I’ve been a wellness consumer most of my life. I sleep with an Oura ring on an Eight Sleep mattress. I run with a Garmin watch so I can track my distance, speed, and heart rate. I have apps to count calories, days spent fasting, and the incremental changes in weight and body composition as reported by the nearby smart scale. I listen to Tim Ferris, Andrew Huberman, and Peter Attia, intrigued by the idea of optimizing my health and happiness. Step into my office and you’ll see books about how to live longer, be happier, lose weight, eat healthier, build muscle, be more mindful, and have better relationships.
Wellness has found its way into most parts of my life, but for the past two years I’ve also been building Parable inside the wellness industry, and this has provided a new perspective about the motivations and assumptions that undergird the industry as a whole.
So what’s the problem with the desire to be better, faster, or stronger? It’s never ending. By default, it has no end apart from perfection, like a carrot dangling just out of reach, in front of a treadmill programmed to insidiously increase its speed in perpetuity.
I've been finding one of those assumptions increasingly difficult to reconcile. This particular belief is both ubiquitous and invisible: It’s everywhere, yet hiding in plain sight. It has become a dominant narrative, even while being so seemingly benign that I never thought to interrogate it.
Here goes:
In our culture, and particularly in wellness, there is an assumption that to be human is to progress – to always be improving, always optimizing. Better-faster-stronger is the goal. And the goal is inherently good, no questions asked.
Try to name one wellness product – a device, supplement, service, food, or drink – that doesn’t promise some version of enhancement, improvement, or optimization. When it comes to supplements (a category Parable necessarily participates in), it’s nearly impossible to find a product that doesn’t have one of the following words on its label: boost, optimize, enhance, or improve.
So what’s the problem with the desire to be better, faster, or stronger? It’s never ending. By default, it has no end apart from perfection, like a carrot dangling just out of reach, in front of a treadmill programmed to insidiously increase its speed in perpetuity. It’s an orientation toward a goal we know we can never attain, but feel compelled to pursue nevertheless, condemning ourselves to the shame, frustration, and defeat of never being __________ enough.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been a devotee of better-faster-stronger; I just didn’t know that was the goal that was driving me. I didn’t have a perspective or reason to challenge it until recently. Like many things in life, it seemed perfectly normal until I had the opportunity to look at it in a new light and see it differently for the first time.
Of late, however, I’m seeing it everywhere, and the drive to optimize feels more exhausting and impossible than it does exciting and rewarding. Maybe it’s just that I can’t keep up as well as before.
So this is where I find myself, newly aware of the insidious temptation to chase perfection – or those that appear perfect – but still not sure what to do with that awareness in my life. I don’t think it means I should sit on my hands. I don’t think it means I should no longer pursue goals or try to round out the rougher edges of my personality. What it comes down to for me is owning and being aware of my true motivations the best I can. It’s also a reminder to love and accept myself in a state that’s always (going to be) short of perfection. I think that’s the hardest shift to make – to eschew the pursuit of being perfect. Because perfect sounds really nice.
