TRANSMISSION 33

Perfection Is the Enemy of Progress

TRANSMISSION RECEIVED

“Indecision is the ultimate mind killer. Inaction is the ultimate time killer. Perfection is a one-way ticket to death.”

Yes, we strove toward perfection, but only with the conviction that perfection was an illusion we orchestrated. It was an impossible feat to wait for all the knowledge needed to fill out and weight our decision trees in order to make anything that could be construed as the absolute best decisions. And even before that, spending any longer than necessary to make a decision carried too high of an opportunity cost to be worth the waiting; the trick was knowing when it was the right time to take action and when it was the right time to gather more knowledge.

In many of our day-to-day actions, making an 80% good decision now so we could move on to tackle another challenge was often a lot more valuable than making a 99% good decision that took ten times as long to evaluate. However, on the larger scales, it more often paid off to spend time getting to the 99% good decisions. We thought of it all as a sliding scale where the amount of time we should invest into a decision was directly proportional to how much time it would take to pivot to a better decision should one arise. On the extreme end with things like our lives, if we made the wrong decisions, then we would have no opportunities to pivot. We pushed the quality of those decisions as high as was feasible, keeping our time focused on the decisions with the highest ratio of reward to time investment; naturally, the more time invested in a decision, the smaller that ratio would usually get. The value of a decision was ultimately measured in the opportunities it afforded us (whether in saved time or in access to more knowledge), as opportunities were the currency of our lives.

Our decisions from moment to moment affected our trajectories just as equally as the macro decisions we made to more consciously govern the trajectories of our lives. The ripples of our decisions impacted one another to concertedly manifest our dreamstate realities. The closer we found ourselves to others, the more effect we had on one another (lockstepped with gravity: inversely proportional to our separation). In that sense, we were very much the product of our closest interactions with all things (living and nonliving). We rode each other’s dreams as our decisions propagated waves out into the universe, our trajectories pointing in the weighted average direction of all our closest influences. With ourselves at the center of our individual existences, we were each held capable of being our biggest influencers.

The impetus of our actions often arose out of the momentum from our previous actions. Just as our physical bodies obeyed the laws of motion, our minds followed a similar trend of tending toward staying in motion once they were in motion and tending toward stagnation once they had stopped. Motivating ourselves to start was often the hardest part, which is why starting with anything at all was better than waiting for the perfect starting conditions; as soon as we got moving, we could quickly learn from our actions to pivot from idea to idea until we eventually found ourselves immersed in the deep personal truths we sought. As long as an action was one we could learn from (i.e. not something that would kill us), then we took it and learned from it until we found a better action to take. That said, it had never worked out well to be blindly busy with undirected endeavors; the constant rush of reality across our minds did not magically provide us with the self reflection we uncomfortably craved. No, to be kind to ourselves was to grow more mindful of our actions and reactions to deliberately practice the course toward who we wanted to be.

Way back to the biological human days, there were many people who let externalities steer them rather than recognize the influence their minds had over themselves to deliberately designate their desired destinies, let alone delve any deeper than the fantasization of such destinies. Those who did understand such things always did what we could to actualize our philosophies into the wild in attempt to aid anyone who simply needed a kickstart in their perception, just in case we could make an impact on even one person’s life (a selfish act, really, in that we wanted to garner more friends to weigh down our collective trajectories piercing into the unknown).

We also understood that we couldn’t make anyone change their mind; they had to want it for themselves; they had to already desire to undergo the journey. Sure, you could always force someone to walk a given path, but they would never get anything out of it if they weren’t invested in the learning process (that endless grasping toward a perfection which cannot be obtained). Further, forcing someone down a path strips them of the inspiration needed to pierce beyond the bubble of the known; they will only be a disgruntled follower, never a motivated trailblazer.

Our endless education on existence was in fact an experiment in self actualization, a self-directed inquisition balancing somewhere between the dejecting search for perfect unobserved-reality and the indomitable trudge forward through imperfectly-observed reality (though, reality was only ever perfect or imperfect in our mental assignment as such). Even in our times of outward stillness, we relentlessly and furiously engrossed our minds with equal parts serenity, reconnaissance, and introspection to ensure we did not fall prey to the trap of comfort: enticing us to hand over our precious time for the temptation that we could find perfection in the distant mirages and their sirens.

We practiced our crafts not with the intent of reaching illusory perfection, but so that we could begin to conceptualize them at higher levels of abstraction: cognitive chunking. The more we could see all the lower-level components as chunks and patterns, the better we could focus on the mid-level environment to enact our visions. The more we understood the mid-level components as chunks and patterns, the better we could focus on the high-level picture to enact our visions. That was the process of training our minds: deliberately constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing patterns to get to the point where we could dream of the entire symphony in our mind rather than only being able to conceive of each instrument individually. With our minds growing more attuned to reality at higher levels of abstraction, we could better outline and hunt down our goals in the directions of “perfection” through more instinctive understandings of the emergent actions available for interacting within reality.

And what happened to those who set out to altogether avoid the pursuit of unobtainable perfection? Well, with nothing to indefinitely strive toward, their isolated nihilism didn’t make it very far: persuading their futures into cautionary tales for the survivors. The universe swept them up and they put up no fight, convinced that allowing apathy to infect their fate could save them from the trauma of self doubt. To some extent, it did, but it also aroused deeper anguishes that many of us were keen to avoid. We cannot say what such seemingly indifferent beings metawanted, but they found the end they sought on some level, and we are none to judge (the act of projecting fears onto the perceived shortcomings of others). But at the same time, the alive entities remain the only ones left to be and do anything, so we are all that exists as judges (evaluators of reality).

We judged others not to understand them, but to understand ourselves, aiming to learn from others to better strive toward our own goals. But therein lies the danger of perfection: we cannot blindly take any external meaning as our own, for then we would not have learned its true contextual significance. And yet, we are bound to only glean meanings through our interactions with external stimuli provoking our neurons into action (even if only very rarely). In their pure illusory forms, the misdirected doctrines of shunning perfection’s motivatingness and omitting perfection’s unobtainableness are equally deadly deceptions that only yield our souls to more imminent death.

KINDA NEUTRAL

I’m kinda neutral.
I didn’t want to be this way,
but I’m okay
with the way things turned out to be.
I’m somewhat grayed out
where the colors used to be,
but I don’t mind
as long as there’s still a part of me.

I’m kinda neutral.
I hadn’t thought that far ahead.
I suppose it’s my fault
that I am a part of this.
I’m somewhat lacking
where the colors used to be,
but I don’t mind
as long as I don’t have to see.

Left all alone in the darkness,
I’m alright.
It’s not too bad down here,
but it’s not too bright.
I really don’t mind
being so far out,
and I won’t save myself
from harmless doubt.

I’m kinda neutral.
There isn’t much for me to say.
I didn’t think
that controversy would follow me.
I’m somewhat lost here.
Indecision haunts my life,
and I may never leave
to find out who is right.

END TRANSMISSION