On being perfect.
I was raised Catholic, which gave me a lot of things. But the one I didn’t expect to miss was the blueprint.
Not the ritual or the community or even the faith, really. The blueprint. A clear framework for how to be a good person. How to do life ‘right’. Do this, don’t do that, and you’re probably fine. I stopped believing in a God at 19, studied psychology at university, and slowly built a worldview that made more sense to me. But I never quite replaced the guidance manual for living.
So I went looking for one. I read about Stoicism. That made sense. Be rational, control what you can, accept what you can’t. Yep, that’s the one. Except it gets a bit cold when someone you love is hurting, and the Stoic answer is basically “well, that’s outside your control.” Okay, maybe not the whole answer.
What else? Utilitarianism. Do the most good for the most people. Hard to argue with that. Except when doing the most good means sacrificing something (or someone) specific or close to you, and suddenly the maths doesn’t add up in practice.
And what about virtue ethics? Be the kind of person who does good things. I liked this one a lot. But “be virtuous” isn’t exactly a step-by-step guide when you’re standing in your kitchen at 10pm, wondering whether you’ve been a good enough friend this week.
Every time I thought I’d found the framework, something poked a hole in it.
Then I read “How to be Perfect” by Mike Schur (the creator of The Good Place, which I’d also been binge-watching, strong recommend). And the thing that struck me wasn’t any single philosophy. It was the shape of the book itself. He walks through each of these frameworks, applies them to real (often very funny) scenarios, and each time, I found myself thinking “right, yes, this is the one.” And each time, he’d gently show you the bit where it falls apart.
The whole book does this. And by the end, the point isn’t “here’s the right answer.” The point is: there isn’t one. Every moral framework is partially right and partially inadequate. The best you can do is try, using whatever combination of principles seems to fit the moment, and accept that you will get it wrong. Repeatedly.
For someone who’d spent twenty years looking for a replacement blueprint, that was surprisingly freeing.
I think I’d been carrying around a fixed mindset about being good. I could accept being a beginner at skills, at work, at hobbies. Adopting a growth mindset around learning or intellectual things? Easy. But morality? Values? How to be a good friend, a good partner, a good person? Somewhere underneath, I still had this pass/fail binary from when I was younger. You’re either good or you’re not. And if you mess up, that tells you something permanent about who you are.
It doesn’t, obviously. I would never have thought that about someone else. But we tend to have different rules for ourselves. It took a comedy writer explaining Kant via a TV show about the afterlife to help me actually believe that.
I’m not going to get it right. None of us are. The point, as Schur keeps saying, is that we try. And when we get it wrong, we try again. Slightly better, hopefully. But no guarantees.
That’s not a blueprint. But it is a direction, and that might be enough.