Good Enough

This post is my entry for April’s IndieWeb Carnival being hosted by Aaron Leonard.

As with most things in life, you can approach good enough from multiple perspectives. For the sake of brevity, I’ll focus on the two that come to mind most often in my current existence and outlook.

Good enough can be a mantra to fight against the never-ending pursuit of perfection; perfection being the enemy of good. In a world where perfection is constantly in our faces with photo filters and social media posts of everyone around us living their best life, it can feel like nothing is good enough until it is perfect. I call bullshit. Perfection seeking is a fool’s errand and evaluating anything with perfection being the success criteria of what is good enough has that fool doing cartwheels in our fragile and flawed human minds.

Adjust your scale and allow good enough to become any level of anything that both makes you happy and satisfies your needs. Not your wants. Not your warped perception of the world based on the Internet and all the generative AI tricks it hurls at your little glass house like a futuristic trebuchet. Let good enough become a weapon against anything that you know you’ve done to a level you’re satisfied with, yet still feel an obligation to continue to refine for refinement’s sake.

Good enough can also be the mantra of accepting the current state of mediocrity that we’re led to believe is modern success of industry and technology. Clothes that are so cheaply manufactured and cheaply sold that they feel cheap and wear like shit, but are good enough. I call bullshit again. The fact is that we’ve been conditioned, dare I say programmed, to believe this form of good enough is not only acceptable quality for life, but a quality of life.

Modern life. Where we have the technology, and convenience because of it, that we should subject ourselves to good enough meal from a convenient restaurant, conveniently brought to our doorstep by a delivery gig worker and every human in the chain of custody is aiming for that thin line below good enough to meet the margin and not an atom more. This form of good enough is a parasite to the tangible life and should be eradicated. This form of good enough is one that we should all take a stand against and say loud and proud we refuse to accept it or that it is a demonstration of our modern capabilities.

I frame good enough as an evaluation of the Dieter Rams concept of less, but better. In one way, the emphasis is on the less, because anything more would be more than enough vs. good enough. In other cases, the emphasis falls on better and the evaluation is that it may be less, but it is not better in any form and it is not (for me) good enough.

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