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Home > For Free > Articles > issue2vol5
How Much are you Prepared to Pay for Perfection?
By David Brewster August 2005
To err is human. Or at least it was 300 years ago when Cardinal Melchior De Polignac made this well-known statement. I’m not so sure anymore. Those of us with weeds in our garden used to be able to ignore them, but things have changed. We are in the midst of a cult of perfection in which flawless turf rules. And we are paying a price.
In the good old days, perfection was something for the elite. The perfect cake would win a pennant at the country show. The perfect race would be rewarded with a gold medal. And just as the perfect body would grace the cover of Sports Illustrated, the perfect lawn had its place on the cover of Vogue Living.
Then along came so-called ‘reality’ television. Suddenly perfect lawns in ‘ordinary’ gardens were a nightly event. They were paraded as something everyone could have, indeed should have. The same applied to houses and holidays – not to mention ears, eyes, noses and chins. Perfection was only a phone call, and the swipe of a credit card, away.
Things went further. With all these individual bits of perfection so readily available, a perfect life became a common expectation. Pick up the newspaper and you’ll see examples of this expectation in action. Everything that goes wrong now has to have a blame-ee. Fate, chance and acts-of-God don’t cut it in the 21st century.
Perfection is no longer an optional extra: it comes standard.
But the pursuit of perfection comes at a cost – a cost greater than what you’ll see on your Visa account. That cost is more complexity. Let me explain why.
First, by putting more emphasis on perfection we become much less adept at dealing with (inevitable) imperfection. When we put all our time and effort into weed prevention, we lose the ability to just pull them out, at a much lower cost, as they come up.
You will find numerous examples of this phenomenon if you look at how governments now respond to things going wrong. Every time a negative story breaks, they simply add another layer of bureaucracy. Another form, another check, another regulation. Meanwhile, new things just keep going wrong as they always did and always will.
Second, this new form of perfection lacks clarity. Perfection is just reality aligned with expectation. New perfection is characterised by higher expectations, but those expectations are frequently fuzzy. The perfect lawn might be only a nip and tuck away, but one program tells me to cut it weekly to 1.5cm, another tells me to trim it daily regardless and another says to leave it alone in winter. Arrgh!
Perfection is a valuable ideal but it might be simpler to aim lower and accept that weeds are plants too. As long as they don’t take over, perhaps we should learn to live with them.
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