How doing things “ideally and optimized” ruins presence and meaning

This is a post about perfectionism and anxiety.

Btw, did you ever realize “perfectionism” is just a synonym for fear of failure, but it has a better tone on it, because it keeps alive the illusion that something can be perfect?

Well, this is a story about all that jazz.

I have such a great work project weekend coming up – photographing and videographing a retreat in fantastic location.

It means so much to me that instead of feeling excited, I am anxious and worried if I manage to do it good enough.

I know I’ve done this many times before and so far always everyone has been very satisfied with my photographs. But for some reason, the impostor syndrome kicks in.

And it’s not just about this, it’s basically about anything that matters to me.

I will also have another business call with a French guy in two hours, and I’m dreading it.

I guess this is just typical introvert’s aversion for calls with random people.

But sometimes I think these feelings of uncomfort feel way too strong, when it really makes me worried and fills my heart space with anxiety, when in reality, nothing bad has happened, and likely won’t happen either.

I know this will ease when I am actually “on it”, like during the call or during the retreat photography trip.

It’s just always this anticipating and trying to control future (spoiler alert-not possible) that the crippling anxiety appears.

When I was younger, my motto was “go with the flow”.

So it meant, instead of anticipatory anxiety, I would just live for the plot, curious to see what this new situation in the future will bring for me.

One could say, living healthy, without trying to control something that is simply impossible to control.

But with age, you need to take more responsibility of hard-core adulting stuff, like debating a mortgage in foreign country, setting up a business in Spanish, or figuring what to do when a tire breaks in French town and you don’t speak any French.

You don’t have anymore any safe adult to call to and fix your issues.

Now you apparently are the adult although you don’t feel like it at all.

You are the same person as before, but instead of childlike curiosity, with the pressure to do things “well and correct”, you feel anxiety instead.

So basically, it would help to think this whole life is just a simulation, practice round, it’s not so serious.

And in a way it’s true. Life is just life, nothing so serious.

In the end, nobody will rate how you performed in all the situations life threw at you.

You just die.

I’m not saying this to be depressive or even nihilist (okay, maybe a little bit).

But to realize it’s always enough to do your best in the given, present moment, because you are never in any other moment.

That is the reason why sports is interesting to follow: you can never know how an athlete performs right in this given moment, because there are many things that affect this very moment, like mood, weather, warm up, injuries, jet lag, etc etc.

And this is what makes it interesting; to see what kind of plot the universe has pre-written to this character for today.

So the goal is to do your best in the given moment, while approaching it with curiosity and as a “blank page”, without ruining the moment with too much pressure and overthinking.

Letting go of the illusion that we control what happens to us, and accepting the fact that we only control our reaction to what happens.

We have gotten so theoretical in life that we think we can “prompt” our way into doing things perfectly in the future.

Of course being prepared is good and adds confidence, but once that is done, that is all you can really do.

For example, I will charge my DSLR camera, make sure there’s space in memory card and plan a shot list what I want to capture from the retreat.

But there’s no point overthinking beforehand how each moment will go, as it’s all just stress and overthinking.

In that way this era of AI and internet is the worst; it really gives us more and more the feeling, and expectation that now we have the tools to control this world.

Now we can get the hang of moments beforehand, and more importantly, we must perform ideally now. Now that we live “in the future” and everything is possible.

If you are anyhow like me, you have ended up asking AI solutions for your problems, and continuing the chat with “would you like me to next…” AI’s suggestions to “help” you further controlling and solving your issues.

Many times it helps at the beginning, but after 30 minutes you notice you just got lost into ideal theoretical world rabbit hole, where all is perfectly structured in the AI answers, yet still nothing is actually done.

It’s all just a hallucination between you and an AI tool.

Even if you are not into AI, this is the case in pretty much all the life that involves any thinking instead of only action.

At all office jobs, people theorize more and more, and book another meeting about a meeting. Office jargon, you know.

And why is that really?

Because it’s easier to psyche to live in an illusion that we can do things ideally in the future, instead of taking action when we still feel like we are “not ready”.

I hate writing this part because I love living in just theories, because that world is ideal.

But the fact is, doing something not-so-good, is more valuable than having million perfect ideas.

Once you have something, you can start improving it.

Just start, they say.

But it requires believing that you will not die, if you do something not so well.

It requires faith and trusting the process, where you are just the tool of performing certain task, instead of the all-mighty power who can control how every single person thinks it is an absolute masterpiece.

You don’t even need to accept that there will be people who will not like it, you need to only do your best and believe that is always good enough.

Because how on earth were you ever thinking of doing more than that?

Were you planning to clone a super-version of you and have that robot do all your tasks perfectly, instead of living the ugly, earthy, humane chance of flaws?

The truth is, even the most successful people simply do their best in the given moment and have faith.

There is no such thing as “faceless corporation”. There are just people with flaws, organized into bigger systems.

So even if you are doing something as scary as “B2B sales”, you are not selling to a huge institution, you are selling to a person who acts under a fancy title, but still suffers occasionally from humane things, like work-life balance, diarrhea, or queuing at the grocery store.

Productivity, AI, optimization, scaling up – those are the “new sexy”.

Doing things better, faster, stronger and of course without a hint of failure is the name of the game.

But also, be humane, relatable, interesting, capture attention and be unique.

All of this kind of quickly kills inspiration to create anything, right?

How to start when you need 30+ years experience before you even begin?

How dare you be just human?

I use now the example of content creation, as that seems still close to my heart (and in some form, my career).

This is the reason why I have left social media behind for a good while now (meaning, I don’t have any of the apps on phone, as I am done wasting my life browsing).

I still would love to create, but I feel like the ship of slow content has sailed from Meta platforms.

Maybe it’s my own pessimism, and I could just post the DSLR camera pictures as I used to, but I am sure anyone who has done content there for a few years, feels the change in the Instagram algorithm.

It’s all about hooks, entertainment, short attention span, and ideally, shock-effects.

And learning how things should be done in ideal world (hook in the first 0.1 seconds, interesting content to follow, clear CTA in the end) kind of ruins all inspirational content that you put together in a slow Sunday morning as a visual inspiration.

You know it won’t “perform”, so instead of doing it for your own joy, you decide to jump out from the whole crazy platform where you nowadays feel like an alien.

Well, this goes now too much on my personal struggle on figuring how to share my visual content with the world in meaningful way now that it’s all about flashing lights and fast-fast-faster content and more entertainment.

I’ll leave this to the attention economy post for later, but for now, my hope would be to find a way to do the content that matters to me anyway, even if it does not matter to anybody else.

I hope you do the same – find a way to show up for the things that matter to you, regardless of the outcome.

(Ugh, that was scary to use en dash (–) , as it's the signature of AI lol).

If nothing else, action is the only way of figuring what you like doing and what matters to you.

Another great way of knowing what matters to you in life is the anticipatory anxiety it causes you.

It feels uncomfortable, because it shows you care about it.

So try doing it anyway, do your best, and let go of the rest.

I know, this went back to theory where all is easy, but for now this is all I can think of as a solution.

Another solution is reading the Rhonda Byrne’s Book The secret (link to goodreads if you wanna read reviews like a real bookworm).

The book divides opinions for a reason, but it teaches us to not to give energy for the doubt and overthinking what could possibly go wrong.

Just do it and leave the thinking for AI.

If you liked reading this column, you might also like to read:

Stop Mistaking Convenience for Freedom: Having Nothing Is The Ultimate Act of Self-Care

Social Media is the Plato's Cave: What You Really Lose When You Scroll

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