There are times where if we don’t get something right the first time we give up. We don’t try again and say we just can’t do it. When we try something new and if it takes more than a week or two, we give up and move on. Or when we are doing an assignment, we can be half way done but if we don’t like it we redo all of it. That’s what you would call being a perfectionist, someone who wants everything perfect.
We keep going until we get our perfection because we want to be seen and praised. There was this one time where my two brothers joined boxing, at the same time. When about two weeks passed by, the oldest said he wanted to drop out. Many of my family, even myself, said he was just lazy since the youngest had no issue doing boxing. Until a few days passed by and they were telling the youngest how good he is in boxing in such a short amount of time. During that time the oldest left to his room without saying a word. That’s when it occurred to me that he left boxing because he would hear all the time how much everyone would praise the youngest, while no one told him anything. This would happen again more often, with the way they clean. The youngest would finish cleaning fast while the oldest would take longer, and the same thing again. Youngest would get praised and the oldest would leave and cause a fit.
This was a pattern I would see often, so it made me think, did he want to be so called “perfect” at something as fast as the youngest or did he just want to be praised. Before any of you say anything this isn’t only with kids. If you think it is childish then we are all childish, we have all been through that. The only difference is that it gets worse in so many different ways. Let’s think about school, we all know those kids who push themselves to do so many things even when it’s too much. They want to have good grades, so they stay up all night until all their work is done. Which leads to them being sleep deprived, then they take extra classes. Which leads to them having almost no time to go out or do anything after school. Their end goal is perfection, to be seen as a perfect child who can do it all. They don’t do it all just because they want to, most do it because of their parents. They want the praise from their parents, they want to know they made them proud.
The views of other people take a huge part in why people crave perfection. The sad reality is that other people’s opinions take a huge part in people’s thought process. A popular one seen these days is body image. There has been a huge improvement with body positivity, a lot more people are more confident with their image. Then there are others, for example skinny people, they are told they have the dream or perfect body. The more people are told this the more unhealthy things they do. They do so many different things to keep up this image people see as perfect. Unaware that it can ruin their mentally health and their physical health in the long run. Of course there are those people who say something and we think to ourselves why are they even talking. Still there are more people’s opinions who we care about then the ones we don’t care for. No matter how many people want to deny that they don’t want perfection, that’s a lie. We all want to be told we are doing good, we all care about other people’s opinion, and we never want to let those people down. Failure will always be people’s biggest fear, because disappointing someone you care about is the worst feeling ever.