The big idea: is being ‘good enough’ better than perfection?
It wasn’t until I’d finished reading a fourth article ranking “the best wellies for children” that it dawned on me that maybe I could be doing something better with this precious time on Earth. Many websites use a five-star rating to rank the boots, just as one might rate films or albums or restaurants. These ratings, though subjective and often fickle, take on a life and meaning of their own. A spiteful customer can sink a small business with one-star online reviews. I wouldn’t buy a three-star welly, even though it’s not clear how much anyone should expect from a rubber boot.
The American psychologist Barry Schwartz observed that faced with apparently endless consumer choice, people respond in two ways. “Satisficers” are happy to pick a good enough option and are unlikely to spend their free time reading hundreds of product reviews, but “maximisers” feel compelled to make the best possible choice. This means the more choices they are offered, the worse off they are: an expansion of possibilities makes decision-making harder and regret the more likely outcome. Studies suggest that maximisers often do better professionally – in this sense, their high standards pay off – but even then they feel worse. Maximisers tend to be less happy, and more prone to depression and negative social comparison.
Unfortunately, the number of online rankings for things like “the best doormats of 2023” or “the best toilet brushes” suggest we live in a world of relentless maximisers. And where do you stop? There are endless ways to assess your life and your choices, and to fail to measure up. You can track your steps, your heart rate and your sleep cycles, monitor your weight and BMI, assess your social media engagement and obsess over performance indicators at work. We treat these metrics with a reverence they rarely deserve: the 10,000 steps goal is arbitrary, your BMI is a very imperfect indicator of your health, online approval doesn’t define your social worth.
Even so, the language and demands of maximisation have seeped into almost every aspect of our being. It shapes how we think of our social and romantic lives: in a hyper-connected world, which relationships do you “invest” in? There is apparently nothing worse than being advised to “settle” – apart from maybe learning that your lover has “settled” with you – but in love, as in all areas of life, it is probably better to be a satisficer, an imperfectionist.
Much writing about maximising – and related trends, such as self-optimisation and perfectionism – focuses on our individual responses. But by considering how we relate to others, we can begin to see why the desire to be the best and to have the best is fundamentally a collective problem, a shared delusion.
In his 2022 book, The Good-Enough Life, Avram Alpert argues that personal quests for greatness, and the unequal social systems that fuel these quests, are at the heart of much that is wrong in the world, driving overconsumption and environmental degradation, stark inequalities and increased unhappiness among people who feel locked in endless competition with one another. Instead of scrambling for a handful of places at the top, Alpert believes we’d all be better off dismantling these hierarchies, so that we no longer cultivate our talents to pursue wealth, fame or power, but only to enrich our own lives and those of others. Ideally, qualities such as kindness and empathy would be recognised as being just as valuable as scientific or creative brilliance.
From our current standpoint, such a world might seem a distant possibility. In 1965 CEOs in the US were paid 21 times as much as the typical worker; now they are paid 344 times as much. We lionise business leaders, and yet commercial success is always a collective endeavour, a triumph of people with different skills and abilities working creatively together. The same is true, although sometimes less obviously so, for any other great achievement or breakthrough, in politics, science, the arts or sport. Imagine how differently power and status would be distributed if we began properly recognising the care and support structures that make individual greatness possible. How humbling, and also empowering, it can be to remember that neither our successes nor our failures are ours alone.
The reason I spent so long Googling “the best wellies for children” wasn’t ultimately to do with boots, of course. Motherhood is the area of my life in which I feel my failures and inadequacy most acutely. I can’t shake the conviction that my children deserve a perfect mother, and that I cannot be good enough for them. The irony is that parenthood, like any social bond, and any love or care work, res
ists the logic of progress and maximisation. Being a good parent, like being a good friend, is not about achievement but about being: being there, being kind, being you. We can use our relationships with others to reinforce our maximising worldview – perfectionist parents tend to prime their children to become perfectionists too. Or we can try to break the cycle. Even when we cannot fully accept our own flaws, we can remind others that they are more than the sum of their achievements.
Perhaps, with the new year upon us, you are feeling a little penitent. Maybe you have resolved to exercise more and eat better, to take up a self-improving hobby, to really go for that promotion at work, to become the best version of you. But instead of taking up another new year’s resolution – a self-reproach disguised as a good intention – perhaps it’s worth asking why you feel sure it’s you that needs to change. What if you’re already good enough?
Further reading
The Good-Enough Life by Avram Alpert (Princeton, £15.99)
The Perfection Trap: The Power of Good Enough in a World That
Always Wants More by Thomas Curran (Cornerstone, £22)
Stand Firm: Resisting the SelfImprovement Craze by Svend Brinkmann (Polity, £12.99)
like it was a roaring success: Sam lasted a term (“it was very much, like, jazz boys who wanted to play like that”). They dropped out, self-released singles and played “wherever would have us”, but by Sim-Savage’s reckoning they “didn’t really know what we were doing” until they met their manager, whose suggestion that they could “actually try and do this properly” so startled the band that Sim-Savage initially turned her down. “We never did this to do really well or whatever,” she frowns. “It’s just something we really, really enjoyed doing.”
And yet they are clearly doing really well, offering a fierce counterargument to the long-held wisdom that noisy guitar rock has had its day. “I think it’s got something to do with Covid,” says Sam. “Bands were on the rise, then had to stop deciding to really go for it.
People were stuck in for so long. Now, they’re like: no, we’ll just do what we want to do when we have the chance.”