Pursuit of Perfection

This place is so empty, my thoughts are so tempting

I don't know how it got so bad.

Sometimes it's so crazy that nothing can save me

But it's the only thing that I had.

--Sum 41, "Pieces"

This weekend a friend from one of my previous lives as a happy, blissfully ignorant telecom engineer came to visit me. It was a good weekend, but it brought back a lot of memories for me. Talking about all the fun that the group of us had in the summer of 2000 (before everyone finished undergrad) and then from 2001 to 2002 (before everyone went their separate ways after Ottawa's high-tech sector collapsed) made me wonder what happened to all of that happiness. Please don't think that I'm at all unhappy now...I have a wonderful family, a wonderful girlfriend, and I've been blessed so far in life with opportunities that make me wonder if (when?) some kind of cosmic "conservation of momentum" law is going to catch up with me. But what happened to the person that was perfectly happy with a B.Sc., perfectly happy applying that B.Sc. to technology that mostly just increased the download rate for illegal MP3's, perfectly happy being a small part in a huge machine and never wanting or needing more than a nice paycheque and for the rain to stay away during the ultimate games on Parilament Hill?

Well, I think what happened to me and so many of my friends is that we fell victim to the pursuit of perfection...a lot of us went back to school, trying to perfect our education. And for me, the first place that the pursuit of perfection led to was a realization that I knew nothing about the world, scientifically or spiritually. And for someone who thought that he had a pretty good handle on everything, that was very a scary realization. I think that most people who go into graduate studies have a similar experience, and different people handle it in different ways. For me, I spent a year desperately trying to do everything perfectly to prove to myself and everyone else that I did know something. Of course that led to stress, anxiety, health problems, and close to zero progress in my research.

Luckily I had a couple of amazing people in my life at the time that got me through it all, and I realized that the solution was accepting my limitations and dealing with the fact that I couldn't possibly operate on the same level as some of the other people in the lab.

The result? Acceptance of the fact that I didn't really understand very much, getting back to a relatively good state of health, and two first-author publications. I'm never going to be perfect, and it seems like the pursuit of perfection only leads to self-destruction, so this time around I'm going into the program knowing that I suck and hoping to maybe suck a little bit less in 3 years. And even if I still suck the same amount, at least I'll take time to enjoy the chowder!

Everything is bleak, it's the middle of the night

You're all alone and the dummies might be right.

Outside the darkness lurks

My music at work, my music at work

-- The Tragically Hip, "Music @ Work"