The Perfectionist Mistake about the Meaning of Life: Part 1

In a previous post in this blog we saw that the meaning of life is based on value, and that claims that life is not meaningful are to be understood as claims that life does not include sufficient aspects of sufficient value. Noting the relation between meaning of life and value is important, since it helps in identifying mistakes that lead many people to unnecessarily view their lives as meaningless. In another post I noted two such important and harmful mistakes. The present post discusses a third one.

If meaning in life is based on value, then it is incorrect that only people who attain exceptional achievements have meaningful lives, while all the rest of us have meaningless ones. Just as with other spheres of value, so with meaningfulness, not only what is of exceptional, superb or perfect value is valuable.

We do not hold that only billionaires such as Warren Buffett have economically feasible lives, while all other people are poor. We do not hold that only the food cooked in, say, the best French restaurant in town is tasty, and that all other meals people prepare, including those we prepare in our own kitchen, must be tasteless. Perhaps the food in that restaurant is better than ours, but the food we prepare and eat is often very tasty and good as well. Likewise, although we recognize that Einstein was a genius, we do not think that anyone who is not an Einstein must be an idiot. Einstein was clearly more intelligent than most people, but many of those people (including ourselves) are quite intelligent as well.

We do not usually think we should see things only in terms of either everything or nothing, so that everything that is not the one must be the other. We notice the continuum between the two radical poles (e.g., exceptional wealth and dismal poverty; genius and idiocy). Likewise, we do not hold that all those who fail to reach the moral stature of Mother Teresa are evil.

Source: image 209651/pexels

Nevertheless, surprisingly, many people who reject the perfectionist supposition in other spheres of value seem to accept it in the sphere of the meaning of life. It often emerges in conversations that they hold (sometimes without even noticing it) that because they have not achieved the stature of the "Greats" (e.g., Shakespeare, Mother Teresa, Plato, Newton) their lives are meaningless. If we are not the likes of Churchill, Mozart or Michelangelo, the contention seems to be, we're just worthless; we are part of the riff-raff, the "zeros." We have failed to have had meaningful lives.

But if we reject perfectionism in other spheres of value, it makes little sense to commit to it when it comes to the meaning of life, and hold that if we didn't write the best novel of the century, or did not revolutionize science, or did not climb to the tip of the pyramid of our profession, our life has been meaningless.

Note that as non-perfectionists we may still admire lives that we take to be superb such as Shakespeare, Mother Teresa, etc. We may also quite reasonably hold that their lives were more meaningful than ours. We may even at times wish we were like them. But non-perfectionists (as opposed to perfectionists) can notice and appreciate the great value that inheres also in the non-superb. Perfectionists' insistence on achieving only what is excellent and nothing short of it blinds them to the great value found also in the non-exceptional or non-superb. As such, perfectionists have a wrong reality check: they fail to notice the value lying all around them. For them, it's either wonderful or worthless. And what is not utterly wonderful must be worthless; the "proof" that it's worthless is that it fails to be utterly wonderful.

Forthcoming posts will continue to discuss perfectionism and further mistakes about the meaning of life.