Perfectionism in wellness and parenting is flight from structural unwellness

Evidence

This is what unsettles me most about the race for perfection at work in the interlocking worlds of wellness and parenting: the pervasive structural unwellness from which the hyperwell and insistently perfect are so clearly fleeing. The unwellness that is all around. At bottom, I suspect that much of the mirroring and doubling we are seeing comes down to who and what we cannot bear to see, to really look at—in our midst, in our past, and in the tumultuous future racing toward us. There are many different ways to try to outrun our shadows. Succumbing to conspiracy worlds is only one of them. And it was toward a confrontation with those shadows that this mapping was taking me, inexorably, next. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 733

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The ‘outrunning our shadows’ generalization is the book’s analytic engine — mirroring and doubling as a unified account of both conspiracy and liberal perfectionism. Dense and paradigm-organizing, though it does its heavy lifting later.
• XREF: Directly anticipates the book’s culmination in confronting the Israel/Palestine shadow, which the reader is tracking through the later chapters. — connects to: Feeling overwhelmed reflects real structural overload, not personal time mismanagement — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1894