There was an interesting article in the August 11, 2025 issue of The New Yorker about the pain that can be caused by being a perfectionist, in that it can lead to depression, eating disorders, and even suicide. To understand why, we need to distinguish perfectionism from the mere desire to excel or be the best at something. While those latter characteristics can skirt close to the boundary of perfectionism, they are not the same thing. What characterizes perfectionism is the feeling that whatever one does or achieves, it is never good enough and requires more work. This can lead to not completing projects because one is constantly making changes without moving on or holding back and not submitting articles or papers because of the need to do more research, more experiments, or explore obscure side issues, and so on. This can lead to a sense of frustration because of the loss of productivity. Perhaps the most dangerous issue is with eating disorders such as anorexia where however thin someone gets, they feel they are not thin enough.

The article focuses on the work of two psychologists Gordon Flett and Paul Hewitt who have spent decades studying this and produced a model that describes three types: “self-oriented perfectionism (requiring perfection of oneself), other-oriented perfectionism (railing against the imperfections of others), and socially prescribed perfectionism (believing that others require one to be perfect).”

All three types can lead to a sense of dissatisfaction with oneself.

To Flett and Hewitt, the idea of perfectionism as a form of admirable striving is a dangerous misconception, one they have devoted three books and hundreds of peer-reviewed papers to overturning. “I can’t stand it when people talk about perfectionism as something positive,” Flett told me, as we sat at his kitchen table in Mississauga, a Toronto suburb where he has spent most of his life. “They don’t realize the deep human toll.” Hewitt, a clinical psychologist, has seen with his therapy patients how perfectionism can be “personally terrorizing for people, a debilitating state.” It’s driven not by aspiration but by fear, and by the conviction that perfection is the only “way of being secure and safe in the world.”
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Flett believes that young people, especially Gen Z-ers, are facing an “epidemic of perfectionism.” In a survey he conducted among Canadian high-school students, he found that fifty-four per cent identified with the statement “I need to be perfect.” (A 2024 Gallup poll corroborated this general trend, finding that more than one in three U.S. teen-agers feel pressure to be perfect.) Flett suspects that the crisis is largely fuelled by social media: people are tortured by the gap between their actual and their “perfected” lives, not to mention the perfected versions of other people that circulate online. “The need to seem perfect is much bigger now than when we started this research,” he said.
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According to Hewitt, this is one thing that distinguishes true perfectionism from a mere pursuit of excellence: reaching the goal never helps, whether it’s a top grade, a target weight, or a professional milestone. Achievement, he says, “doesn’t touch that fundamental sense of being unacceptable.” Perfectionism perpetuates an endless state of striving. It’s an affliction of futility, an addiction to finding masochistic refuge in the familiar hell of feeling insufficient. It might not feel good, but it feels like home.
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A clinical psychologist once told Flett that she’d often felt baffled by her anorexic patients: What could account for someone starving herself and thinking, It’s still not enough? Perfectionism gave her a way to understand this relentlessly self-destructive drive.
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The physical toll of perfectionism has been a particular focus of Flett and Hewitt’s research. Perfectionists experience higher than normal rates of ulcers, hypertension, fibromyalgia, arthritis, irritable-bowel syndrome, and Crohn’s disease, but they are also slow to seek care. Their fervent desire to “be O.K.” (or to seem that way) can hinder them from looking for the help they need.
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In many cases, a frustrated desire for parental acceptance has produced a tyrannical taskmaster driven by a false conditional: If I am perfect, then I’ll be loved.
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A lot of the time, what prompts a perfectionist to go to therapy is an issue such as chronic anxiety or depression, with perfectionism only gradually revealing itself as an important force. The precipitating incident may be a tangible failure that the patient is struggling to get past, but sometimes the larger problem is success—specifically, that success has not delivered the expected dividends of happiness and self-worth. For this reason, middle age is often a time of crisis in the life of a perfectionist, though the affliction manifests at all ages.

As with so many articles that deal with human psychology, when reading them one cannot help but wonder whether one also belongs in that category. While I do have some elements of that trait, I think I have been able to limit it. As an example, I used to hate it when I made errors in blog posts, however trivial they were. Since I use the blog as a repository of my thoughts and ideas, sometimes I go back to old posts to recover some information. In doing so, I sometimes find small typos. I feel obliged to correct them, even though the post may be decades old and the chances that anyone else will see the error going forward is close to zero. But while I feel the need to correct an error that I have discovered and now know about, that by itself is not a sign of perfectionism because it takes mere seconds to correct and I move on. It becomes problematic if I obsessively pore over all my old posts looking for errors to root out, because that would prevent me from doing anything new.

I think that one of the liberating ideas that saved me from sliding down the slope towards perfectionism is learning about the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80-20 rule, which takes many forms but in this context means that one usually can achieve 80% of some goal with 20% of the effort. As one seeks to get closer to the goal, the law of diminishing returns kicks in and one can spend enormous amounts of time achieving the most marginal of gains. Knowing when to recognize that what one has achieved is good enough for one’s needs and close the book is important.

When I was teaching introductory physics classes at my university, many of my students were high achievers who came to college having got straight A grades all their lives. Their self-image was tied in with being a ‘straight A student’ and they felt the need to maintain it. Hence they would play safe and avoid taking courses that they might be interested in or challenging for fear of not getting an A. This was a form of “self-oriented perfectionism (requiring perfection of oneself)”. I would tell the class that getting their first B grade would be an enormously liberating experience because it would free them from the tyranny of perfection. Some of them would find it amusing that I, their professor, was telling them that sometimes a B was good enough.

When I was director of the teaching center, I would encounter a similar issue with faculty. Some of them would spend enormous amounts of time preparing their lectures (at the expense of their research) because they felt the need to cover every excruciating detail and be ready to answer any question a student may pose, however obscure, because they felt that their standing as an ‘expert’ was at stake. This was a form of “socially prescribed perfectionism (believing that others require one to be perfect)”. They were also afraid of running out of material before the end of the class. As a result, their lectures were dense and information-filled but not in the least engaging to the students. I would tell these faculty that they should limit their preparation to two hours or so for one hour of class, focus more on engaging the students than telling them stuff, and that it was perfectly fine to tell a student that they did not know the answer to a question but would look into it and get back to them. I told them that I did so routinely in my own classes. This attitude can make the classes more enjoyable to both faculty and students.