– which makes us difficult to be around and punishing to live within. The origins

of perfectionism lie in the imagination, in the ease with which we can conjure up a picture

of an ideal state of affairs, compared with the monstrous difficulty of bringing such

a state into being by ourselves. The sickness of perfectionism gestates in the fertile gap

between our noble visions and our mediocre reality. And yet our problems do not ultimately

arise in our love of perfection per se. They lie in our reckless tendencies to under-budget

for the difficulties of achieving it. The proper target for (gentle) criticism is premature

perfectionism. How accurately we budget – for time and effort – is dependent on a proper

grasp of the inherent difficulty of any task. If we fully recognise something to be exceptionally

arduous, we don’t panic when our first efforts are weak and progress slow. It’s difficult

– but we knew it would be. High standards only become a problem when we think something

might and should be substantially easier than it turns out to be, and when we read our struggles

as marks of our own ineptitude rather than as an inevitable part of an entirely legitimate

lengthy journey. Perfectionism is only a problem because we have underbudgeted for difficulty,

not because we are aiming high. It strikes when we imagine we might write a good novel

in six months, or have a good career by the age of thirty or have worked out spontaneously

how to have a successful marriage. Our perfectionism starts to torture us when we lack information

on how hard others had to work and how much they had suffer before reaching their ideas

of perfection. In a better world culture would endlessly draw to our attention the first

drafts, and hidden labours of others, and properly alert us to the true horrors exacted

by anything worth doing. We would not then be impatient sickly perfectionists, we would

be patient resilient questers for excellence. The problem isn’t that we’re aiming for

perfection. It’s that we don’t have an accurately redemptive idea of what perfection

really demands.

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