“Nobody’s perfect” may be one of the rare phrases that turns double standards into an art form. Another contender, of course, would be “one of the most…”—a phrase that somehow wants to be absolute and evasive at the same time.
The charm of “nobody’s perfect” is that it works in two entirely opposite directions. It can be used as a shield for oneself, or for someone one has already decided to excuse. It can also be used as a verdict against others, or against someone one believes should not be excused at all. Put simply: I can be “nobody’s perfect,” and therefore spared certain responsibilities; other people can also be “nobody’s perfect,” and therefore whatever they did may be neatly filed under “idiotic.”
I remember seeing one of those “positive energy” videos a long time ago. The setup was roughly this: a person was first asked to name the part of their face they felt least confident about. Then several artists drew portraits of that person. Only after the drawings were finished did the artists learn what the person had said about their own insecurity.
Because the subject and the artists had been kept apart during the process, only the subject could hear the artists being interviewed afterward. When the artists learned what the person disliked about themselves, they said they had never seen that feature as a “flaw.” What they had noticed instead were other qualities—things the subject might never have recognized in themselves. In the portraits, the so-called insecurity was not deliberately magnified. The details the person had overlooked, those small points of brightness, had been drawn out instead.
The message of the video was essentially this: everyone has reason to feel confident, because other people do not necessarily see the defects we fear most. They may notice something else in us entirely.
It is a pleasant message. It is also, if forced back into the present social climate, a little absurd. If you are a man and you tell a strange woman, “You look beautiful today,” it may take less than ten minutes before some post appears online about how “men are so creepy.” Of course, if you are handsome enough, whether it is creepy becomes a separate discussion. Then again, if you are really that handsome, why would you need to go up to a stranger and say “you’re beautiful” in the first place?
So what I took from that video was not exactly its harmonious, uplifting meaning. What I read in it was something more uncomfortable: other people’s judgments may indeed be more objective, but they often need a reference point before they can produce another supposedly objective judgment in response to it.
To be fair, the artists in the video did not know beforehand what the subject felt insecure about. Their kindness and respect toward the person they observed seemed genuine. But those two things—respect and kindness—are precisely what have become difficult to count on. In the present world, even between spouses, one may not necessarily find the respect and gentleness that should be there, let alone a sincere willingness to express praise or love.
Some praise can only be spoken after the flaw has been identified.
This inverted logic exists in many families of origin. Of course, in a larger number of families, even the act of praise is absent altogether. Some elementary school writing assignments even ask children to write about “my shortcomings.” Under that kind of education, it is already a miracle if the psychology it produces still manages to feel human. Asking such people to identify their strengths is another matter entirely.
For a while, there was a popular kind of psychological exercise, usually presented as a form of “reconciling with oneself.” The task was simple: say what your strengths are. What followed could be quite interesting. Some people, in order to discover their “strengths,” first had to start from their “weaknesses,” and then imagine the opposite quality. Others—more commonly—first located flaws in other people, and then used those flaws as a contrast to infer what virtues they themselves might possess.
This method is not necessarily right or wrong. What is worth thinking about is the reference point being used. If someone has grown up in an education system devoted to detecting flaws, then asking them to find their own merits is genuinely painful. Their attention has always been trained on the expectation that these so-called defects should be transformed into virtues. Whether those defects ever truly become virtues is something everyone understands well enough, even if no one says it aloud.
There are also people who are remarkably frank about their shortcomings. But even once those shortcomings are recognized, they do not change anything. Instead, the flaw becomes a kind of “strength,” a tool for avoiding responsibilities that should have been theirs, or for excusing their behavior in advance.
“Ah, I’m just that kind of person. I can’t change.”
The unspoken meaning is: my behavior cannot be changed; if anyone must adjust, it will have to be you.
This is why I have always felt that the old saying, “One cannot befriend a person without obsessions, for such a person has no deep feeling,” contains a fatal problem. “Nobody’s perfect” is certainly true. The problem is: who gets to decide whether an imperfect trait is a defect, a charming eccentricity, or an endearing blemish?
In other words, which person is more worth forming a deep friendship with: someone who lives in pursuit of perfection, demands rigor from themselves in everything, and even extends those standards to others; or someone who does not care much about right and wrong, lives loosely and freely, and is covered head to toe in quirks and flaws?
That question is extreme. Between those two poles lies an enormous amount of space. But people enjoy extracting philosophical pleasure from sharp, painless sentences about right and wrong, as if the extremes themselves were the point.
“Nobody’s perfect” is enjoyable precisely because that space is so large. It can be used on oneself, to excuse one’s mistakes or to live more lightly. It can be used on others, to condemn their behavior—or to deceive oneself into believing that they may still come around.