For people of my generation, Saint Seiya—also known as Knights of the Zodiac—was probably the first thing that made the idea of zodiac signs feel vivid. In the Twelve Gold Saints arc, Virgo Shaka was presented as the being closest to god. To a kid, that naturally translated into one simple conclusion: Virgo must be the strongest.

Later, through all kinds of channels, I started picking up the usual zodiac theories and found out that Virgo was supposed to represent perfectionism. At the time, I remember thinking that even if my birthday didn’t belong to the strongest sign, I could at least learn to be a perfectionist. That was childhood reasoning: completely illogical, but very sincere.

In elementary school, perfectionism was easy enough to perform. Get full marks in Chinese and math, and that was basically the whole thing. But once middle school started, it became obvious that maintaining perfection was impossible. Especially when competition-style problems appeared—those questions where, if you don’t know how to do them, you simply don’t. Memorizing answers didn’t help much either. If the next problem was weird enough, you were still helpless. At that point, my imaginary spiritual Virgo identity could no longer hold. Better to leave it to fate.

Then the internet became widespread, and the web was flooded with psychological quizzes and personality tests. Compared with the entertainment value of zodiac theories, those scales and questionnaires looked more scientific, or at least more respectable. Around then, I started to notice that perfectionism usually didn’t line up with real practice. I also realized Virgo had very little to do with being the strongest sign. Once that childhood filter was gone, perfectionism looked less like excellence and more like nitpicking and wasted effort. Still, it’s a personality tendency. There isn’t much point in morally judging it.

The digital age gave perfectionism a second life

Perfectionism came back in a different form once life became fully digital. The internet deserves most of the credit, especially through the habit of information optimization.

Before the internet, knowledge transmission was built on trust. If a teacher said something, or a book said something, then it was probably right. And it was hard to encounter fully conflicting views anyway, so there wasn’t much need to search for the “best” version of an answer.

Online, knowledge works differently. Its foundation is suspicion. Someone anonymous posts a claim, and others can immediately search for sources, fact-check it, challenge it, and try to arrive at something more objective. In essence, this is an extension of perfectionism: the belief that with enough sorting, comparison, and correction, one can approach the optimal answer.

That revival could have become a kind of enlightenment. But recommendation algorithms almost immediately pushed people back into comfort zones filled with echoes of themselves. In reality, people who can recognize the limits of their own understanding and keep pushing past them are always rare. Most people do not enjoy fighting themselves.

And this is where the side effects of perfectionism show up.

Many people who were once open to different perspectives gradually build their own internal knowledge systems. Then, in order to preserve the perfection and consistency of that system, they start ignoring later challenges or blocking them through labels. They use abstract ideological tags and factional categories to reduce disagreement into symbols, which lets them deny how messy real problems actually are.

A related side effect is the strengthening of this kind of system logic itself: the urge to force everything into qualitative, definitive explanations.

MH370 and the need for a final answer

The clearest example of this, for me, was Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

At the time, I simply could not understand how, in an age of highly developed information technology, an airplane could just disappear. For days I kept searching online, reading one theory after another—conspiracies, anti-conspiracies, official speculation, unofficial speculation. None of it satisfied me. What my brain wanted was not a probability distribution. It wanted a dead-or-alive answer, a categorical conclusion.

Because of MH370, I actually slept badly for several days. I didn’t know a single passenger, but I still couldn’t accept that something like that could vanish without resolution. So how was that mental knot untied?

It wasn’t.

To this day, I still don’t understand it, and I still don’t have an answer that feels sufficient. The only difference between who I was then and who I am now is that back then I thought there was just this one unsolved problem. Now my head is full of unsolved accounts like that. None of them resolve cleanly. Once you accumulate enough of them, you go numb and stop obsessing over each one individually.

Optimization as a way of life

Something similar appears in digital-age belief systems. Some people love recording themselves through every kind of sensor and device, convinced that hidden inside their data is the secret to their health. They also chase one wellness trend after another—organic vegetables with olive oil, fitness routines, goji berry drinks, and whatever else currently carries the aura of being correct.

Every action in that world has a clear purpose, and there is always some supporting evidence ready to be cited. But what tends to be missing is any patience for discussing the details. Good and bad are enough. The complexity underneath is usually outsourced to authorities and experts, and the people following the system often don’t actually understand those details themselves.

At bottom, this is still self-optimization.

And in an era where evidence can be found for nearly any position, optimization can always be made to look rational. One striking feature of this process is that the standard being optimized toward is often the highest level available in a field. Most people cannot even really explain what makes that standard good, but they accept that it is good in a very simple way.

This is especially common among highly educated people. In search of superiority in one form or another, they tend to form expectations that are not entirely reasonable. Once they have seen what “the best” looks like, they can no longer go back. Since most people can never actually reach that level, they end up living in a constant state of striving, as if life were a permanently full campaign of goals.

The people who dedicate themselves to an optimum

These people are not hard to identify. One easy test is to ask what they think of craftsmanship.

Those who truly believe in perfectionism tend to dedicate themselves to some target. It may be career. It may be family. But their whole life becomes a pursuit of extremity in one direction.

There is also a special subtype: the extreme realist. This person has no fixed devotion to any particular ideal, but converts all goals into calculations of personal interest. In essence, it is a form of radical selfishness—the desire to control everything and make it useful to oneself. People like this may succeed easily enough, but they are not easy to befriend.

This kind of fixation is not actually that different from the old version of me who imagined himself a spiritual Virgo. It can drift away from reality very easily. It produces odd views of compatibility, strange competitive instincts, and a tendency to get trapped by abstract problems and worry them to death.

I went through that stage myself.

What got me out of it was not just reality pushing back. More importantly, I began to realize that I was allowed to question my own core values and assumptions. As far as I can tell, most perfectionists—or most people with a deep obsession around one thing—need a concrete target in order to keep living. They need something to optimize, even if the optimization is basically mystical. What they rarely question is the obsession itself.

If the obsession collapses, or if the goal is finally reached, the meaning of their existence suddenly becomes unstable, and they become lost. So they immediately set a new goal.

When you talk to people like this, their behavior has an unusually explicit purposefulness. They will even, without fully noticing it, try to guide you toward the “optimized” life plan they have mapped out. If something is already optimal, then by definition it no longer needs to be questioned.

But I have never accepted, at the root, that there is any reachable optimum at all. That is probably the main reason I could never become a real perfectionist.

The problem with coherent systems

There was a time when I also tried to build a neat cognitive framework for myself. I wasn’t expecting a worldview with no mysteries, but I wanted at least to be able to think in a clear, orderly way.

In one sense, that framework does exist now.

But nearly every branch of every system ends in unresolved questions, and many of those unresolved questions are tangled together. From perspective A, I can organize the facts into one coherent story. From perspective B, I can organize them into another story that is just as coherent but built on values completely opposed to A.

When talking to other people, I can often simulate their line of reasoning almost perfectly and respond within it. But that does not mean the actual problem gets solved. Many lines of thought do not lead to an endpoint. They lead only to a cluster of unknowns and newer problems.

That is why I increasingly think perfectionism is a false proposition. In this world, logical consistency exists, but total consistency with reality does not. The answers we find through logic often function mainly as emotional comfort. They do not solve the real problem. They just give us a signal that says: you may stop thinking about this now.

Chaos is where perfectionism goes to die

At the same time, I can still feel the force of perfectionists’ convictions when I talk to them. They are deeply attached to things like family happiness, career stability, excellent grades. It often never even occurs to them that a world could continue operating without those categories holding the central place they assign to them.

Whether that is fortunate or unfortunate, I started confronting chaos early through research work. Scientific research is, in many ways, a graveyard for perfectionists. It does not matter how good your résumé is or how capable you are. If the project itself does not work, then nothing comes out. That loss of control, that frustration, is normal. Research is trial and error precisely because failure is ordinary.

Of course, even in research there are still loopholes for perfectionists. Through combinations, procedural strategies, and careful selection, they can sometimes avoid direct confrontation with failure and continue feeding their desire to control life.

None of this is really a moral issue. It is just a different way to live.

I can laugh at perfectionists for making themselves miserable, and I can also accept their criticism that my thinking has neither lower nor upper bounds. I simply like to play with ideas. Order matters in communication with others, but more important is communication with oneself. In a mind that does not impose limits too early, questioning may be the real opportunity for growth.

A perfectionist may get tangled up asking whether the classics interpret me or I interpret the classics.

I am more likely to ask:

What exactly are your classics supposed to be?