Why “I Have to Do It Perfectly” Never Goes Quiet: Not Your Character, but the Structure of Language

Introduction: The Voice That Will Not Quiet

Eighty percent is enough. You know it in your head, yet your hands will not stop. Find a single typo and you reread the whole thing; faced with a document ready to submit, you feel it is still not enough. Even while resting, somewhere a voice is sounding — should you really be doing this? And when you are worn out, the conclusion most people arrive at is always the same: I have this troublesome character called perfectionism, and I have to fix it.

Plenty of people are looking for a way to cure perfectionism. What this article examines is the premise beneath it: is the reason the voice I have to do it perfectly will not go quiet a matter of your character — or the working of something else entirely, something that keeps demanding more of you?

This article makes a single claim. Perfectionism is not a character to be cured; it is the symptom of a structure. That structure is the mechanism by which the language of I have to quietly and continually converts what you want to do — a motive born from within — into what you are made to do — an obligation forced from outside. From here I dissect the whole picture in order, tracing findings from cognitive science and economics.

What the Voice of “I Have To” Is Doing

Turn first to the very voice sounding inside you. I have to do it properly, I have to sharpen it further — we take this kind of inner voice to be an ally, a means of disciplining ourselves. Yet this voice, wearing the face of an ally, is doing an altogether different job.

As psychology has confirmed, people speak to themselves an enormous number of times a day, and the content of those words gradually shapes their beliefs about themselves. Every time you say I have to to yourself, you are quietly attaching to that action the premise: this is not something I do because I want to. It is forced drudgery. The voice may intend encouragement, but the premise it attaches is always the same: I do not want to, yet I am made to.

What matters here is that this operation occurs automatically, through the mere use of the words, regardless of the strength of your will. It cannot be cancelled by effort or willpower. The instant the words are used, the brain begins to process the action as drudgery. The heaviness you feel is not proof of a weak heart but the normal working of this automatic conversion.

The Moment What You Want to Do Becomes What You Are Made to Do

The same activity is joy for one person and drudgery for another. This difference lies not in the content of the activity but in how the activity is processed within the mind.

To a boy swinging a bat over and over because he wants to become a professional baseball player, saying “you’re working so hard” is somehow beside the point. He is doing it because he wants to; no one is forcing him. Words that console the activity as a hard labour are out of step with his own felt sense. When you stick the label he is labouring from outside onto a state in which the motive is born from within, that activity gradually takes on, even within him, the colour of something being made to do.

The psychologists Deci and Ryan showed repeatedly that people move most deeply, and for longest, not through outside rewards or coercion but when the activity is motivated from within [Deci & Ryan, 1985]. And, decisively, they found that the sense of having to — the sense that autonomy is being stripped away — directly erodes this intrinsic motivation. The voice I have to do it perfectly is precisely what is shaving away that autonomy, little by little, from the inside. You grow tired not only because of the volume of the activity, but because what should have been what you wanted to do is being continually converted into what you are made to do.

Whose Interest Does the Norm of “More” Serve?

Why, then, do we keep this voice of more, and properly housed so firmly inside us? It is not inborn. It was written in from outside over a long stretch of time.

The sociologist Max Weber argued that a set of values internalising diligence and strict self-discipline as a moral duty became the spiritual foundation of modern society [Weber, 1905] (this way of drawing the causation faces many objections from present-day historians and economists, and is best received as one influential reading). What to see here is how those values function. Once the norm that makes a virtue of more is internalised, people begin to drive themselves without anyone watching from outside. They work overtime unbidden, relearn unprompted, and feel guilt at resting.

To the side that needs your labour power, this state could not be more convenient. As Marx described, the position of being able to obtain the means of living only by selling one’s labour power — he called it the “double freedom” [Marx, 1867], later organised into a system of economics by Uno Kōzō [Uno, 1964] — means that the more willingly you drive yourself, the more cheaply and efficiently that position is used. Your inner voice of I have to do it perfectly may be less a guardian protecting you than the cheapest management device there is for the side that profits from your voluntary exhaustion.

Why You Go Unrewarded: the Question Is Posed Wrong

Come this far, and the strangeness of a familiar question comes into view: I am doing this much, so why am I not rewarded?

At a glance the question sounds reasonable. Yet a premise has already slipped inside the way it is posed. It places doing more, and properly as a correct answer beyond doubt, and then asks why is it still not enough? As long as you keep this premise and search for a solution, the answer always arrives at your method is still not enough. The next method, the next certification, the next self-improvement — the loop continues.

What should be asked is not how can I do it better but what, exactly, is the premise of more, and properly itself doing? The former speeds the inside of the same turning; the latter steps outside the turning. The true nature of going unrewarded lies not in your shortfall but in the fact that you keep posing an unanswerable question, believing an answer must come.

The Exit Is Not Past the Next “Perfect”

Where, then, is the exit? Not past doing it more perfectly, more without gaps. That only speeds the turning of the conversion device; from the device itself it does not let you out.

The exit this book sets out is not a resolve to quit being perfect. Resolve alone lets the inner voice return at once, because as long as economic anxiety remains, the voice of I have to is reproduced again and again. The exit lies in moving two directions at once.

• Reclaim, in daily life, the state of moving from what you want to do — motive born from within. Draw the ruler of what counts as important back from outside norms into your own hands.
• Make that state sustainable through economic and structural autonomy. Free your life, little by little, from the structure of being made to do what you do not want to do. Try to change only the cognition, and if the ground does not change, the voice returns.

Let one thing be clear. This is not a denial of applying yourself intently. To pour yourself deeply into something, to hone it over time — these in themselves are no problem at all. What is cut is not the action but the language that keeps converting that action into something made to do, and the norm that makes a virtue of it. To pour yourself deeply, by your own ruler and for your own sake, is an altogether different thing from an exhaustion driven onward.

Conclusion: Change the Question

That I have to do it perfectly will not go quiet is not because it is your character, but because the language of I have to keeps converting what you want to do into an outside obligation, and the norm that makes a virtue of more sustains that conversion. So the exit lies neither in doing it more perfectly nor in fixing your character.

What is needed is to change the question. Not how can I cure my perfectionism but by what language am I now moving myself, and whose ruler is it? Gazing at the same fatigue, what you see changes entirely depending on whether you look at it as a defect to be fixed or dissect it as a structure of conversion. Receive the overall blueprint as your next step.

Articles in This Cluster: Reading Each Argument in Depth

This article set out, as a whole picture, that perfectionism is the symptom of a language that converts what you want to do into an outside obligation, and of the norm that makes a virtue of it. Each argument is dissected more deeply in its own piece, arranged in the order of this article’s reasoning — the working of language, the work ethic, the structure of the pain, and the exit.

The working of language — why the same activity turns into drudgery

• Why work that feels like “sacrificing yourself” becomes drudgery — the mechanism by which what you want to do turns into an obligation
• Work feels hard not because your heart is weak — the inner voice is redefining the action as drudgery

The work ethic — whose interest does the norm of “more” serve?

• Not being able to stop overworking is not a matter of will — whose interest does the norm that makes a virtue of diligence serve?
• The structure of over-adaptation that thins you out — the more you try to be a “good person,” the thinner you become
• Why merely being with people is exhausting — the cost of endlessly performing a “capable self”

The structure of the pain — that fatigue is not your weakness

• When you feel “it is my fault I am not rewarded” — the way the question is posed is already wrong
• The true nature of not wanting to do anything — motivation runs dry because the motive was written in from outside
• Difficulty living is not because you are weak — a terrain made by a modernity that makes a virtue of diligence

The exit — reclaiming the ruler

• Why you feel “there is no self here” — have you not surrendered what you want to do to outside obligation?

This argument — the trap of surrendering sovereignty to the outside — can be analysed with the same structure from other domains. Why career advancement never quiets your anxiety about the future dissects the industry that feeds anxiety; what the desire for approval really is dissects the source of the wish to be recognised; and why being stoic takes you further from freedom dissects the underside of self-discipline as a virtue. These are sister clusters, each a different angle: what this article treats is self-exploitation through the internalisation of diligence, and the turning of motive into outside obligation. To move from the individual arguments to the overall design, start from the structural autonomy master pillar.

The direction this article named as the exit — sustaining the state of moving from what you want to do through economic and structural autonomy — is handled concretely from the side of economic structure in the articles under how the economic structure works. In particular, what really decides your pay and from flow-type labour to stock-type are the continuation that unties, from the root, the economic anxiety that reproduces I have to from within.

The book-length treatment of this argument is available as Why Is It So Hard to Stop Trying So Hard? on Amazon Kindle.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (1985) Plenum Press
• Weber, M. Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (1905)
• Marx, K. Das Kapital, Band I (1867) Verlag von Otto Meissner
• Uno, K. Principles of Political Economy (1964) Iwanami Shoten