Kim Mills: Have you ever done a job interview where you’re asked “What’s your biggest weakness?” And did you answer, “Oh, I’m such a perfectionist”? There’s a good reason this answer has become a job interview cliche. Perfection, after all, is usually seen as a selling point, an asset disguised as a flaw. Who wouldn’t want to hire a perfect employee, after all?
But psychologists’ research suggests that perfectionism may not be something to aspire to after all. In recent years, researchers have found rising rates of perfectionism in the United States and around the world, and they’ve begun to recognize the toll that the drive to be perfect can take on people’s mental health and well-being.
So why do more and more of us feel the need to push ourselves to perfection? Does our achievement culture demand it? Is it social media and the endless comparisons that come with it? And what does it mean to be a perfectionist anyway? How is perfectionism different from just striving for excellence? And what can we do as individuals, as parents, as a society to help ourselves and each other recognize that often, good is good enough?
Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.
My guest today is Dr. Thomas Curran, an associate professor in the department of psychological and behavioral science at the London School of Economics. He’s a leading expert on perfectionism and how perfectionism is increasing in the modern world. His popular TED Talk on perfectionism has been viewed more than 3 million times, and his research has been covered by news outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and CNN.com. His debut book is The Perfection Trap: Embracing the Power of Good Enough.
Dr. Curran, thank you for joining me today.
Thomas Curran, PhD: Pleasure to be speaking with you, Kim.
Mills: Back in 2019, you published a study that found rising rates of perfectionism in young people in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. over the past several decades. Tell us about that work. What kind of data did you look at? What did you find?
Curran: Yeah, that was, I suppose, my biggest paper I’ve ever published. And I didn’t realize at the time it was going to be quite the story. It was really a hunch. Sometimes the best ideas are the simplest ideas, and I just had a hunch. I was seeing young people in my office—I’m a professor, so I work with be young people a lot. And it became evident to me over recent years that there was a lot of pressure that young people are putting on themselves. They were feeling that they weren’t good enough or that no matter how hard they tried, they weren’t achieving in the ways in which they were hoping to achieve. And I was seeing a lot of requests for not just academic support, but also mental health support as well. And all of this seemed to be bound up in this idea of self-imposed pressure.
So one of the things I decided to do was to try to see if there is a trend here, something happening, something in the water around young people and whether we can maybe detect any of those changes in levels of perfectionism. So that was the hunch and I collated all the possible information that we could possibly collect on levels of perfectionism in college students from the U.S., U.K., Canada, starting in around 1989, so late '80s and all the way through to around 2021, 2022. And because college students have broadly similar characteristics, which is by the way a terrible thing for sampling generally in psychology, but it does happen to have an advantage when it comes to comparing across generations because they’re broadly similar, reliable comparisons. And if you string them out over time, you see rising levels of perfectionism among young people. And that hunch was confirmed in the data, and those rises were quite steep, particularly for what’s called socially prescribed perfectionism, which is a sense that other people and everyone around me expects me to be perfect. That was rising exponentially at a rate of about 33% increase since the late '80s. So yeah, some really interesting and challenging findings, and that propelled me, I suppose, into the TED Talk sphere and writing a book and all the rest of it, because people really wanted to know about this phenomenon.
Mills: Well, how do researchers measure perfectionism? Was there some kind of scale that you used or did you have to create one?
Curran: Yeah, so luckily there is scale that most researchers use when they study perfectionism. It’s called the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale. It was developed by two psychologists, Paul Hewitt—Canadian psychologist Paul Hewitt, and Gordon Flett. I think Gordon Flett’s been on the podcast previously. Incredible scholars. They did a lot of heavy lifting in this area, developed the scale, and that’s what we’ve been using across the years. And that’s amazing because we’ve got one consistent tool there. It’s a paper and pencil questionnaire that measures socially prescribed perfectionism, as I mentioned, but also something called self-oriented perfectionism, which is perfectionism that comes from within—high self-standards and excessive self-standards. And students have responded to this same survey now for about 30, 35 years. So that gives us a treasure of data really to make these, do these cohort analyses, and that’s what we’ve used to derive our conclusions from.
Mills: What are a couple of the questions? Just so our listeners can understand what you ask people that indicates that, yeah, you’re a perfectionist.
Curran: So self-oriented perfectionism is a form of perfectionism that comes from inside of us. It’s high self-set goals and expectations, and we might use an item, “I expect myself to be perfect” or “everything I do has to be perfect.” And we might measure that on a 1 to 5 Likert scale. So if you don’t really agree with that statement, then you might say, I don’t agree with that statement. So it might be a 1. If you really agree with that statement and strongly agree, you would put a 5, and everywhere in between.
So these perfectionist constructs, they really operate on a spectrum. So higher or lower, most people are in the middle, and that middle bit is increasing over time. As we saw in our data, socially prescribed perfectionism were another form of perfectionism that we measure, and that’s really rooted in pressures from the outside world. So other people who expect me to be perfect, my parents expect me to be perfect, for example. Those are the sorts of things we might ask to measure socially prescribed perfectionism. And again, same principle, if you disagree it’s a 1, if you agree it’s a 5 and everywhere in between. And once you aggregate those items, get an average, you can get a reasonably good idea of where you sit on the spectrum.
Mills: Now you’ve talked about different kinds of perfectionism. You said self-oriented, other oriented, and socially prescribed. Have all of these been increasing?
Curran: Yes, but it’s important to bear in mind that when it comes to self-oriented perfectionism that started from a high baseline. So in the late '80s it was already quite high. It’s a 5-point Likert scale. It was around 4—the mean scores across many, many samples of college students. So that already started high. It went even higher over time. But what was really interesting is not necessarily the self-perfectionism, although that was an interesting finding, but what was going on with socially prescribed is really interesting because that didn’t start very high. That started around 3. So around the midpoint of the scale. Basically most people said, yeah, kind of not to those items. However, we’re seeing that now sharply accelerated. We’ve updated a 2019 paper with new data and we’re seeing a sharp acceleration in recent years with socially prescribed pressures.
And that’s really worrying because it’s those social pressures that most concern us when it comes to things like mental health. They have the strongest link with depression, anxiety, worry, rumination. And so that’s what concerns us because what we used to see perhaps in the past was high striving or high self-oriented perfectionism, but moderate levels socially prescribed perfectionism. But now what we’re seeing is a slightly different pattern in recent generations where you’ve got high self-oriented perfectionism but fast accelerating socially prescribed perfection.
Mills: What do you think is driving these increases? I mean, what’s changed in our society in the last couple of decades that would lead to this rising perfectionism?
Curran: That’s a whole book in and of itself. I mean, first of all, it’s not a causal analysis. So essentially anything I say here will be speculative, but nevertheless, we can say with reasonable confidence that there are a number of factors and one of which we have empirically tested. So one of the things we think is happening is parental behaviors are changing. The way in which we rear children is changing. There’s a lot more pressure, a lot more surveillance, a lot more monitoring of young people, for good reason, and also a lot more expectations as well that’s been placed on young people, particularly in the academic sphere. And there’s a lot of evidence to support those claims. But we’ve shown empirically that young people are perceiving that the parents are demanding more of them, particularly in the academic route. And those higher demands, those higher expectations are highly correlated with perfectionism.
So you put those two things together and you begin to see that change in parental practices towards more expectant and controlling forms of rearing have a direct correlation with perfectionism. And that may be one of the reasons why perfectionism is rising among young people. But there are factors way beyond parenting. And it’s also important to recognize that this isn’t something that parents are doing intentionally. They’re just responding to pressures in the outside world, right? I mean, Ivy League acceptance rates are around 5% today. They were 10% in 2014. That is an incredible amount of pressure that parents see, they feel, and they’re going to naturally translate that downwards to their kids in terms of higher academic expectations because they know it’s even harder to get into the elite colleges. And elite college education is really important if you want to get into the elite professions.
So parents are just responding to wider pressures that are going on in the wider environment, and that isn’t just in schools or colleges, when it comes to standardized testing and more stringent entry criteria. It’s also the broader economy—we’ve slowed down, and that means less opportunities for young people, particularly in the workplace. So that’s an added pressure that young people feel and also parents feel. So again, that ratchets up the pressure. And there of course are other factors. Social media among them—that has come on the scene in the last 10 years that certainly hasn’t helped when it’s come to those social pressures and those idealized images of how we should be looking and appearing and behaving. There’s so many factors that we could point to, but in our work and in our theorizing, those are the main ones.
Mills: Now, your study looked at perfectionism in college students, but is it also increasing in other age groups? And you talked about parents kind of leading the way. Are they themselves perfectionists or they’re just foisting this on their kids?
Curran: A bit of both. Parental perfectionism is very strongly correlated with child perfectionism. We have to be a bit careful there because disaggregating what is social modeling from genes is a tricky one. If—we know about 30-40% of perfectionism is heritage, so a lot of it is genetic. But beyond that, there will be parent socialization that is at play. And there are many different pathways in which parents can transmit perfectionism to young people, through expectations as I’ve talked about, but also through something called conditional regard. So there’s conditionality of approval that can occur within parents that teaches children that they’re only worth something when they’ve achieved or done something well. And so conditional regard is a big one.
There’s also anxious forms of rearing that come into play as well. When children see parents behaving anxiously or fearing failure or treating mistakes of failure as big deals, as big problems, that teaches children themselves that those things are big problems and they want to avoid them. So there’s all sorts of different pathways through which parenting can impact on perfectionism, but it is also important to remember that it is highly genetic too.
Mills: Have you been able to follow college students over time? So when they leave school and they go into the workplace, do they continue to have that perfectionism?
Curran: Yes, they do. There’s not much life course analysis when it comes to perfectionism, so it is very difficult to say whether this is something that ameliorates or doesn’t ameliorate over time. We know neuroticism does ameliorate over time, and so there may be an argument that that’s the same for perfectionism. We need to test that. There was a couple of studies that show perfectionism can perhaps be a little stickier than neuroticism. One study shows that perfectionism and perfectionistic irritability seems to be quite sticky across the lifespan, but that’s an isolated study. We need to do more there. So it may be the case that perfectionism is a little bit more of a stable construct over time than something like neuroticism or maybe it isn’t. We just don’t know.
Mills: What role do you think that this increase in perfectionism and in the achievement culture is playing in driving the youth mental health crisis?
Curran: Well, it’s not the whole picture, of course. We are very keen to highlight perfectionism as a public health concern. We think that these are trends that are telling us something about the way young people are perceiving themselves or viewing themselves in relation to other people, the way that they’re perceiving the social environment and how demanding it is and what this expected of them. And we think these are very salient trends in those respects. And because perfectionism, particularly socially prescribed perfectionism has such a strong correlation with things like depression, anxiety, self-presentational concerns – and among psychologists, when I say big correlation, I mean for psychology research, big correlations, we’re talking about around 25% explained depression and anxiety. Now, that’s a lot when it comes to psychology research. Because they share such large correlation we do think that perfectionism might be a part of the youth mental health crisis that we’re currently seeing. Not the only part, but certainly a part.
Mills: When we think about stereotypes of achievement culture like the pressure to get perfect grades, and in the U.S., these high SAT scores, to get into college, or participating in the right extracurricular activities, it feels like something that applies mostly to the top end of the socioeconomic ladder. Is that correct or is this tendency cutting across the socioeconomic spectrum?
Curran: No, that would be correct to say. And Dr. Luthar has published some incredibly important research on this topic showing that the more affluent teens are actually those that disproportionately suffer in terms of their mental health from the achievement pressures that they experience at school, the ones that are most aggressively primed for elite college. And they experience a lot of psychological difficulties, substance abuse issues and behavioral issues, a lot of which is actually not as documented, I think as perhaps it should be, because we quite rightly focus on the more deprived end of the socioeconomic spectrum. Absolutely we do because there’s a lot of suffering there for many, many reasons. But also at the same time, I think it’s important for us to highlight that there are teens at the higher end of the socioeconomic spectrum who are suffering from an excessive need to achieve, so much pressure they’re putting on themselves partly rooted in perfectionism, but having impacts more broadly on their mental health.
Mills: Is the educational system itself contributing to this? I mean, I know kids today come home with hours of homework. When I was a kid, maybe I had a half an hour or max an hour’s worth of homework every night. I don’t know how kids do it today.
Curran: It’s an incredibly tough schooling process. I think on average there’s about 130 standardized tests that young people will undertake from kindergarten to the 12th grade. I mean, that’s an incredible amount of testing and ranking and sifting and sorting. And so you can only imagine the ways in which young people begin to construe a sense of self and identity in those contexts, which is essentially self-identity pinned to how well we perform, where we sit in the rank. Of course, that’s a very fragile sense of self-worth, because the moment things go wrong or the moment we get a bad test score, our self-esteem plummets and we start to experience a lot of rumination, shame, guilt, stress. And there’s no doubt that there’s a lot of pressure in schooling. And I understand the need to have standardized testing. Of course there is a place for it. But I think what we have at the moment is an excessive culture of standardized testing, which is creating a lot of worry, a lot of anxiety.
Mills: Given your knowledge of all this, do you go easy on your students? Do you give fewer tests?
Curran: I don’t want to give them any tests if I can avoid it. I feel like they’ve done that enough at this point. But no, the way that I try to assess is really to emphasize the feedback, to make sure that especially in the first year, because in the U.K. system the first year doesn’t count anything as much. We try not to even give them a grade. It’s all about what was done well, what could be improved, and those things to focus on as you develop your understanding, knowledge in a certain area. And that’s difficult because it’s really jarring for students to come into that different way of learning, to not have a grade until, not have something they can anchor their sense of self around. But ultimately, it’s a much healthier way to learn, I think.
Mills: Is there such a thing as healthy perfectionism? I mean, can you be a perfectionist in a way that’s not detrimental to your well-being?
Curran: I’m going to say no, but this is a contentious topic, and if you speak to other psychologists in the area, you may get different answers. It’s all good fun. But it does hit on, I think something really important. And that’s the question of whether this is a construct that we need to find the positives in or it’s something that we need to find a completely different track to, and that there is nothing positive about perfectionism and we need to step onto a different pathway.
Even the high standards, the excessive standards are themselves negative in my mind for two reasons. The first is because even if we do meet those high and excessive standards, the perfectionist can never enjoy them because there’s always got to be something more. So we can’t appreciate our successes even if we get them. And also, of course, there’s problems when things don’t go quite so well for those high self-standard perfectionists because that’s a big hit to their self-esteem.
And so what they tend to do is avoid and iterate and procrastinate, is try to avoid those feelings of shame and guilt from making a mistake or hitting a setback. So that actually blocks our progress in the end, it doesn’t carry us forward. And so for my mind, I think that the negatives far outweigh any positives that you might find from being a perfectionist. Much better is to try to situate ourselves on a better track where we’re focusing on our efforts, we are focusing on the process of learning. We’re trying to hit higher goals, but we’re maintaining the sense of perspective and that we’re allowing ourselves to enjoy successes when they arrive. Those are all markers of a high achiever, and it doesn’t preclude high achievement by taking a slightly different track. But what it does mean is that we can enjoy the process and as a consequence, we can find psychological well-being, purpose and meaning through that process, which is things that we just simply can’t do if perfectionism is in the driving seat.
Mills: Part of your story is that you were a perfectionist. Isn’t that true? I mean, you recognize that in yourself and it kind of changed the way that you approach life. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Curran: Yeah, like a lot of people these days who are trying to climb the career ladder perfectionism really did take over in my own life, particularly in my early to mid-20s when I was working all sorts of hours to try to lift myself above other people to try and get as many publications out there as I could, to try and win as many grants as I could, to looking around at how other people are doing and using that as my benchmark for how good I should be doing. And there’s an argument to suggest that it was part of why I’m here, but also it came at heavy cost and burnout. I had to leave work for a number of months. It was a very difficult period both in my personal life as well because it created all sorts of overflows in terms of my relationships with other people.
And so there was a lot of collateral. And although ostensibly I looked like I was a high achiever, underneath, I was really sinking. And that was an impetus for me to take a different direction, choose a different track, to try to remove those narcissistic self-reference tendencies that I held within me, that contingent self-esteem that I held within me based on my achievement and how I was appearing relative to other people. And actually just try to be more centered and focus on what it is that I want to leave in the world, what it is I want to learn and I want to share. And that flicking that switch really helped me because it gave me a bigger purpose. It made me look more holistically. It made me want to ask bigger questions about what’s happening at a societal level. And ultimately that was the real reason why I think I’m here is because if I continued on that track, I’d have burnt out and I would be really struggling. But now I’m able to have good work-life balance and ask really interesting questions, which is one of the reasons I’m talking to you I suppose.
Mills: Given that experience and also the research that you’ve done, do you have advice, really specific advice for people who recognize the harmful perfectionist tendencies that they have and they want to change? What can they do?
Curran: There’s loads of things to bear in mind, and again, that’s also probably another book, but there’s a few things that I’ve found really useful in my experience and also to have some evidence behind them. The first is that self-compassion is a big part of combatting perfectionism and self-compassion is really about recognizing that we are a fallible, exhaustible human being and that we’re going to make mistakes that are going to hit setbacks, and that’s just part and part sort of what it means to be human. And so recognizing that and actually internalizing that, and then making sure that we check in on ourselves when things go wrong and we go easy on ourselves and maybe when we’re harshly self-critical about how can you be so stupid and what were you thinking, making sure we actively step in and intervene in those moments and find constructive and compassionate ways to move forward is really, really important. Because silencing that inner critic is a big part of combating perfectionism.
I think also on a work basis, one of the things I’ve found really useful is to try to prioritize, put my priorities into buckets. There are things that require high level diligence. There are things that require the activities to be good enough, and then there are things that just need to get done. Not everything has to be done at a hundred miles an hour. Not everything has to be done to the minute, to absolutely perfectly. Maybe some things require a little bit of conscientiousness, but actually most things in the work I’ve done – and actually to be an efficient worker, we have to prioritize efficiently too, and we have to recognize that there are some tasks where good enough is good enough and actually making progress is more important than getting things absolutely perfect first time round. So it’s definitely helped me in terms prioritizing and putting my tasks into buckets and allowing myself, giving myself permission for things not quite to be of a certain standard for tasks that don’t need to be of that certain standard.
And finally, I also like to journal. I think this is a lot of evidence for journaling for all sorts of psychological ailments, but particularly for perfectionism, just writing down our fears can be so important because one of the things that blocks perfectionist people is the fear that things might go wrong. They catastrophize a lot. And so writing down your fears, not ignoring them or suppressing them, but actually writing them down, what is it you’re worried about? What’s stopping you making progress in this moment? And write it down, journal it, and then ask yourself, well, what steps, practical steps can I put in place to avoid that worst case scenario happening? And then draw it through to its conclusion if it were to happen. So let’s say it did happen, what can we do to bring ourselves back to square one?
And just putting those fears under the microscope and putting practical ways forward in the case to avoid it in the first case, but then in the case of actually happening, how do we move ourselves back is a really, really good way to break down those fears, and it allows us to have a roadmap to move forward, and then we could just get on and do it without that fear holding us back.
Mills: What about parents and other caregivers? What can they do to encourage their kids while buffering them from the pressures that lead to perfectionism? I mean, you know, you want your kid to get into the best school, but how can you keep your child from becoming overly anxious and suffering?
Curran: Yeah, there’s a few things I would recommend to parents. First thing is don’t put too much pressure on yourself because parenting is one of the hardest jobs. You can go into it, the best intentions, and you can find very quickly that you’re reduced to a helpless spectator, and that’s just normal and natural and part and parcel of the process. So that I think is the first thing. Putting too much pressure on yourself to get things just right. Winicott’s idea of the good enough parent is something that springs to mind when I think about parenting—is you can’t perfect everything, and that’s good for kids because life is not perfect.
So a couple, okay, practical things. Well, first of all, don’t hitch your approval to achievement or how much effort kids are putting in, particularly when it comes to sports or academic activities. It’s good to have standards. It’s good to want children to do the best they can, but you have to be really careful as parents, not to subtly qualify your approval based on the expectation that young people do more. It’s very easy to slip into that trap when young people have done well, they’ve come home, they’ve got an A in their test, and you go, that’s great. Okay, keep working. Right? Because that full approval, full validation of recognition of parents is subtly withheld under the understanding of more. So essentially what we’re doing is we’re holding young people on tiptoes under the expectation they keep working. And that teaches them that they’re only really worth something in this world if they strive and strive and strive. And if they achieve and achieve and achieve, and the moment they don’t, then the implication is that other people value them less. So conditional acceptance is really problematic when it comes to development of perfectionism.
So it’s really important that you give your kids full unqualified approval when they’ve done well, but also when things haven’t gone quite so well, you give them a hug, you tell them, it’s okay. It’s just one test of many of the tests, right? It’s not an indictment on you. It doesn’t say anything about whether your teacher likes you or whether you are good at this particular subject. It’s just one test. And the most important thing is to immerse yourself in the learning process and things will turn around if you keep doing the revision and the reading and all the rest of it. I think it’s really important to put our arm around our children in those moments and make sure that we just give just as much acceptance when they’ve done well, when they haven’t quite as well.
And the second thing I would say is also just normalize mistakes, failures, setbacks. If you’ve had a bad day at work, it’s okay to communicate that with young people. It’s okay to sit around the dinner table and laugh about it. It lets them know that these things happen as part and parcel of the real world, and that if their parents can laugh about it, if their parents can share it openly, then that gives them permission to do it too. And so those are the two main ones. But as I said at the beginning, it’s really, really hard. And to any parent out there, you’re doing a great job.
Mills: Is there something we can be doing on a societal level to stop this rise in perfectionism?
Curran: Yes. And one of the things that I write about the final part of the book is how society might need to change to provide less pressure or provide a context of less pressure, particularly on young people. And there are many things that I’ve recommended, none of which I think are necessarily going to be implemented, but they’re almost quite utopic in some ways. But I do think that if they were, we would see less pressure, one of which is an expansion of participation in higher education. I think it’s scandalous actually, that universities haven’t expanded participation because all we’re really doing is excluding more and more kids as colleges become more and more competitive, and that’s not the way forward. And it needs to be vast investment in education. Education has so many benefits at a societal level, not just for young people, but society at large.
And the more that we don’t increase the pie at universities, the more that’s going to become more competitive and the more pressure’s going to be on young people to get to gain access. So I think that’s one thing we could do to help. Another thing is, I think at a broader level, I’m really big advocate of UBI. The universal basic income is something that we’re probably going to see anyway as AI comes in to capture a lot of productivity and jobs. I think it’s going to be needed as an emergency measure to bridge the gap between that world now and the new world where AI does a lot of the work that we used to do.
But I think that will have many, many benefits. And in particular, it’ll take away the sort of scarcity that often is the fire for perfectionism. This idea that if we take a risk but it doesn’t pay off that we’re going to be destitute. It’s a lot of fear, it’s a lot of worries, a lot of precarity, and that creates a lot of perfectionism at a societal level. And UBI has been advocated across the board from left to right on its ability to spur creativity, to spur innovation, to give almost a safety net that allows us to try new things and be innovative. And without it, it stifles that innovation because perfectionism holds us back. And there are other things I advocate in the book, but I think those are the two big ones.
Mills: So what’s next for you? What are you working on? What’s your next book
Curran: At the moment? I’m just going to take a little bit of time off to recover from what’s been a grueling year or two. I’ve loved writing the book. I’ve loved getting out there. I’ve loved speaking to people. I’ve loved talking about perfectionism. It’s really one of the reasons I did it was to spread the message, but at the same time, it’s quite exhausting as well. And I have a young family now, and I think it’s time for me to switch gears a little bit and focus on my family. And then maybe in a few years time, I’ll write another book. I have some ideas on what might come next, but I think for now, I’m just going to listen to my own advice and get a bit of work-life balance.
Mills: Well, Dr. Curran, I want to thank you for joining me today.
Curran: It’s been fantastic to talk. Thank you for having me.
Mills: To read more about Dr. Curran’s and other psychologists research on perfectionism, visit the October issue of APA’s magazine, Monitor on Psychology. Go to www.apa.org/monitor. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you’ve heard, please subscribe and leave us a review.
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Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.
Thomas Curran, PhD, is an associate professor in the department of psychological and behavioural science at the London School of Economics. He is a leading expert on perfectionism and has written on this and related topics for TIME magazine and the Harvard Business Review. His work has been featured in the New Scientist, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, among many other publications. In 2018, he gave a TEDMED talk entitled Our Dangerous Obsession with Perfectionism is Getting Worse and in 2023 he published his debut book, The Perfection Trap.
