A mishandled brushstroke, a loose thread in a hand-stitched garment, or a typo in a handwritten letter can all be considered human errors.
While these may seem as simple as human errors, would we truly be a society without them?
Imagine a world where no mistakes were made. Can you picture it? No, you can’t. Because as humans, we were designed to mess up, to be imperfect.
We are all familiar with the concept of perfection. What’s beautiful about perfection is that everyone perceives it differently. If I showed someone two paintings, one made by a human and one made by AI, their opinion on which is “better” would surprise anyone else. While some may view perfection as meaningful, others may prefer something lifeless, simple, and “perfect”.
Why can we no longer make mistakes?
A friend once told me she no longer creates art. When asked why, she claimed that her art must be flawless; otherwise, she cannot create at all, which leads to her feeling lazy. Many people, specifically teenagers, have suffered from similar thoughts.
What people fail to recognise is that sometimes even the smallest imperfection is what makes a creation so beautiful. A parent may walk into their child’s kindergarten classroom and stare at the macaroni art. How would they know which piece their child made if every single one looks like the picture? No parent will be able to say, “That’s my child’s; they always add too much glue to the sides,” when creativity is stripped away from us.
Why can we no longer create for fun? Nobody is going to see all of our creations, and yet people are on a constant high of being the best. The pursuit of perfection permeates everything, including the activities we once found enjoyable.
The comfort in making mistakes
At times, when I crochet a bag for myself, I find a peculiar sense of comfort in pinpointing every misplaced stitch and every intricate detail involved. And sometimes I’ll compare my work with someone better than I, and it makes me want to kill myself, but I realise that they will never know how much love truly went into making my sort of wonky handbag; they will never know exactly what objects I used to measure its size — and there is beauty in knowing that at one point you messed up badly and had to start all over again.
When one receives a handwritten letter, they’ll notice scribbles in between the pages and ink spilt and smudged. And while reading, they can picture the other writing at their desk; a typed-out letter on perfect paper could not have that homey effect.
A world without smudges of ink
Someday, a person who once loved to create beautiful gowns will slave away in the dark, making sure that not even a thread is loose at the very bottom of the skirt.
Someday, as we stroll through the hallowed halls of an art museum, each painting will have a uniform appearance — each will be deemed “the perfect painting”.
Upon the street, the hair of the passers-by will be a flawless shade of midnight black; there will be no room for an un-ironed shirt or an untied shoelace.
Eventually, in the pursuit of perfection, humans will lose the vibrancy in all their activities, resulting in a dull world devoid of personality — is that truly what we desire?