There was a stretch in the mid-2000s when people uploaded the whole weekend. Ninety-odd photos straight off a digital camera, nothing was cropped and nothing was edited. Go back a bit further and there was no audience at all, just a roll of film that took two weeks to come back from Boots that caught all the imperfect moments.
And somewhere between then and now, everything started getting edited before anyone else saw it. Homes, faces, careers, weekends, all pinched and cropped into the good bits.
And this cultural movement towards “perfection” and having it all together bleeds into all bits of life. The house tidied before the cleaner arrives, the voice note recorded four times before sending, the message typed into the group chat and then deleted.
All of it points at a standard that nobody is actually meeting, including the people who look like they are. Behind any front door on the street there's a pile of clean washing that needs putting away. There is no such thing as perfect because life is meant to be messy and a bit lumpy. That’s what’s so beautiful about it.
Why we think there's a right way to do everything
Wanting to do things well isn't new. Your grandparents wanted to do things well. What's new is the sense that there's a correct version of a morning, a Sunday, a birthday, a kitchen, and that other people have already found it while you're still working it out.
Researchers tracked perfectionism in more than 40,000 students from the late eighties through to 2016. Over the years, it went up on every measure they looked at, but mainly the feeling that other people demand perfection from you. Students in 2016 scored around a third higher on that than students in the late eighties did and the pressure people put on themselves rose too.
The research that's come since points the same way, and social media keeps turning up in it. Last year, a review of 37 studies found the same pattern over and over, with filtered images and body dissatisfaction showing up together.
Being aware of it doesn't always help either, we can scroll past a photo knowing full well it took twenty attempts and a filter, and still come away feeling behind. The comparison happens before you've had a chance to talk yourself out of it. So instead, maybe we need to romanticise the imperfection, and remind ourselves every day that it’s the lumpy, messy moments that make life fun and memorable.
Wabi-sabi and kintsugi: two Japanese ideas that treat imperfection as the point
There's a whole tradition of beauty built on the opposite of what your feed might be telling you. And it's several hundred years older.
Wabi-sabi comes out of Zen Buddhism and the Japanese tea ceremony, and it finds beauty in things that are worn and unfinished. The bannister rubbed smooth in one spot, or the vintage drawers that don’t quite open properly, or the old mug that you reach for every morning. Underneath it sits the assumption that nothing lasts and nothing is ever completed, which makes being half-done the ordinary condition of a life rather than a stage you pass through.
Kintsugi takes the same idea further. When a bowl breaks, the pieces get joined with lacquer mixed with powdered gold, so the repair is the first thing you see and the bowl is worth more afterwards than it was before.
Nobody looks at one of those bowls and sees damage. They see everything it's been through, which is the interesting part of any object and, as it turns out, any person.
The beautiful mess effect: why we judge ourselves harder than anyone else does
We often hold ourselves to a higher standard than we do others. Psychologists have named this as “the beautiful mess effect”. We are far harder on our own messy moments than we are on anybody else's. If you open up or show an imperfection, you're more likely to see weakness in it. But if a friend does the same thing, you'll hear honesty, and probably think better of them for saying it. Identical behaviour but the opposite verdict, because you hold yourself to a different standard.
In one experiment, when people imagined themselves owning up to a mistake, or telling someone how they felt, they said it would be embarrassing. When they watched somebody else do it, they said it was brave. In an older experiment, someone who came across as highly capable became more likeable after spilling a cup of coffee down themselves. Because they’re showing that they’re human, just like you.
So the ‘imperfections’ or vulnerability that you might be editing out is usually the bit that makes people warm to you, because they see realness and a messiness that they most definitely also have themselves.
Life is messy, and messy is beautiful
Everyone is winging it. The friend whose house always looks immaculate, will probably also have a cupboard they won't open in front of you. The colleague who seems to have it all sorted is going home to something they haven't worked out either.
There's something freeing in that once you realise it. The standard you keep falling short of was never real, and nobody has ever loved anybody for their tidy cupboards. It's the honest bits people are fond of - the creases and the lumps of normal life. Plus, the memories you’ll keep forever are probably the ones in a messy living room or the nights that didn’t go to plan.