Upon first glance the topic is easy.

noun: perfection

1. the condition, state, or quality of being free or as free as possible from all flaws or defects.

Some of you may feel that describes you to a tee but therein lies your first flaw. Failed reasoning. But we always seek the perfect wine, the perfect word, the perfect lifestyle. And even if we think we get there we are always looking for more. Did you ever wonder why?

For time eternal we search for things. Neuroscientist Jaak Panks argues that of seven core instincts in the human brain (anger, fear, panic-grief, maternal care, pleasure/lust, play, and seeking), seeking is the most important. It is how we grow and it is healthy to a point.

We all have frontiers to conquer whether is is a more fulfilling job, getting in shape, or just pursuing a topic we know nothing about. Over the years I have watched good friends who slip into the routine of the day and don’t want to be bothered. Don’t get involved. Relax TTG ! They might be right but that feels sort of like giving up which to me  is the opposite of the pursuit of the unknown. Stop Ted, you are making me tired looking at you.

My old buddy Leonardo described it as curiositae.That beautiful genius looked at everything as something to be learned. He would look at fields and see how many different shades of green there were? How do fish swim and breathe? He would question people on the street. He kept dozens of notebooks on his observations and then read them through trying to connect the dots. 

His greatest strength was not considering himself smart but inquisitive. There is so much to learn. He asked tough questions.As we become more academic we tend to be more rigid which is sad. We rely on consultants and so called experts when all that gray matter that we have upstairs is the same as DaVinci’s. As Mark Twain said,”We are all perfect, just at different things.”

I think there is a distinction between striving for knowledge and just wanting more. In today’s world we tend to emphasize things more than thoughts. There is never enough. We want bigger houses, faster cars and airplanes, and more lavish accoutrements. We don’t stop to think of what we have but are always looking down the road. It is almost impossible to live in the present. We don’t find time to enjoy the simplest of things. Does that great scotch taste any better in a fancy restaurant than your back porch? Good question for us all. 

Part of this thinking lends itself to constant comparisons. Our world is full of it. Advertisements and media of all sorts blast us with visions of who we should be and what we should look like if we are successful. When we lived at Desert Mountain in Scottsdale, people would build what I called two party houses. They were gigantic and off the charts with this and that but after two parties people would wonder what the owners were going  do for an encore. 

I know it sounds corny but do we never just sit down and thank whatever God we employ for all we have. Not just saying grace every now and then but really looking at our world and being grateful. I don’t. I get off on this tear or  that until something hits me over the head. It is usually Kathy. 

This all has a dark side as it relates to mental health. Some equate perfectionism with acceptance. If I am not that good then I am not lovable. If I fail then I am worthless. Sadly this affects young people the most. It is estimated that 50% of those teens who have taken their own lives did so because they were not able to measure up. They felt they had let down family and friends. They felt there was no hope for them. 

How incredibly sad and what an indictment of our society. Pressure to get into the right school. Pressure to succeed in work and make not only a decent living but supersede all others in wealth and power. Pressure to be acceptable to our peers and conversant in the latest fads. Pressure to fit in every possible way. This is not a passing moment but being ingrained into our younger generations by a constant barrage on social media and an amped up culture. I don’t know how we stop it?

Perfect, TTG. You have now screwed up my day by your drivel. I apologize for that but I see too much of it. Here in Flalaland we have it good but it is not good enough for some. We went to the New York area and saw a frenetic pace twice to three times what is was just years ago. We can strive but we don’t have to be insatiable. We can dream but life is tough with all sorts of ruts in the road. When we create unreal expectations we are setting ourselves up for a hit.

The prefect answer is to be grateful for what we have. It sounds trite but if we just stopped the world and got off for a minute we would realize what a good thing we have. Thank all to you for reading and listening and of course thinking. It  is as close to perfect as I am going to get…and that is just fine for me.  

As always

Ted The Great

Factoids:

The average American home has tripled in size in the last 50 years and continues to grow larger and larger. The average American woman owns 4X the amount of clothes as her grandmother, but continues to purchase. The average American home has 300,000 items inside it… and yet Amazon arrives on our doorstep several times each week. Go figure

Perfect games in baseball, bowling and sub par golf are very rare for the vast majority of earthlings. Ditto 1600 on SAT’s. 

Both adaptive and maladaptive forms of perfectionism have been linked to depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, personality disorders and eating disorders.

Perfectionism and procrastination go hand in hand. You are so afraid of not being perfect you don’t do anything at all. Yikes

I don’t know about you but I am in a serious search for the truth. No, I am not doing my Socrates gig but really trying to figure out if there is anyone or thing out there that I can believe in? Whether it is  government, media, business or religion, you really have a hard time saying this or that is really true.

We make our decisions and form our ethos by looking at data sets and deriving conclusions. Your thinking follows a trend and your beliefs are either confirmed or disrupted by what you perceive to be reality. In today’s world our sources of data have become suspect. You can follow blindly or constantly challenge their veracity. I choose to do the latter. 

We have had a pandemic scorch our civilization. We are mesmerized by its evilness in every part of our lives. We look for a way to make sense of this or at least to understand what we are up against. We want and need answers. We are told to follow the science, but science disagrees.

People who have spent their lives studying epidemiology, find it impossible to speak in a unified voice. Even worse we have some with dubious credentials who are now touted as specialists. And on top of all of this is politics and optics. The so called leaders might know something for a fact but they cannot let it get out for fear of panic or image ruination. What’s a guy to think?

I would like to tell you this only holds true for this once in a lifetime event. For years we have discussed climate change.

Forget about whether it is man made or not, it is happening. We are hotter, colder, wetter, drier. I happen to believe the world before we started screwing with it, is system complex far beyond our comprehension. Ice melts in the Arctic, the saline flows up the west coast of Africa on underwater currents to the Sahara and then is blown across the Atlantic to nurture the rainforests of South America. This is not Sci fi but highly observable phenomena. Yet we don’t believe. 

Let’s forget about science and move onto the Disneyworld of the Capitol Beltway. We have a multi trillion dollar infrastructure bill that the pols tell us is revenue neutral. The non partisan Congressional Budget Office just pegged that declaration off by $350 billion over ten years. A mere rounding error, you say. We have not fully spent the remnants of the last giant COVID bill.  The current one is 2500 pages long. How can you begin to comprehend not only its utility in solving  problem but how do you administer such a giant? The devil is truly in the details.  

We had an attack on the nation’s capitol on January 6. It was beyond embarrassing for us as a great nation. Despite on the spot coverage there are those that think it was just tourists acting up or at least exercising their right to free speech. Interpret it any way you want but IT HAPPENED! 

I am embarrassed and saddened by my Catholic church. For an institution that has over the centuries sought to care for the sick and educate our public we have done a horrible job on sexual abuse of minors. That’s right, we have specifically preyed on the young and impressionable. We have ruined lives beyond repair. And yet we stonewall and pontificate. Don’t be smug. It is emblematic of other so called teams in gymnastics, football et al. If you can’t trust your priest, coach, governor or scout troop leader, who can you?

Wall Street is a game of numbers and numbers can’t be altered or can they? Stocks gyrate up and down by 20-50% largely based on rumor. Theranos was a new type of testing that would revolutionize medicine. Millions of dollars invested. Safeway and Walgreens were going to carry the tests. The board included former heads of the DOD, Wells Fargo, Bechtel and of course Mad Dog Mattis..  All taken in by what was probably a total fraud. 

Nikola is an electric truck startup that staged a video showing one of their rigs cruising down the highway. It turns out that they pushed a shell of a truck with no engine to the top of a hill and then filmed the ride down. Some pretty smart people got sucked in and millions down the drain. 

Everyday there are people stealing everything from pension funds to school budgets. There are con men on the prowl worldwide on the internet. The recent revelations of Facebook are just the tip of the iceberg. Are we at the core dishonest?

Money, greed and power will do strange things or are they just part of our way of life? I would hold out that we are shocked at first but then complacent or even complicit in our acceptance of,”It’s just the way it is”.

Trust is earned. I go out on a limb for anyone if I feel they are genuine and truthful. I am also greatly saddened and beyond crestfallen when I find out it not to be so. I am all too far from sainthood but I hope I am decent human being you can depend on. Maybe we are just numb to events and they are easy to ignore. It’s just people being people. Lower your standards, TTG, otherwise you are going to have a heart attack or an ulcer. Sorry, just not there yet.  

Who do you trust? It says on the fiver in my pocket, “In God We Trust” Maybe we ought to think about that? It may be all we have left. I hope not.

As always

Ted The Great

Factoids:

The FTC said there were 2.2 million fraud reports from consumers in the US in 2020. A large portion were online and from overseas. Many sought out the elderly as perfect targets. Sadly it works. 

Healthcare fraud is somewhere between $100-230 BILLION per year. This comes from HMO’s, doctors, pharmaceutical and individuals. The most common is billing for services not provided. 

A recent analysis indicates the average person tells two lies per day. On further study the lies were not evenly distributed. This pattern of a few individuals telling most of the lies follows what is known as the Pareto principle, which is also known as “the law of the vital few.” In short, this principle suggests that in a population, 20 percent of the people account for 80 percent of a behavior. There might be hope

Some Big Lies:

The Trojan Horse

Bernie Madoff

Hitler

Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinski

Watergate

Stolen Elections