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The Perfect Life Fallacy
The following essay first appeared as an article in Alvaro de Vicente’s Substack publication, Men in the Making. For more articles like this one, you can visit his page here. Subscribe to the publication to stay up-to-date on Alvaro’s writing.
This essay is part of a series entitled “Life Prep.”
‘I’ll tell you what is convenient,’ he said after a moment. ‘To sleep until noon and have someone bring you your breakfast on a tray. To cancel an appointment at the very last minute. To keep a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment’s notice it can whisk you away to another. To sidestep marriage in your youth and put off having children altogether. These are the greatest of conveniences, Anushka—and at one time, I had them all. But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most.’
—Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow
In my last article, I wrote about the importance of helping your son develop a life plan. That life plan, I explained, ought to answer three fundamental questions:
- What is the purpose of my life?
- How will I attain my purpose?
- What do I hope to leave behind?
Raising these questions—and helping your son begin to answer them—is a good start toward charting a course for his life. Doing so will encourage him to live with greater intentionality. Rather than meandering through life, he will actually be able to journey through it.
In this article, I want to consider a common pitfall that can arise as your son begins to live more intentionally: what I call the perfect life fallacy.
The Problem with Seeking the Perfect Life
We are at a cultural point where we believe we can control everything in our lives. This is likely not the first time in history we’ve found ourselves here, but I think it’s more pronounced now. Given technological advancements, we tend to believe we can control every aspect of our lives—or, at least, that we will eventually be able to. The idea that nature is to be controlled, subdued, mastered—beaten into submission, even, to borrow Francis Bacon’s language—has worked its way into how many of us see the world, though we would likely never put it in terms so blunt as Bacon did.
What’s more, given certain philosophical shifts, we’ve come to believe that this kind of control is a right we have by nature. We think that when something undesirable happens to us—something that we did not, nor would choose—we are a victim, wronged either by someone else, by circumstance, or even by a god we don’t know. On a cosmic level, we are like spoiled children.
Given this cultural milieu, the temptation for someone seeking to live with greater intentionality is to believe he can somehow craft the perfect life—to hold up as an ideal a life in which he controls every aspect, or at least the ones that count for something. The inner monologue sounds something like this: My life is under my control. I control my day. I have my schedule, my plans, my idea of what ought to happen.
Truth be told, we can govern many aspects of our lives. As parents, you ought to help your son develop a sense of agency over his choices. He should be thoughtful and intentional about his day. He should have dreams and aspirations, and plans for attaining them.
The problem arises when this pursuit of control is taken to excess—virtue, as Aristotle tells us, lies in the mean. This sense of control inevitably leads to disappointment, because, in fact, we control very little of our lives. For sure, we can control our mindset, our approach, our actions and reactions. But we do not control outcomes, nor the thousands of circumstances that make up our lives and shape the choices available to us. If our implicit, primary goal is control, we will be grasping for an unrealizable ideal—and will be forever frustrated trying to fit such a round peg into a square whole.
More importantly, seeking a “perfect life” quickly devolves into selfishness. We have all met someone who was unwilling to help another because doing so would mess with his plans, his idea for how his day or week was planned to go. His life plan will turn selfish too, if he bases decisions on what he thinks his perfect life ought to be—rather than on what will help others, or society, or God.
The perfect life fallacy flows from two false views of this life.
First, it typically goes along with a view—often unspoken and unacknowledged—that this life is an independent unit. This can even creep into the mindset of a believing Christian. We forget that this life is but a passing journey, a step on the way to eternity. Instead of trying to live in a way that prepares us for heaven, we try to make heaven on earth.
Second, it goes along with the idea that our life is our own. How often we think of ourselves as the masters of our lives, owners with full power of determination. We forget that even our lives are gifts from another. We did not make ourselves; we are stewards of a gift.
Beyond these two errors, the search for a perfect life often masks pride. We take ourselves too seriously, secretly believing we could make straight As on the report card of life. Of course, saying the thought out loud is enough to reveal its absurdity. Nevertheless, it is quite normal to find such a notion lurking in the background of our thoughts and feelings.
A Good Life
The perfect life fallacy is easy to fall into precisely because it is close to the truth. We want to live intentionally and meaningfully—though those terms are overused today. We want to live well and achieve our goals, especially when they’re good and noble ones.
What we should aim for, however, is not the perfect life but a good life—full of mistakes, challenges, setbacks, joys, moments of peace, contradictions, beginning again (and then beginning again once more), and all the rest.
How can you help your son aim for living a good life without falling into the perfect life fallacy?
The first step is to realize that life on earth is inseparably linked to life after death. In fact, we cannot really understand this life without reference to the next one; the proportions are wrong. C. S. Lewis put it well in Letter 28 of The Screwtape Letters: “It is obvious that to Him human birth is important chiefly as the qualification for human death, and death solely as the gate to that other kind of life.” Life on earth is a stage, a phase toward eternal life—an infinitesimally small part of an existence that will persist for eternity.
Any life plan, therefore, has to keep eternal life in view if it’s to be well conceived. Sacrifices, goods, sufferings, joys—all should appear in light of eternity. As St. Josemaría put it, “There is a remedy for those anxieties of yours. Be patient, have rectitude of intention, and look at things from a supernatural perspective.”
The second step is to remind yourself often: my life is not my own. It has been given to me.
Every gift ought to be handled according to the intention of the giver; it would be rude to do otherwise. In the case of a living gift, it also ought to be cared for according to that creature’s needs. A gift of a dog differs from a gift of furniture: the furniture I should use according to the giver’s wishes; the dog, according to those wishes and the dog’s own well-being. I should use my life, then, according to the wishes of its donor, God, and in accordance with human nature—which is itself also a gift from God.
The ultimate question, then, is this: What does the giver of my life have in mind, and how do I live according to his wishes? I won’t answer those questions here—each reader has to work them out for himself. But answer them he must, if he hopes to avoid the perfect life fallacy. Once he has answered them, he’ll be able to live intentionally; and if the intention behind his life is good and true to his nature, he’ll find satisfaction and meaning in pursuing it.
Your Dreams Will Fall Short
There is no perfect life in the sense of a finished one—life is a process until the moment of death—nor in the sense of a faultless one; even the best lives are marked by occasional mistakes. To live well is not to live perfectly, but to live with the understanding that life is a process. The point is not to be errorless but to persevere.
As you help your son develop a life plan, encourage him to dream. But remind him, too, that his dreams will fall short of reality. Life will be better than he could have planned it—because he is not the protagonist of his own story. God is.
Next in the Series
Read the entire “Life Prep” series. Articles will continue to be added to this collection as the series continues.
About the Author
Alvaro de Vicente
Headmaster of The Heights School, and an advisor to hundreds of school leaders, both of start-up schools and established schools seeking to revamp their offerings, especially for boys.