How Ideal?
Imagine you are born in a perfect family, you have a complete childhood where you got almost everything you ever wanted. You look like the most flawless person that drug-soaked Leonardo Da Vinci could paint. You are given the best education, you score the best grades in college, you have the perfect job in the most perfect workplace (the USA according to the millenials) and you are now standing at New York Harbour possessing everything to make the Statue of Liberty put its book and torch aside, lie back, and spread its knees for you like Margot Robbie from The Wolf of Wall Street. Would you be able to call yourself the happiest person on the planet?
Maybe you'd say,
Fuck yeah, Govardhan. Who wouldn't want such a life? I would definitely call myself the happiest person on the planet if all that happened.
Well, let us consider the case of what most people call perfect.
We get a bunch of talented and model-shaped singers singing(ranting) unrelatable songs about their exes. We get movie stars who show the best of themselves on the largest of screens, where mostly, go incognito in public, hire a fashion designer to design their clothes for that tired-jetlagged-walking-out-of-the-airport-while-getting-annoyed-by-the-paparazzi-photograph.
If we could go in deeper, we could question how perfect our beliefs, opinions, culture or religion are. In fact, some of them are very relevant and life-changing eye-openers.
Also don't get me wrong, saying things like, "you look perfect" or "this place is perfect" are general terms that go a long way in terms of appreciation. But striving to look perfect, or to make something perfect is what dooms people into unhappiness.
So, what drives us to attain perfection?
Those advertisements containing botox covered faces validating some irrelevant commercial objects like a toothbrush or a soap, cures with anti-aging benefits, surgeries for receding hairlines, weight-loss (or gain) and how could I forget- fairness creams, the most shameless scam revolving around the biggest insecurity of most Indians. Even social media is loaded with a junk load of plastic faces with millions of balloon-heads double tapping and admiring them for living life at unimaginable standards. This drives peoples' desire for perfection, and this same desire morphs into a disguise for one's insecurities, which is a very dangerous thing to possess.
"We have two lives, and the second one begins when we realize we have only one."-Confucius
Ultimately, you don't have to measure most of the things that you encounter, even yourself. Most of the things in your life don't need approval - your weight, your appearance, the clothes you wear or even the choices you make. Instead, we could focus on authenticity, where there is plenty of room for imperfections, mistakes or all the things that are purely human because that's what we are, human.
- Govardhan
Maybe you'd say,
Fuck yeah, Govardhan. Who wouldn't want such a life? I would definitely call myself the happiest person on the planet if all that happened.
Well, let us consider the case of what most people call perfect.
We get a bunch of talented and model-shaped singers singing(ranting) unrelatable songs about their exes. We get movie stars who show the best of themselves on the largest of screens, where mostly, go incognito in public, hire a fashion designer to design their clothes for that tired-jetlagged-walking-out-of-the-airport-while-getting-annoyed-by-the-paparazzi-photograph.
If we could go in deeper, we could question how perfect our beliefs, opinions, culture or religion are. In fact, some of them are very relevant and life-changing eye-openers.
Also don't get me wrong, saying things like, "you look perfect" or "this place is perfect" are general terms that go a long way in terms of appreciation. But striving to look perfect, or to make something perfect is what dooms people into unhappiness.
So, what drives us to attain perfection?
Those advertisements containing botox covered faces validating some irrelevant commercial objects like a toothbrush or a soap, cures with anti-aging benefits, surgeries for receding hairlines, weight-loss (or gain) and how could I forget- fairness creams, the most shameless scam revolving around the biggest insecurity of most Indians. Even social media is loaded with a junk load of plastic faces with millions of balloon-heads double tapping and admiring them for living life at unimaginable standards. This drives peoples' desire for perfection, and this same desire morphs into a disguise for one's insecurities, which is a very dangerous thing to possess.
"We have two lives, and the second one begins when we realize we have only one."-Confucius
Ultimately, you don't have to measure most of the things that you encounter, even yourself. Most of the things in your life don't need approval - your weight, your appearance, the clothes you wear or even the choices you make. Instead, we could focus on authenticity, where there is plenty of room for imperfections, mistakes or all the things that are purely human because that's what we are, human.
- Govardhan
