How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

by Michael Schur

In short: being good is impossible, and it was pointless to even try, and we should all just eat hormone-filled cheeseburgers, toss the trash directly into the Pacific Ocean, and give up.

Knowing we don’t have to be completely courageous or utterly kind or perfectly generous makes the arduous project of becoming better people seem less impossible.

The point is this: to demand perfection, or to hold people to impossible standards, is to deny the simple and beautiful reality that nobody is perfect.

You are people on earth. You are not alone here, and that means you owe the other people on earth certain things. What you owe them, more or less, is to live by rules they wouldn’t reject as unfair (assuming they’re decent, reasonable people).