Welcome back! Well, I’m kind of saying welcome back for us- for you I say thanks for hanging in there! I know it’s been quite awhile since we last wrote (Jane posted our official welcome back last week, but I want to chime in as well and say THANK YOU to you guys for once again reading!). I’m really happy to be writing here again! It’s serendipitous that I’m in Orlando right now while writing this, because the last post I wrote for OMGIm30, back in January, was also written in Orlando- and was actually about Orlando.

One of the reasons I took a break from writing was that my work travel schedule had gotten completely insane (my busiest travel time is January-May). Another reason was that I felt like I wanted to revamp the site and fix a bunch of issues with wordpress. One of the issues we’ve been having is that people who view our site on mobile devices have trouble subscribing to our email list, so if any awesome tech nerds are reading this and have ideas how to solve this through wordpress, please drop us a line at omgim30@gmail.com. It would be really appreciated!

Anyway, there’s a lot of other tweaks to the site I’d like to make- but the real writing issue wasn’t the tweaks or the travel- it was that I was waiting and waiting for all complex things in my life to be done and fixed before I started writing again. I was really waiting for perfection before I could resume. And that’s where I started thinking “the perfect is the enemy of the good.”

..Which is a famous phrase, basically coming down to not completing a task because it feels impossible to complete perfectly. An example of ‘perfect being the enemy of good’ is not publishing a blogpost because I felt like it could be edited another 3 times and was not sure it was absolutely perfect. Another example is putting off writing any posts for months because I didn’t feel like my life or schedule was perfect.

This whole concept is closely related to the Nirvana Fallacy, where tasks aren’t even STARTED because they’re regarded as ‘imperfect’. A good example of the Nirvana Fallacy  is someone saying to me, ‘why bother being a vegetarian if you’re not fully vegan? If you still eat eggs and dairy, you harm animals anyway. Why not just eat meat too and screw it?” Or even someone saying “sex ed classes don’t work because kids are still going to have unsafe sex.” Sigh. That’s the Nirvana Complex in action- where you shoot something down that REDUCES harm because it doesn’t COMPLETELY eradicate harm.

How much does the pursuit of perfection overshadow the pursuit of good in your own life? When have you found yourself trapped in the Nirvana Complex as an excuse to not do something you think is important? Here’s to us all going for it anyway! And welcoming in new beginnings!

Imperfect rainbow in Orlando. Still a good rainbow, even though it’s above a McDonalds.