Episode 465 - The Spell of Perfectionism

Living Myth

Michael Meade

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 10 December 2025

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode brings a focus to the problem of perfectionism and how it can silence our natural spontaneity, turn our innate passions into stone and cancel the imagination and creativity that are natural to our souls. Perfectionism can be paradoxical in the sense that it can foster an egotistical sense that we are better than others or plunge us into feelings of inferiority and inadequacy.

Michael Meade uses an old tale to show how the quest for perfection is a hopeless endeavor that operates as a kind of spell that continuously leads us away from our deeper sense of self and soul and prevents us from finding a genuine sense of self-worth. Rather than trying to be perfect, the true aim of life is to become a whole person. Becoming whole involves making mistakes and having faults, but also finding forgiveness and healing.

No one is perfect, yet each soul is unique, having true self-worth within and a genuine aim in life that waits to be discovered. In the end, it is not perfection, but the uniqueness of the individual soul that makes each person meaningful, purposeful and innately valuable.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Living Myth podcast with Michael Mead, where this shifting, changing world is looked at from a mythic perspective.
0:24.3	This episode brings a focus to the problem of perfectionism and how it can silence our natural spontaneity, turn our innate passions into stone,
0:31.9	and cancel the imagination and creativity that are natural to our souls.
0:43.9	Mead uses an old tale to show how the quest for perfection is a hopeless endeavor that operates as a kind of spell that continuously leads us away from our deeper sense of
0:49.8	self and soul and prevents us from finding a genuine sense of self-worth.
0:55.0	An old idea states that any event, inner or outer, can be opened up to reveal levels of feeling and meaning
1:22.8	and understanding that cannot be evident to the casual observer.
1:29.8	So what I want to speak about began in a modern grocery store
1:35.5	where I was looking for flowers to bring to a social occasion.
1:41.6	There were a few pre-arranged bouquets left, but they seemed a little worse for wear.
1:49.4	After some disappointment and confusion, I decided to select three bunches of unarranged flowers
1:57.2	that I hoped to be able to combine. When I got to the checkout counter, the young woman
2:04.0	kindly asked if I had found everything okay. I said, well, the bouquets that are left didn't seem so
2:12.4	fresh, and so I had to pick these unarranged flowers and hope that it works out.
2:19.3	And she offered something that I seem to hear a lot these days almost no matter what the circumstances are.
2:26.3	That is to say, perfect.
2:29.3	I thought but didn't say what's perfect about it.
2:37.8	I'm having to accept something less than perfect,
2:40.3	and I'm not sure how I'm feeling about it.
2:43.6	And it occurred to me that at a time,
2:48.1	when it can feel as if everything around us is falling apart,
2:55.7	people increasingly use the word perfect as if out of a growing sense of unconsciousness or else as a desperate way to hold on to the sense of something being perfect
	...

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