Just Perfect!

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Over the last week-and-a-half I have joined the approximately 35 million people who tuned into the 2024 Olympics at some point each day. Even watching competitions that didn’t particularly interest me, I sometimes found myself gasping at the physicality and skill of the athletes.

But the thing that intrigues me most about the competitions is not the perfection, but the fallibility of the performers. No matter how hard they train, no matter what level of coaching they receive, they sometimes fail. How many times has Simone Biles performed her stunning floor routine since she burst on the gymnastics scene at age 16? And yet, steps out of bounds cost her gold in her last appearance.  

The Chinese men’s gymnastic team was heading for gold until Su Weide fell twice during a horizontal bar routine that he must have been practiced until he could have done it in his sleep. And three-time Olympian show-jumping favorite Daniel Bluman’s quest for gold came to an early end after his horse clipped one rail and balked at another jump when Bluman approached it from the wrong angle. Bluman was considered the strongest rider of the Israeli delegation, but the country’s dreams were dashed in an instant.

These athletes all excel in their sports, but all fell victim to the minute mistakes—grasping the horizontal bar a fraction of a second too long, misjudging the approach to a jump, or miscalculating a twisting, turning tumble during a floor routine. It is their very lack of perfection that comforts me.

In recent decades, there have been ever-escalating levels of expectation, not just for athletes, but for students, workers, parents, even homemakers. And when we fall below those expectations, there is an inevitable impulse to compare our performance to others, to devalue ourselves. 

Poor Su Weide exited the arena, head hung low, the very picture of misery. There are reports that he has been virtually ostracized by his teammates instead of receiving their moral support. Biles, who withdrew from the 2020 Olympics after suffering the “twisties,” a dangerous condition in which the athlete loses his or her sense of direction, was castigated as a “national embarrassment” by critics and the superb athlete herself confessed that she “felt like a failure.”

“Even though I was empowering so many people and speaking out about mental health, every time I talked about my experience in Tokyo—it stung a little bit,” she was quoted as saying in Vanity Fair. 

But Biles and all the other public figures who stumble are, in fact, doing us a favor. If the best of the best is not perfect, it lessens the burden for the rest of us.

English social psychologist Thomas Curran has studied the drive toward perfection and cautions against it.“Perfection, by definition, is an impossible goal, and that’s the first thing to say,” he tells us.

Curran, the lead author of a study published in the 2017 Psychological Bulletin, found “the drive to be perfect in body, mind and career” has risen throughout the 2000s and is the result of a shift in ideology. It is a dangerous shift in the eyes of some psychologists, who argue that the perfectionist’s excessively high personal standards and overly critical self-evaluations bring “a greater risk of depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts because they will never be able to achieve what it is they’re after.”

For their 2017 paper, Curran, now the assistant professor of Department of Psychological and Behavioral Science at the London School of Economics, and co-author Andrew P. Hill of York St. John University, looked at data from more than 40,000 American, Canadian and British college students who completed the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale. The researchers found that between 1989 and 2016, the scores for all three types of perfectionism rose significantly, with the greatest increase seen in “socially prescribed perfectionism,” which went up 33 percent. (Socially prescribed perfectionism is when individuals believe that others judge them harshly, and that they must be perfect to gain approval.)

It has only gotten worse in the past decade. Social media bombards us with images and narratives of perfection. Images of others at carefully curated moments in their lives can distort our perceptions of their lives as compared to our own, leading to dissatisfaction and depression. 

So, I celebrate the stumbles, falls and miscalculations that we all make. We should be kinder to ourselves and less judgmental of others. Life, after all, is imperfect.

Kathryn Boughton is Editor of the Kent Good Times Dispatch. Her views are her own and do not reflect those of Kent News, Inc., the KGTD’s parent company.

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