mental health care industry is not precluded from this very normal, very characteristic trait of being human. Nothing granted it that authority absolutely and nothing ever will. The industry is made of people just as capable of being flawed as the ones they identify as ill. It doesn't mean they understand all perspectives of being human.

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