Perfection

On a cloudless November night in 1572, Tycho Brahe observed an unusually bright star in the northern sky that suddenly appeared in the constellation Cassiopeia. It had been assumed since antiquity that anything beyond the moon's orbit was eternally immutable. That star, SN 1572, is now classified as a supernova that is 7,500 light-years from Earth.

By 1592, Tycho Brahe had cataloged 777 stars. His mapping of those fixed stars blazed a trail for his protege, Johannes Kepler, to discover the laws that govern planetary motion. Several centuries later, it was a telescope named in Kepler's honor—the Kepler space telescope—that would catalog 530,506 stars.

Tycho Brahe is widely regarded as the greatest observer of the skies who had ever lived, but even Brahe couldn't have imagined the existence of half a million stars. And that's the tip of the iceberg. Astronomers now estimate the existence of more than two trillion gal¬axies. Each of those two trillion galaxies has an average of one hundred billion stars. Do the math, and that adds up to two hundred sextillion stars in the observable universe.

The point? Creation is much larger than any of us can imagine! And the same goes for the Creator. Like Tycho Brahe, some of us are quite content with our catalog of 777 stars. We think that's all there is. We've settled for a god we can measure and manage. If that's you, your god is too small.

Possible Preaching Angle: Why did God tell Abram to count the stars? (Gen. 15:5). God was messing with his mind, in a good way. He was giving Abram a nightlight—a visual reminder of both his history and his destiny. The same God who hung the stars in the sky can give you descendants. Faith adds God to every equation. When you do that, five loaves plus two fish equals all-you-can-eat for five thousand people. And there is more left over than you started with.

In a recent article in The Guardian, Oliver Burkeman describes how to be liberated from people-pleasing:

“Great news! I found the cure for my anxiety!!” the author Sarah Gailey once announced on social media. “All I need is for everyone I know to tell me definitively that they aren’t mad at me, once every 15 seconds, forever.”

I know how she feels. For years, I possessed a remarkable superpower: I could turn almost any work opportunity that came my way into an unpleasant emotional drama, simply by agreeing to do it.

Once I’d accepted a deadline or signed a contract, there was now another person in the world who might be growing impatient that I hadn’t finished yet, or who might end up disappointed in what I produced. And the thought that they might be harboring any negativity towards me felt hugely oppressive. This same overinvestment in other people’s emotions meant I was always saying yes to things I should really have declined, because I flinched internally at the thought of the other person feeling crestfallen.

It bears emphasizing that the people you’re worried might be angry with you, disappointed in you, or bored by you almost never actually are. The liberating truth is that they’ve got their own troubles to worry about…. As the novelist Leila Sales observes, poking fun at this tendency in herself: “It’s weird how when I don’t respond to someone’s email, it’s because I’m busy, but when other people don’t respond to my emails, it’s because they hate me.”

The liberating truth about life as a finite human is that…you’re never going to please everyone, or do everything, or accomplish anything perfectly. So, what would you like to do with your life instead?

Married people average 30 percentage points more happy than unmarried Americans. So, there’s a lot at stake when one swipes left or right. In an article for The Free Press, Rob Henderson lays out a gaggle of unexpected statistics on the self-selective narrowing of the dating pool that cumulatively suggest something bleak. As dating has become hyper-optimized toward one’s desires, it’s had the effect of making relationships harder. His solution? Stop swiping and settle down:

Previous generations didn’t have many options, so they stuck together through hard times and made it work. Now, abundance (or its illusion on dating apps) has led people to feel less satisfied. People are now more anxious about making a choice and less certain that the one they made was correct.

One classic study found that consumers were more likely to buy a jam when they were presented with six flavors compared to 30. And among those who did make a purchase, the people presented with fewer flavors were more satisfied with their choice.

These two factors — demanding more of your partner and understanding that abundance is not always favorable or desirable — should be a lesson that will guide us toward healthier and more fulfilling relationships. Shutting off the dating apps and reducing our choices will actually give us a greater appetite for love.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Of course, this advice makes a whole lot more sense if one understands love to be self-giving for the benefit of another, as opposed to something like self-fulfillment.

Freya India writes in an article titled “We Can't Compete With AI Girlfriends”:

Apparently, ads for AI girlfriends have been all over TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook lately. Replika, an AI chatbot originally offering mental health help and emotional support, now runs ads for spicy selfies and hot role play. Eva AI invites users to create their dream companion, while Dream Girlfriend promises a girl that exceeds your wildest desires. The app Intimate even offers hyper-realistic voice calls with your virtual partner.

This might seem niche and weird but it’s a fast-growing market. All kinds of startups are releasing romantic chatbots capable of having explicit conversations and sending sexual photos. Meanwhile, Replika alone has already been downloaded more than 20 million times. And even just one Snapchat influencer, Caryn Marjorie, makes $100,000 a week by charging users $1 a minute to chat with the AI version of herself.

Freya India notes that this technology creates “unrealistic beauty standards,” but even worse is the unrealistic emotional standards set by these apps. She continues:

Eva AI, for example, not only lets you choose the perfect face and body but customize the perfect personality, offering options like “hot, funny, bold,” “shy, modest, considerate” and “smart, strict, rational.” Create a girlfriend who is judgement-free! Who lets you hang out with your buddies without drama! Who laughs at all your jokes! “Control it all the way you want to,” promises Eva AI. Design a girl who is “always on your side,” says Replika.

A recent Aperture video on YouTube effectively portrays the harms and dangers of today's dating apps, especially Tinder:

Maybe the most disastrous thing about dating apps is that we're ultimately commodifying love and that can change the way we view and experience it. When we're attracted to someone, our brain releases the chemical dopamine as a reward response. Online dating apps train us to constantly seek this dopamine hit from attraction or lust. Then when we're with someone we're no longer getting that attraction. We know it can easily be found on an app in our pocket. All we have to do is ghost, deceive or abruptly break up with someone in order to get it again.

Even just looking at an attractive person on your app will give you a hit of dopamine, making loyalty to a lover much less appealing. You get hooked into a reward cycle. It becomes addictive. Just as you get a blip of joy from a like on social media, you get a hit of dopamine from a match on Tinder. It keeps you coming back even if you have found someone worth keeping.

Most of us have been with someone we loved and still questioned whether there was someone better out there. Apps like Tinder exploit this feeling. They overwhelm you with choices, making you feel like you're never making the right one. And so you move on. Back to the phone. Back to the dopamine hits so readily available. As you go on dates and start relationships the app is always dangling that shinier object or human being right in front of you.

Because it's so fast and easy to get a new shot of dopamine by simply opening the app on our phones, we don't give ourselves enough time to get to know a person. The problem with this is that we aren't spending enough time in relationships for our brains to produce oxytocin over those warm cuddly feelings which are more common in long-term relationships. If you've ever been in a long-term loving relationship, you notice how at peace you feel. How when you're with this person everything feels all right with the world. Dating apps are weaning us off this feeling. Dating apps are more dangerous than you think.

You can watch the video here (timestamp: 6 min. 04 sec. to 8 min. 04 sec.).

In his recent book, Paul Tripp describes a trip to the see world’s tallest skyscraper:

Wherever you go in Dubai, you are confronted with the Burj Khalifa the world's tallest building. Impressive skyscrapers are all around Dubai, but the Burj Khalifa looms over them all with majestic glory. At 2,716 feet (just over half a mile) it dwarfs buildings that would otherwise leave you in mouth-gaping awe. As you move around Dubai, you see all of these buildings and you say to yourself again and again, "How in the world did they build that?" But the Burj Khalifa is on an entirely other scale.

Even from far away, it was hard to crank my head back far enough to see all the way to the top. The closer I got, the more imposing and amazing this structure became. As I walked, there was no thought of the other buildings in Dubai that had previously impressed me. As amazing as those build­ings were, they were simply not comparable in stunning architectural grandeur and perfection to this one.

When I finally got to the base of the Burj Khalifa, I felt incredibly small, like an ant at the base of a light pole. I entered a futuristic looking elevator and, in what seemed like seconds, was on the 125th floor. This was not the top of the building, because that was closed to visitors. As I stepped to the windows to get a feel for how high I was and to scan the city of Dubai, I immediately commented on how small the rest of the buildings looked. Those "small" buildings were skyscrapers that, in any other city, would have been the buildings that you wanted to visit. They looked small, unimpressive, and not worthy of attention, let alone awe. I had experienced the greatest, which put what had impressed me before into proper perspective.

By means of God's revelation of himself in Scripture, we see that there is no perfection like God's perfection. There is no holiness as holy as God's holiness. If you allow yourself to gaze upon his holiness, you will feel incredibly small and sinful. It is a good thing spiritually to have the assessments of your own grandeur decimated by divine glory.

Twent-eight-year-old Abby has been on dating apps for eight years, bouncing between OkCupid, Bumble, Tinder, eHarmony, Match, WooPlus, Coffee Meets Bagel, and Hinge. A committed user, she can easily spend two or more hours a day piling up matches, messaging back and forth, and planning dates with men who seem promising.

But really, she is just over it all: The swiping, the monotonous getting-to-know-you conversations, and the self-doubt that creeps in when one of her matches fizzles. Not a single long-term relationship has blossomed from her efforts.

Other aspects of the experience weigh on her as well. Abby said she has regularly felt pressured to have sex with others. She is not alone: A 2020 Pew Research Center survey found that 37 percent of online daters said someone continued to contact them after they said they weren’t interested, and 35 percent had received unwanted sexually explicit texts or images.

Yet despite all of it — the time, the tedium, and the safety concerns — Abby feels compelled to keep scrolling, driven by a mix of optimism and the fear that if she logs off, she’ll miss her shot at meeting someone amazing.

“I just feel burned out,” said Abby. “It really is almost like this part-time job.”

In his article, "The Deeper Roots of Youth Anxiety," College Professor Joseph E. Davis tells the story about one of a growing number of students who are struggling with deep anxiety.

Meghan, a 19-year-old scholarship student at a first-rate university, is frustrated and despairing of herself. She explains that she is attending her “safety school” and wants to “show that I should be somewhere better by acing all my classes and being president of 40 organizations.” But, she adds, “that is really not happening. I am, if anything, a mediocre student … and that just makes me so angry at the world and then me for not being the best person.” Although she wants “to impress someone,” she says, “I end up being impressively unimpressive,” and that “crushes me.”

New York Times columnist David Brooks describes the rise of what he calls “Uber-moms”:

“Über-moms” are highly successful career women who have taken time off to make sure all their kids get into Harvard. And you can usually tell the Über-moms because they actually weigh less than their own children … During pregnancy, they’re taking so many soy-based nutritional formulas that the babies plop out—these gigantic, 14-pound toothless defensive lineman, just boom.

Über-moms cutting the umbilical cord, flashing little Mandarin flash cards at the things, getting ready for Harvard. They have their spiritual yearnings which they express mostly through food. So, they go through … progressive grocery stores that all the cashiers look like they are on loan from Amnesty International. And my favorite section is the snack food section because they couldn’t have pretzels and potato chips … that would not be spiritual. So, they have these seaweed-based snacks. We had bought veggie booty with kale, which is for kids who come home and say, “Mom, Mom I want a snack that will help prevent colorectal cancer.”

The brilliant American writer David Foster Wallace committed suicide on September 12th, 2008. He was only 46-years-old. For many months prior to his death, Wallace had been in a deep depression. About ten years after Wallace’s death, Dr. David Kessler M.D. wrote an article in Psychology Today reflecting on what may have caused Wallace’s tragic end:

Wallace’s 2008 suicide at the age of 46 devastated the literary community. He was, at that time, acclaimed as the boldest, most innovative writer of his generation ... Despite Wallace’s frustration with his inability to complete the book [The Pale King], in some ways his life had never been better. He had married four years earlier and was comfortably settled in California, with a teaching job he loved. Why then did he take his own life?

Wallace’s life offers an example of what can happen when … striving perfectionism, which evolves into relentless self-criticism and becomes coupled with an uncanny ability to analyze the flaws in one’s own analysis … Wallace was caught up by this very loop, which resulted in a despair that ultimately he could not conceive of ever escaping. Yet, swimming upstream through his own torrent of disapproval, Wallace always hoped for more: more achievement, more recognition, more love.

Perfectionism can affect people of all ages and lifestyles, but it is increasingly prevalent among students. Research involving 40,000 students at universities in the UK, the US, and Canada found a 33 percent increase since 1989 in those who feel they must display perfection to secure approval. The report's lead author, Thomas Curran of the University of Bath, fears a "hidden epidemic of perfectionism."

Perfectionism is a personality trait rather than a mental health condition. There is no World Health Organization diagnosis code for perfectionism and it is not listed in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It can fly under the radar and masquerade as the pursuit of high standards, yet it overlaps with a plethora of disorders from eating to obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, body dysmorphia, depression and suicide. As one struggling perfectionist said, "My brain feels like it's been punched."

An article in USA Today reports that the American Psychological Association has published new research exploring the rise of perfectionism in young people. Compared to prior generations, today's college students are harder on themselves, more demanding of others, and report higher levels of social pressure to be perfect.

The study examined over 40,000 college students who took a special survey between 1989 and 2016. The more recent students scored higher in all three forms of perfectionism. Between 1989 and 2016, the scores for socially prescribed perfectionism—or perceiving the excessive expectations of others—increased by 33 percent. Other-oriented expectations—putting unrealistic expectations on others—went up 16 percent, and self-oriented perfectionism—our irrational desire to be perfect—increased 10 percent.

One of the lead researchers concluded, "Today's young people are competing with each other in order to meet societal pressures to succeed and they feel that perfectionism is necessary in order to feel safe, socially connected and of worth." Unfortunately, perfectionism can lead to anxiety, clinical depression, anorexia, and other health issues.

Anxiety has overtaken depression as the most common reason college students seek counseling services. In its annual survey of students, the American College Health Association found a significant increase—to 62 percent in 2016 from 50 percent in 2011—of undergraduates reporting "overwhelming anxiety" in the previous year. Surveys that look at symptoms related to anxiety are also telling. In 1985, the Higher Education Research Institute at U.C.L.A. began asking incoming college freshmen if they "felt overwhelmed by all I had to do" during the previous year. In 1985, 18 percent said they did. By 2010, that number had increased to 29 percent. By 2023, it surged to 44 percent.

For many of these young people, the biggest single stressor is that they "never get to the point where they can say, 'I've done enough, and now I can stop,'" [one expert] says. "There's always one more activity, one more A.P. class, one more thing to do in order to get into a top college. Kids have a sense that they're not measuring up. The pressure is relentless and getting worse."

Editor’s Note: You can view the 2024 stats here

In his book, This Is Our Time Trevin Wax relates the following story:

In his provocative book Modern Romance, the actor and comedian Aziz Ansari describes watching his friend Derek search for a date on OKCupid, an app designed to help people find that perfect date: Derek got on OKCupid and let us watch as he went through his options. These were women whom OKCupid had selected as potential matches for him based on his profile and the site's algorithm. The first woman he clicked on was beautiful with a witty profile page, a good job, and lots of shared interests, including a love of sports. After looking the page over for a minute or so, Derek said, "Well, she looks okay. I'm just gonna keep looking for a while." I asked what was wrong and he replied, "She likes the Red Sox." I was completely shocked. I couldn't believe how quickly he had moved on. Imagine the Derek of twenty years ago finding out that this beautiful, charming woman was a real possibility for a date. The Derek of 1993 wouldn't have walked up and said, "Oh, wait, you like the Red Sox?! But Derek of 2013 simply clicked an X on a web-browser tab and deleted her without thinking twice.

Christian authors Tim and Kathy Keller point out what's wrong with this unsatisfying search for the perfect soul mate. "We are looking for someone who accepts us as we are and fulfills our desires," they write, "and this creates an unrealistic set of expectations that frustrates both the searchers and the searched for … [The Bible's view of marriage involves] two flawed people coming together to create a space of stability, love, and consolation. … But a marriage based not on self-denial but on self-fulfillment will require a low—or no—maintenance partner who meets your needs while making almost no claims on you. Simply put—today people are asking far too much in the marriage partner."

In an interview with Esquire Magazine, former Beatles star Paul McCartney, now aged 82 (his birthday is June 1942), was asked if he felt that he still had something to prove. McCartney responded:

Yeah, all the time. And it is a silly feeling. And I do actually sometimes talk to myself and say, "Wait a minute: look at this little mountain of achievements. There's an awful lot of them. Isn't that enough?" But maybe I could do it a bit better. Maybe I could write something that's just more relevant or new. And that always drags you forward. I mean, I never felt like, "Oh, I did good." Nobody does. Even at the height of the Beatles. I prefer to think there's something I'm not doing quite right, so I'm constantly working on it. I always was, we always were. I mean, look at John [Lennon], a mass of paranoia and worries about whether he's doing it right. You only have to listen to his lyrics. I think that's just artists in general.

Sarah Salviander is research scientist in the field of astrophysics. A lifelong atheist, Sarah became a theist as an undergraduate physics student, when she came to believe that the universe was too elegantly organized to be an accident. She is currently a researcher at the Astronomy Department at the University of Texas at Austin, and a part-time assistant professor in the Physics Department at Southwestern University.

Her parents were socialists and political activists who were also atheists, though they preferred to be called agnostics. In her testimony Sarah wrote:

It's amazing that for the first 25 years of my life, I met only three people who identified as Christian. My view of Christianity was negative from an early age. Looking back, I realized a lot of this was the unconscious absorption of the general hostility toward Christianity that is common in places like Canada and Europe.

So she began to focus on her physics and math studies. She joined campus clubs, started to make friends, and, for the first time in her life, met Christians.

They weren't like [atheists and agnostics I knew]—they were joyous and content. And, they were smart, too. I was astonished to find that my physics professors, whom I admired, were Christian. Their personal example began to have an influence on me, and I found myself growing less hostile to Christianity.

Sarah then joined a group in the Centre for Astrophysics and Space Sciences (CASS) that was researching evidence for the big bang, and that was a turning point in her conversion. She continued: "I started to sense an underlying order to the universe. Without knowing it, I was awakening to what Psalm 19 tells us so clearly: the heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands."

In his film, A Hologram for the King, Tom Hanks plays a middle-aged American businessman who is sent to Saudi Arabia, where the king is planning to build a new city in the middle of the desert. Hanks' character, Adam Clay, must persuade the Saudis to let the company he works for provide IT technology and support for this new city.

In an interview after the film debuted, Hanks told Terry Gross, host of NPR's "Fresh Air," that he felt particularly connected with his character's sense of self-doubt and dislocation. Hanks said, "No matter what we've done, there comes a point where you think, 'How did I get here? When are they going to discover that I am, in fact, a fraud and take everything away from me?'

Despite having won two Academy Awards and appearing in more than 70 films and TV shows, Hanks says he still finds himself doubting his own abilities. "It's a high-wire act that we all walk," he told Terry Gross,

There are days when I know that 3 o'clock tomorrow afternoon I am going to have to deliver some degree of emotional goods, and if I can't do it, that means I'm going to have to fake it. If I fake it, that means they might catch me at faking it, and if they catch me at faking it, well, then it's just doomsday.

In an interview in The New York Times, award-winning actor Ben Affleck reflected on the pressure to hide our broken areas. When he watches other movies that strain to make their heroes entirely likable and valiant, Mr. Affleck said: "I find that boring. Instead, I think it's interesting how we manage the best version of ourselves, despite our flaws and our weaknesses and our tendencies to do the wrong thing."

The article noted, "[Affleck] has also realized that for all of his Hollywood success, some part of him will always feel like a relentless striver who must prove, through his work, that he has a right to be there." Affleck put it this way:

That [relentless striving] never goes away. All these habits that we develop, that help us at some point, they have flip sides. In this case, it's hard to turn that feeling off … The urge of making it good and trying to make sure that it works, that you've done the most interesting version that you can—it's like a neurosis that drives me to work every day.

We all have failures in our careers. But usually we keep quiet about it. Not this Princeton professor, who recently shared his CV of failures on Twitter for the world to see. It includes sections titled "Degree programs I did not get into," "Research funding I did not get" and "Paper rejections from academic journals."

Why did he do it? "Most of what I try fails, but these failures are often invisible, while the successes are visible. I have noticed that this sometimes gives others the impression that most things work out for me," Princeton assistant professor of psychology and public affairs Johannes Haushofer wrote on the CV.

Projecting only success and never recognizing failure has damaging effects, Haushofer wrote. So he decided to do something about it. "[People] are more likely to attribute their own failures to themselves, rather than the fact that the world is stochastic, applications are crapshoots, and selection committees and referees have bad days. This CV of Failures is an attempt to balance the record and provide some perspective," he said. But here's what Haushofer called his "meta-failure": "This darn CV of Failures," he wrote, "has received way more attention than my entire body of academic work."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Though we often fail, we can rise up again because of God's forgiveness; (2) God will lift up all those who humble themselves, but the proud he rejects