I had a plan, y’all.
Isn’t that always how it starts? I had a plan for my week. This past Tuesday was my birthday and I fit in as many things as I could manage. I packed myself a delicious lunch, walked to the office, worked hard all day, walked home, ate cake, met a friend for dinner, and then went to my love’s house for snuggles, chatting, and presents. I could have put my love off until Wednesday. He asked. But I wanted to write on Wednesday evening. And then again on Thursday, so that I’d have time to review multiple drafts, record audio, and not have to drag my laptop to work on Friday to do final edits on my lunch break.
This was a solid plan. A great plan. The perfect plan.
But then life happened. A friend reached out to me who I was supposed to meet with last week but he’d ghosted me. This was fine, honestly. I was happily on holiday break last week and didn’t really want to talk about one of my many side gigs— bookkeeping for my Quaker Meeting. But on my birthday he finally reached out to say that he’d gone radio silent last week because his mom died unexpectedly, which shifted his priorities significantly. And now he needed updated books by this weekend in order to present a report. Could I get everything updated by then?
Of course, I could. Had to, in fact. You don’t say no to a friend whose mom just died. So last night, when I had planned to be happily holed up writing, I was doing bank reconciliations.
The truth, though, is that I got done fairly early. I could have started writing as soon as I was done and gotten in a couple of solid hours of work. But the evening wasn’t playing out the way I had planned so I threw it all in the toilet and spent the rest of the evening scrolling through Facebook and binge-watching The Sex Lives of College Girls.
Here’s the ironic part, though. I had planned to write about the nirvana fallacy this week. Do you know what that is? It’s a theory, sometimes referred to as the perfect solution fallacy, first stated by economist Harold Demsetz. The idea is that people will reject an achievable or realistic answer to a problem because it’s not perfect. If it doesn’t completely erase the problem or resolve it on every level they reject it, believing they have to keep searching for the perfect answer because it must exist out there somewhere.
At best this means the original problem doesn’t get resolved. At worst additional problems are created. A personal example of the nirvana fallacy is someone who ends a relationship in which they are happy because they conclude the person they love isn’t their “perfect match”. Now they are unhappy and alone because no one is perfect.
A more public example is the conundrum of affordable housing. When there is a lack of affordable housing in a given community well-intentioned people will sometimes protest any large-scale development that provides market-rate housing, even if some low-income housing is included in the plan. Their argument is that no development should be happening except affordable housing. However, a related problem is that development is expensive so private developers want a return on investment. Affordable housing doesn’t offer any solution to that. A mixed-use building, though, can be a compromise and a partial solution to both problems, but the folks concerned about affordable housing will reject it because it’s only a partial solution to the problem they think is the top priority. There’s so much public outcry that the developers look for opportunities elsewhere, and now the community is back where it started, with no affordable housing.
That’s the nirvana fallacy at work.
The nirvana fallacy was also at work when I refused to write at all because I couldn’t write the perfect way I wanted to— quietly uninterrupted from the moment I walked in the door after work until the moment I turned the lights out. It’s also at work when someone brings treats to work and I have a little something. Then the day is shot, right? So, I might as well eat whatever the hell I want at dinner, and tack on dessert. Maybe also have a drink while I’m at it. Maybe even bum a cigarette. Don’t worry. I’ll be good tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll be perfect.
The nirvana fallacy, perfectionism, and binary thinking are all tied up with each other. Everything and everyone is either perfect or awful, good or bad. Imagine how these ways of categorizing the world might complicate an integrity practice. If you’re not always perfectly authentic, absolutely honest, and totally in alignment with your highest ideals in every way then you must be bad, wrong, and maybe even sinful. Why even bother at all?
Even if you keep trying to attain integrity perfectly, the fallacy causes your beliefs to function like a straightjacket. You wrap yourself up so tightly, berating yourself and everyone around you for every deviation from your ideals to such an extent that the concept of integrity becomes nothing but a burden and a cudgel.
I hope you do not do this sort of thing to yourself (or anyone else, for that matter), but if you do, you’re not alone. Even if you think you’re immune to this sort of fallacious thinking it’s worth asking, how often in a day do you do something and then discount it because it wasn’t perfect? How often do you hold ideals about how things should go or how people should be and then suffer because everything was wonky and everyone was imperfect?
Is nihilism the answer? Nothing matters because everything just sucks in the end. There’s no sense in being idealistic because you’ll inevitably be disappointed. Don’t even try because whatever you end up with won’t be as good as what you imagined.
I have to believe it’s possible to hold onto conviction and clarity while also embracing complexity and imperfection, but you have to reject illusions of nirvana, perfection, and unending transcendence. There’s no life there. How could there be without the balance of death, decay, and chaos?
“Balance”, another fallacious ideal that many of us fall prey to, is actually something you fall into and out of, moment by moment. Ask any dancer. Balance isn’t achieved by locking your muscles and holding everything rigid and unmoving. It’s a subtle series of micro-adjustments— a lean over here, a pull in there, inhale, exhale, and repeat. From enough distance, it appears the dancer is holding perfectly still, but get up close and you’ll see that they’re moving in and out of balance nearly constantly.
So are we. From a distance, we may appear to be in our integrity all the time, but get up close and things get more complicated, less perfect. We choose that thing which was great in some ways, but less great in others. We say something which feels absolutely true in the moment, but then later realize we avoided the big truth that would change everything. We help a friend but neglect ourselves. We perfectly catch one ball, meanwhile dropping another.
There’s no winning or nirvana. No perfect world in which all our choices, actions, and relationships are exactly in line with all our beliefs. No world in which everything is consciously intended, we are completely integrated, and there is no pain or darkness or suffering.
There is only a string of moments in which we try, and sometimes fail, and then try again— reach, reach farther, inhale, fall back, exhale, and repeat. Up close it feels like work, like imperfection, or failure, but from this vantage point? It looks like you’re floating above it all, aligned and balanced.
Both are true, and neither is true. But you are incontrovertibly true. The whole gorgeous, messy, imperfect, striving chaos of you, which is what really, truly matters.
I understand this conundrum of your last week well. It happens to me every week.
Ask any dancer about balance- yes. Decades ago, when I kept losing my balance and falling, my dance teacher told me to make the floor my partner. (It was modern dance, obviously). I’ve never forgotten that lesson. Make the floor your partner. Losing balance isn’t a failure, it’s an opportunity. The point is to keep moving ( even when the “movement “ is a pause) and to have fun. Even the things that trip us can be partners in the dance.
OMG, yes to all this! I deal with it so often in my personal life. Like if I eat sugar, which I'm trying not to do, the whole day is shot and I might as well binge on sugar the rest of the day. It's so hard to beat that, seems like a feature of being human.
In my work life (I do clean-energy communications), it manifests so often in ways like "Let's fight this community solar bill because it isn't perfect community solar, even though it will result in more solar than we had before." Some of the activists, people we need really badly and who play a crucial role, are such purists that they can prevent good things from getting done. The affordable housing issue is a great example, as we're dealing with that now in probably all of our cities.
We all need to remind ourselves that things usually aren't black and white, and "embrace complexity and imperfection."