Be Less Better

It's not easy being both a hard-working perfectionist and a lazy bum, yet both personas are my own thanks to the wonderful thing known as cognitive dissonance. To maintain this false-knot of cognitive dissonance as long as I have would not have been possible without its two most paradoxical tautological strands:

"Good enough is good enough"

"Better is better.

I would lean on the crutch that best rationalized whatever my impulsive, arbitrary self wanted to do at the time. "Clean your room, Philip!" Would be met with the removal of trash from trash bins and clothing from the floor. Good enough is good enough, I would tell myself.

"Philip. You already got a 2350 on the SAT. What's the point in taking it again?" Obviously the point was to get a better score; after all, better is better.

It must have been that false-knot's unwavering love of life that prevented me from engaging these apparent tautologies for what they were.

And it wasn't so much that these statements weren't logically sound. In a literal sense, they indubitably were, but my haphazard application of both these statements was inherently flawed in an identical way: The first instance of each respective adjectival phrase modifies a different entity from the second.

Is removing trash from bins and clothes from the floor good enough for me to call my room clean? Probably. Is it good enough for me to feel proud and at ease of my surroundings? Of course not. That ever-growing pile of magazines, cluttered closet, and unmade bed constitute a relentless, albeit slow, drain on my sanity.

Is it worth the effort to make my room cleaner? Cleaner is better and, after all, better is most definitively better. As with before, the first adjective asserts that a cleaner room is better than a less clean room. The second adjective asserts that a better room is better for my sanity. In this particular case, the logic happens to be true.

If we revisit my decision to retake the SAT all those years ago, that same logic was decidedly less sound. To get a better score would not necessarily result in a better chance of getting into my college of choice. And I spent a good dozen hours studying for that second chance that I could've spent tidying up my college essays, treasuring the last few months living with my wonderful baby brother, or getting into hard drugs and chasing hookers.

Seeing as I'm far too old to re-lay entirely new foundations for my cognitive dissonance, perhaps the best I can do is to bring my two favorite misleading paradoxical tautologies into harmony. How good must I be at rock climbing to feel good about myself? How much better do I need to be at rock climbing before the cost of additional improvement stops making me feel better about myself?

Borrowing from economics, one solution to the paradox is to assume diminishing returns and to define good enough as the point at which better stops being better.

Since most returns in life are, indeed, diminishing, I think this is a satisfactory conclusion for a random midnight musing. Both my vision of myself as the faultless ubermensch and my desire to justify my laziness are on their last legs, and so too is this corner of my cognitive dissonance.

Perhaps not only am I not good enough today but that the better me of the future should probably be less better than the me I envision.

I suspect this should be a very healthy notion for me to accept seeing as sometimes my ego needs deflating; more importantly, think of all the hookers who need chasing!