I think accepting your flaws and learning to live with them is actually a sign of maturity. It takes strength to stop chasing some impossible version of yourself and just be okay with who you are.
But at the same time, I still believe it’s a good and worthy goal to try to better yourself. Not in a way that becomes obsessive or self-punishing, but with balance—working on being a better person while knowing full well that perfection will never come. That kind of effort can bring a quiet kind of satisfaction, even if not happiness.
Also, the philosophical ideas mentioned—like cynicism, stoicism, or even spirituality—can be helpful too, as long as they're used in moderation. They’re not solutions to everything, but they are still part of what it means to live an authentic human life.
"21 So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. 22 For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; 23 but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. 24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? 25 Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!
So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin."
I really appreciated your piece. I find it is one of the best I have read on naming and deconstructing the idolatry of “self”. I’ve read it a couple times now to let it marinate. I have a couple of thoughts that are an attempt to lean into the light that your post has started to shine.
I wonder if every act truly is a failure? I think it depends on how we define perfection. Is love a failure? In the Christian tradition, we are made perfect in love. Not in a way that is without error, —for we will surely err—but in a way that holds errors within its scope and is yet still capable of connection and embrace. The characteristic of love is an honest other-centredness rooted in humility which neutralizes the tyranny and idolatry of the self (that you so eloquently define) and makes accommodation for error through forgiveness.
I like to think of this in terms of an Oscar worthy performance in film. The script is the perfection of what “ought to be” and when the actor merges with the script, the beauty is in the delivery. The actors errors and mistakes, coincidental discoveries in rehearsal, and interpretation of the perfect (the script) are what makes the performance so good. In this case, it is love for the art and the craft which demonstrates the beauty that captures our gaze. The acting is “perfect” in its imperfection, if you will. Sometimes the perfection, what ought to be, can only be improvised and discovered through imperfect attempts at love, which makes it poetically perfect after all. It is perfect when the self is cast aside, not to annihilate, but to discover the self as it should be... through the act of love. In this realm, there is no idolatry of the perfect self hanging over our head, only what is in love.
In think you are saying that religion and ancient philosophies like Stoicism and Cynicism, while offering coping mechanisms, ultimately defer or deny resolution to our problem. I think our problem is idolatry that is shaped by the Market. Byung Chul Han is a good philosopher on this topic. He would argue that the despair of not becoming the perfect self is not necessarily ontological, but a cultural pathology shaped by neoliberalism ideology. I think this is in your purview, though.
I would also like to suggest that your definition of Christianity as the deferral of perfection—which is the case with other merit based religions—is misclassified. Christianity is not the deferral of perfection, but the embrace of imperfection in our time and space through love as encounters in the incarnation of Jesus. It is about the God who came near and loves us into a way of loving that embraces our imperfections and parlays our response to that love into a cosmic project of reconciliation. Any act is “response to love”, and not a striving for some ideal picture of ourselves which is shaped more by market forces than anything. In Christianity, the true self is one that is discovered in embrace with God’s love and it fully recognizes that scars still remain but are somehow changed into wounds that proclaim that death will never have its way, not will shame rule the day. Christian love is one that destroys the idolatry of self and reorients the human on a trajectory of purpose that goes beyond consumer.
I really loved your post and as you can tell, it engaged me significantly. I hope that’s OK.
Thank you for your comment! It is for people like you I bother to get up in the morning and write anything at all!
To begin with, you’ve put your finger right on one of the crucial fault lines of the essay: the notion of "failure" in the act. You are utterly correct to point out that this idea hinges on how we define perfection. Here, I am making the point that it is not merely moral or cultural but ontological. Even when we are alone, we cannot escape our own sense of inferiority against other selves we believe should or could exist. As to the actor or their failures or perfections, the ideal cannot be escaped in the very sense that there is an Oscar—it remains a hierarchy. Any hierarchy, any "one above the other," implies an ultimate: a thing to which we all aspire. Even your reply hints at this—after all, I cannot fully or perfectly convey my ideals, sadly.
This problem appears in philosophy also: any philosophy that argues for becoming as its goal—whether becoming more in tune with the world, becoming apart from society, becoming better able to form a quietist life—leads inevitably to an unfulfillable perfection that can never be achieved, qua the endless tortures of the saint.
On Christianity: you raise a crucial distinction. The Christianity you describe—at its most mature and incarnational—is a philosophy of love that embraces imperfection in the here and now. I respect this vision, and it is certainly one of the most beautiful versions of Christianity. But the fact that eschatology exists in Christianity undermines this ideal. Jesus will come again to right every wrong and remake the world into its true, perfect form. The fact that heaven exists in Christianity also undermines the ideal of God’s love. If we were perfect under God’s love in this life, we wouldn’t need God—or even existence itself. Perfection is ultimately annihilation, in that it cannot change state.
I think Byung-Chul Han is fine, but his analysis is rather skin-deep. The market could not take advantage of this ideal if it did not already exist within man. Capitalism exploits the frailty that was already there; it does not create it ex nihilo. Our self-haunting precedes the market.
Ultimately, if Christianity functioned as an ideal of love in the now, capitalism and the market would never have been able to arise in relation to it.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. It’s clear this arises from a deep well of reflection and honest engagement with the ache of existence. I’m grateful for the dialogue.
I want to sit a little longer with the word at the center of your argument: failure. You’ve made a compelling case for how its glued to even our most solitary acts as a kind of metaphysical verdict. But I wonder if there is another story—one that shifts the ground beneath our feet entirely.
In the Christian tradition, the story of the self doesn’t begin with failure. It begins with blessing. The voice that echoes out of Genesis does not say, “Let us make man, flawed and forever wanting,” but “Let us make humanity in our image… and behold, it was very good.” Theologically, this “good” is not comparative (better than this, less than that) but an original affirmation, a primal blessing. We are not born into the world broken. We are born into the world beloved—before we strive, before we fail, before we construct an ideal self to haunt us.
I think this is important because it reframes the terms of becoming. Rather than a ladder upward toward an ever-elusive perfection, we are always returning to the goodness in which we were already made. Becoming is not the tyranny of the not-yet or the not-here, but the unfolding of what is already true.
This is where I find hope in the idea of presence—what I sometimes call the active now, or as I’ve recently been playing with: a kind of flirting with eternity. It’s the state where one is so held by love in every moment that the idol of the ideal no longer matters. It evaporates under the glow of love. The striving ceases not because we are perfect, but because we are with. With others. With God. With life. Theologian James Finley calls this “becoming who we already are in God’s eyes.”
And yes, Christian eschatology speaks of a future perfection—but I see this not as a deferral or denial of the present, but as an intensification of presence. The kingdom of God is among you, Jesus said. Not postponed, but present—hidden like leaven, buried like a seed, quietly making all things new. Heaven is interlocking and overlapping with the here and now and not some distant "other" place.
The tyranny, then, is not that we are not yet perfect, but that we forget we are already held by love. We are not measured by a spectral self—that is, a ghost-like projection of who we think we ought to be, always just out of reach—but invited into communion here and now. The resolution to the anguish you describe, to me, is to live inside a love that absorbs failure, redeems it, transfigures it. A love that doesn’t pretend there is no wound—but shows us that wounds can shine.
So yes, the market exploits us. But perhaps it does so not because we are haunted by an ideal per se, but because we have forgotten that the presence of God is here, and that love is a presence, not a product. The market promises us the self we think we should be. The Incarnation offers us the truth of who we already are: loved into being, loved into becoming.
Thank you again for provoking these thoughts. Your work matters. It opens space for deeper reflection, and I’m grateful for it.
I think our major point of contention is that you are Christian and I am not and therefore we will never find a solid ground on which we can agree, which is perfectly okay! As I do not prioritize or privilege one way of knowing over another. You are right where God made man good, this is undoubtably true. But I feel Genisis supports my cause in that when man becomes self-aware, that is how I read the fruit of knowledge moment, his imperfection is acknowledged by both himself and God, and Christian teleology is a path back to this perlapsian perfection?
My friend, I’m grateful for your thoughtfulness. These days it seems like a relic to share difference in a way that nudges us to engage more deeply in our thought. Your writing does this for me, I hope mine does the same for you.
In my reading of Genesis, the fall is not so much the awakening of consciousness, but the rupture of trust. It is less an ascent into knowing and more a turning away from being known. The eating of the fruit is more about asserting autonomy and less about self awareness... grasping for God-like control, rather than receiving life as gift. It's disobedience born of mistrust rather than a enlightened awakening. The “knowledge” gained from eating the fruit is not a higher insight into ourselves or the world, but a loss of innocence: self-consciousness that brings shame and alienation. Christian theology is about the intervention of cosmic God-love as invitation to trust again.
It's funny cause Byung Chul Han's critique is really just another expression of the thing he is critiquing. His critique is an extension of the thing it seeks to escape.
Oh welcome back, and glad to read that you are feeling better.
I think that it is human nature -philosphy?- to seek for an ideal, regardless of its unattainability. Trying to reach perfection is both a blessing and a curse, if I can use those terms, and it is not only a number of philosophical schools, but also religions, that focus on aiming at perfection. Vacuous exercise, maybe, but is that not the main reason for which we want to stay alive? I wonder...
The tyranny of the ideal is one I know all too well. I spent far too many years chasing after a phantom, a self that I believed with all my heart I needed to become. All it brought me was despair. The ideal is a mirage, constantly at the edge of the horizon, no matter how fast and how far you run.
But I don't think I can follow you fully into your pessimism. Ideals can trap us, the same way any spook of the mind can. But without them we grow without direction, if we grow at all. I now try to hold my ideal self lightly, inquisitively. It is something I aspire to be not because I must, but simply to see what it is like. I may find that I do not like that person. That is fine. It was an experiment, nothing more. With every new person I become, I learn a little more about who I would like to be. The more I experience, the more I learn I can experience. The farther I stretch, the more solid my core becomes.
I think accepting your flaws and learning to live with them is actually a sign of maturity. It takes strength to stop chasing some impossible version of yourself and just be okay with who you are.
But at the same time, I still believe it’s a good and worthy goal to try to better yourself. Not in a way that becomes obsessive or self-punishing, but with balance—working on being a better person while knowing full well that perfection will never come. That kind of effort can bring a quiet kind of satisfaction, even if not happiness.
Also, the philosophical ideas mentioned—like cynicism, stoicism, or even spirituality—can be helpful too, as long as they're used in moderation. They’re not solutions to everything, but they are still part of what it means to live an authentic human life.
You have no flaws. Any acceptance of flaws is just a return to the perfection we seek to deny.
Ah, the sense of horniness is back at play, chasing the superior veneration of the mirror of naught! Ouroboros it is, then.
The great conqueror of the abyss, you spin a good yarn; I concede you that.
How polished your reflections are! Come, let's walk on the waters of nothingness; they seem clear this time of year.
Grandiloquent rhetoric will gain you much excellence but never the joy of the fool.
A dog? No way; these lovely creatures are eternally loyal – huff huff.
I bid you much fortune, dear wanderer.
(one should love Mircea Eliade, don’t you think?)
Haha great comment thanks Tyger old buddy!
"21 So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. 22 For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; 23 but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. 24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? 25 Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!
So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin."
Romans 7
I really appreciated your piece. I find it is one of the best I have read on naming and deconstructing the idolatry of “self”. I’ve read it a couple times now to let it marinate. I have a couple of thoughts that are an attempt to lean into the light that your post has started to shine.
I wonder if every act truly is a failure? I think it depends on how we define perfection. Is love a failure? In the Christian tradition, we are made perfect in love. Not in a way that is without error, —for we will surely err—but in a way that holds errors within its scope and is yet still capable of connection and embrace. The characteristic of love is an honest other-centredness rooted in humility which neutralizes the tyranny and idolatry of the self (that you so eloquently define) and makes accommodation for error through forgiveness.
I like to think of this in terms of an Oscar worthy performance in film. The script is the perfection of what “ought to be” and when the actor merges with the script, the beauty is in the delivery. The actors errors and mistakes, coincidental discoveries in rehearsal, and interpretation of the perfect (the script) are what makes the performance so good. In this case, it is love for the art and the craft which demonstrates the beauty that captures our gaze. The acting is “perfect” in its imperfection, if you will. Sometimes the perfection, what ought to be, can only be improvised and discovered through imperfect attempts at love, which makes it poetically perfect after all. It is perfect when the self is cast aside, not to annihilate, but to discover the self as it should be... through the act of love. In this realm, there is no idolatry of the perfect self hanging over our head, only what is in love.
In think you are saying that religion and ancient philosophies like Stoicism and Cynicism, while offering coping mechanisms, ultimately defer or deny resolution to our problem. I think our problem is idolatry that is shaped by the Market. Byung Chul Han is a good philosopher on this topic. He would argue that the despair of not becoming the perfect self is not necessarily ontological, but a cultural pathology shaped by neoliberalism ideology. I think this is in your purview, though.
I would also like to suggest that your definition of Christianity as the deferral of perfection—which is the case with other merit based religions—is misclassified. Christianity is not the deferral of perfection, but the embrace of imperfection in our time and space through love as encounters in the incarnation of Jesus. It is about the God who came near and loves us into a way of loving that embraces our imperfections and parlays our response to that love into a cosmic project of reconciliation. Any act is “response to love”, and not a striving for some ideal picture of ourselves which is shaped more by market forces than anything. In Christianity, the true self is one that is discovered in embrace with God’s love and it fully recognizes that scars still remain but are somehow changed into wounds that proclaim that death will never have its way, not will shame rule the day. Christian love is one that destroys the idolatry of self and reorients the human on a trajectory of purpose that goes beyond consumer.
I really loved your post and as you can tell, it engaged me significantly. I hope that’s OK.
Thank you for your comment! It is for people like you I bother to get up in the morning and write anything at all!
To begin with, you’ve put your finger right on one of the crucial fault lines of the essay: the notion of "failure" in the act. You are utterly correct to point out that this idea hinges on how we define perfection. Here, I am making the point that it is not merely moral or cultural but ontological. Even when we are alone, we cannot escape our own sense of inferiority against other selves we believe should or could exist. As to the actor or their failures or perfections, the ideal cannot be escaped in the very sense that there is an Oscar—it remains a hierarchy. Any hierarchy, any "one above the other," implies an ultimate: a thing to which we all aspire. Even your reply hints at this—after all, I cannot fully or perfectly convey my ideals, sadly.
This problem appears in philosophy also: any philosophy that argues for becoming as its goal—whether becoming more in tune with the world, becoming apart from society, becoming better able to form a quietist life—leads inevitably to an unfulfillable perfection that can never be achieved, qua the endless tortures of the saint.
On Christianity: you raise a crucial distinction. The Christianity you describe—at its most mature and incarnational—is a philosophy of love that embraces imperfection in the here and now. I respect this vision, and it is certainly one of the most beautiful versions of Christianity. But the fact that eschatology exists in Christianity undermines this ideal. Jesus will come again to right every wrong and remake the world into its true, perfect form. The fact that heaven exists in Christianity also undermines the ideal of God’s love. If we were perfect under God’s love in this life, we wouldn’t need God—or even existence itself. Perfection is ultimately annihilation, in that it cannot change state.
I think Byung-Chul Han is fine, but his analysis is rather skin-deep. The market could not take advantage of this ideal if it did not already exist within man. Capitalism exploits the frailty that was already there; it does not create it ex nihilo. Our self-haunting precedes the market.
Ultimately, if Christianity functioned as an ideal of love in the now, capitalism and the market would never have been able to arise in relation to it.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. It’s clear this arises from a deep well of reflection and honest engagement with the ache of existence. I’m grateful for the dialogue.
I want to sit a little longer with the word at the center of your argument: failure. You’ve made a compelling case for how its glued to even our most solitary acts as a kind of metaphysical verdict. But I wonder if there is another story—one that shifts the ground beneath our feet entirely.
In the Christian tradition, the story of the self doesn’t begin with failure. It begins with blessing. The voice that echoes out of Genesis does not say, “Let us make man, flawed and forever wanting,” but “Let us make humanity in our image… and behold, it was very good.” Theologically, this “good” is not comparative (better than this, less than that) but an original affirmation, a primal blessing. We are not born into the world broken. We are born into the world beloved—before we strive, before we fail, before we construct an ideal self to haunt us.
I think this is important because it reframes the terms of becoming. Rather than a ladder upward toward an ever-elusive perfection, we are always returning to the goodness in which we were already made. Becoming is not the tyranny of the not-yet or the not-here, but the unfolding of what is already true.
This is where I find hope in the idea of presence—what I sometimes call the active now, or as I’ve recently been playing with: a kind of flirting with eternity. It’s the state where one is so held by love in every moment that the idol of the ideal no longer matters. It evaporates under the glow of love. The striving ceases not because we are perfect, but because we are with. With others. With God. With life. Theologian James Finley calls this “becoming who we already are in God’s eyes.”
And yes, Christian eschatology speaks of a future perfection—but I see this not as a deferral or denial of the present, but as an intensification of presence. The kingdom of God is among you, Jesus said. Not postponed, but present—hidden like leaven, buried like a seed, quietly making all things new. Heaven is interlocking and overlapping with the here and now and not some distant "other" place.
The tyranny, then, is not that we are not yet perfect, but that we forget we are already held by love. We are not measured by a spectral self—that is, a ghost-like projection of who we think we ought to be, always just out of reach—but invited into communion here and now. The resolution to the anguish you describe, to me, is to live inside a love that absorbs failure, redeems it, transfigures it. A love that doesn’t pretend there is no wound—but shows us that wounds can shine.
So yes, the market exploits us. But perhaps it does so not because we are haunted by an ideal per se, but because we have forgotten that the presence of God is here, and that love is a presence, not a product. The market promises us the self we think we should be. The Incarnation offers us the truth of who we already are: loved into being, loved into becoming.
Thank you again for provoking these thoughts. Your work matters. It opens space for deeper reflection, and I’m grateful for it.
I think our major point of contention is that you are Christian and I am not and therefore we will never find a solid ground on which we can agree, which is perfectly okay! As I do not prioritize or privilege one way of knowing over another. You are right where God made man good, this is undoubtably true. But I feel Genisis supports my cause in that when man becomes self-aware, that is how I read the fruit of knowledge moment, his imperfection is acknowledged by both himself and God, and Christian teleology is a path back to this perlapsian perfection?
My friend, I’m grateful for your thoughtfulness. These days it seems like a relic to share difference in a way that nudges us to engage more deeply in our thought. Your writing does this for me, I hope mine does the same for you.
In my reading of Genesis, the fall is not so much the awakening of consciousness, but the rupture of trust. It is less an ascent into knowing and more a turning away from being known. The eating of the fruit is more about asserting autonomy and less about self awareness... grasping for God-like control, rather than receiving life as gift. It's disobedience born of mistrust rather than a enlightened awakening. The “knowledge” gained from eating the fruit is not a higher insight into ourselves or the world, but a loss of innocence: self-consciousness that brings shame and alienation. Christian theology is about the intervention of cosmic God-love as invitation to trust again.
Thank you for the dialogue!
It's funny cause Byung Chul Han's critique is really just another expression of the thing he is critiquing. His critique is an extension of the thing it seeks to escape.
Oh welcome back, and glad to read that you are feeling better.
I think that it is human nature -philosphy?- to seek for an ideal, regardless of its unattainability. Trying to reach perfection is both a blessing and a curse, if I can use those terms, and it is not only a number of philosophical schools, but also religions, that focus on aiming at perfection. Vacuous exercise, maybe, but is that not the main reason for which we want to stay alive? I wonder...
You can choose to just be. Not perfect, not imperfect. Just be and let the wheel spin.
This is the way. I am basically a Taoist. If you aren't going with the flow of life, you are going to have a bad time.
The tyranny of the ideal is one I know all too well. I spent far too many years chasing after a phantom, a self that I believed with all my heart I needed to become. All it brought me was despair. The ideal is a mirage, constantly at the edge of the horizon, no matter how fast and how far you run.
But I don't think I can follow you fully into your pessimism. Ideals can trap us, the same way any spook of the mind can. But without them we grow without direction, if we grow at all. I now try to hold my ideal self lightly, inquisitively. It is something I aspire to be not because I must, but simply to see what it is like. I may find that I do not like that person. That is fine. It was an experiment, nothing more. With every new person I become, I learn a little more about who I would like to be. The more I experience, the more I learn I can experience. The farther I stretch, the more solid my core becomes.
“Stand on the edge of the abyss and when you don’t have any more strength, rest a little and have a cup of tea,” - Elder Sophrony of Essex
“Keep your mind in hell and despair not.” - St. Silouan the Athonite
Some of the wisdom and simple sentences that get me through the day.