This is all there is

Fresh starts are just another form of perfectionism

I love Oliver Burkeman's writing. It always resonates with me and is very honest and down to Earth. It's very much like the Stoics. So it's not surprising that "There's no such thing as a fresh start" spoke to me as well, especially given recent events.

Part of what I hope for whenever I melt down a blog/social media account is some sort of fresh start. This time I'll do better. This time I'll "do it right", whatever that means. That never happens. In Burkeman's opinion it's all just part of being a perfectionist in the first place.

He says:

To put it another way: fresh-startism is a form of perfectionism, and as with all forms of perfectionism, the solution is to stop being such a perfectionist – to resign yourself to the fact that things probably won't unfold as flawlessly as you'd hoped.

In my experience they never do. There is no perfect anything, no matter how hard one might try to get it. That doesn't mean you won't find something that works for you, whatever that something is, but likely you stumbled on it by tweaking something, not a Big Bang restart that was perfect from the beginning.

That's the thing that is so frustrating about being a perfectionist: we've already failed, many times over. The problem is we somehow think that next time is going to be different and it never is. It makes sense of course, we only learn by failing. Don't try to convince a perfectionist of that though.

Burkeman goes on to say:

The reason this is so liberating, for anyone with even a hint of perfectionism, is that it means you get to give up on the exhausting struggle to take charge of your life, so as to steer it in a new direction. You get to abandon all hope of one day finding the perfect time management system – or perfect relationship, job, neighborhood, etcetera – and relax back into the inescapable chaos and muddle of the one you have.

And then – once you're facing your real situation, not fixating on a fantasy alternative – you suddenly find yourself able to start making a few concrete improvements, here and now, unburdened by any need for those improvements to usher in a golden age of perfection.

This is how I feel, as I mentioned in my weekly notes for this week, about my online presence. There is no "perfect". There won't be so stop acting like there is, stop annoying people by switching things, only to do it again (and again...and again...). Tweak. Take breaks. Do whatever is necessary other than blowing it all up. That doesn't work. There is no such thing as a fresh start. What I've got is all there is.