Perfection

On the book, the message and what we're all trying to get

“Wherever you go, there you are.” I’m not sure who the first person was to say those words, but not long ago I was talking to someone considered to be wise and I asked them, where should I be? How do I know? New York or LA? Where do I belong? And he said, “wherever you go, there you are.” And I get it, it’s true. He wasn’t any help but I appreciate the advice nonetheless.

This week I read a book called Perfection that perfectly encapsulates this quote.

It’s a story about Anna and Tom, a young 30 something couple who live in Berlin. They are designers, social media influencers, social stars and generally enviable people. They seem to have it all together, from the dishes in their kitchen to the plants in their windowsill to the types of friends they spend time with,––if we had a 2025 ideal, it would be them.

I know so many people hated them after reading it so I was expecting to as well, but I didn’t, not at all. I felt sorry for them. The author, Vincenco Latronico really nailed this book. He begins with Anna and Tom as two separate people, two different humans in their own right, and over time merges them into one homogenous blob of instagram-approved, well-lit, trendy, well-traveled sludge. It sums up everything social media has done to us, infiltrate our own ideas, our every moment with what someone else has deemed valuable. Down to the way we spend our time, who we root for, what brand of makeup to wear, how to style every outfit, how to think and what to think about everything to the point that we have transformed into a single-celled brainwashed organism. How he manages to capture this is brilliant, moving, and also disturbing.

Anna and Tom are lost—they did all the right things, chose the right careers, hung out with the right people, picked a cool city and yet they are both confused and dissatisfied with their lives, always wondering—should we move? Should we go to Spain? What about Antwerp? Whichever city they were told would be the most cool.

It’s in all this wondering that it becomes painfully clear that neither one of them knows what they want from their life, that they are now a single unit echoing the thoughts and feelings of some random chic person at an art gallery—and sadly, I saw myself in them.

Not from the listening to others part, but in their attempt to try to answer, what is living? Are we doing it? Are we succeeding. How can we experience joy or even have the pursuit of joy when there’s so much suffering in the world? And if we can’t fix the suffering directly, what does that mean for my real value as a person?

I’m not sure we ever have an answer to this. I think Vincenzo’s point is that the answers to those questions come inherently from really living, that maybe if you’re really living you don’t have time or the mental wherewithal to even ask—am I living right now? Is this a real life? Am I playing at something or really doing this?

The internet, and social media will do its darnedest to define what a life is, what its value is and if the person living it, is doing it properly. We are so confused about what it means these days that having any external force give us an answer——go to Greece, take a “candid photo” of yourself sipping wine with the wind billowing in your hair–– post to instagram—OK DONE–– You did it! ––You did life! Congratulations!–––feels like relief.

It’s absurd, the whole thing. But the book is amazing. Because sometimes it’s good to be called out, to have someone put into words the devolving of society, to mirror back our despair over what has become of us. And to look it in the face, cringe and all and think—is this what I truly want?

I still don’t know the answer to my question. But when I asked my friend John this week, “Am I living a life? Does my life count as living?” he sent me back a quote from Kurt Vonnegut, “We are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.”

It’s funny because it’s true, or feels true. The days I feel the most happy, or when I have those moments of bliss are the days I’m “farting around”, and piddling around my apartment or my neighborhood just doing whatever I want. It’s in this freedom where I get overwhelmed with the realization of my luck—that I get to piddle around.

That’s what Anna and Tom are missing—a remembering that it’s a miracle we’re here at all, that the fluke in itself is so outrageous that merely existing is an act of, well, perfection.