I’ve been pondering this whole thing for quite a while now and I believe that there are some radical and deep seated cultural assumptions that prevent either side from seeing the other’s perspective clearly. And I think that it’s important to see the other side clearly because at the core, theres a lot of valuable understanding that can come from this.
Standard disclaimers: When I’m referring to a cultural group, I’m not generalising across the entire group. Rather, I’m referring to a smaller subgroup which happens to reside largely within that cultural group. All relationships are correlations, not absolutes. Also, just because you can cite horrible examples does not mean the fundamental principle is unsound. Like most things, this is pretty much a fundamentally good idea wrapped up in tons and tons of shitty implementations. Crappy parents are everywhere and they would probably be crappy no matter what they believed in.
Speaking from an Asian cultural background, what I would say is a more accurate description is that it’s a culture of improvement rather than perfection although it can easily look like perfection from an outsider. It’s the notion that improvement, in and of itself is a goal worth seeking and not something that is merely a means to other goals such as money or happiness. And that there exists some platonic goal to improve towards of which any improvement is one to be celebrated. IMHO, this is most evident in Japanese culture where there is practically a national past time made out of improving things and a society that is willing to support it. There exists apples in japan that sell for hundreds of US dollars. Why? Not because they believe a $100 apple tastes many times better than a $1 apple, but simply because they believe that the quest for the platonic apple is something that is worth striving towards and that the appreciation of that quest is what is worth the $100. The same applies to hundreds of facets of japanese life where such dedication is the norm and not the exception. Kobe beef cows are fed beer and massaged daily, calligraphy masters work for many years to perfect their strokes, tea ceremonies, flower arranging, samuri etc etc. I could go onto a big diversion here about how this also manifests itself in the Chinese national exam systems, both ancient and modern but I won’t right now. Anyway, the thing I believe is that what is actually being improved is largely irrelevant, the process is what is important, not the end results.
And so why is this process so important? Because once you stop improving, then your standing still. And no matter where you are, if you are standing still, than others will inevitably overtake you, no matter how long it might take them. From this perspective, of course theres never a “good enough”. Once you believe that something is good enough then where is your incentive to do better? It would be like suggesting to some americans that there is such a thing as “enough money”. Enough money will always be 1.5x what you are currently earning and any suggestion otherwise is absurd.
About the only thing which I’ve found mirrors this philosophy in popular american culture is sporting. Take a look at olympic sprinters for example. If you plot the world records for 100m sprints over time, you could almost fit a trend line to it bottoming out at around 9.5 seconds or so… In other words, the platonic sprint, the absolute limit of what a human body can physiologically do is 9.5 seconds. And for the last 50 years or so, sprinters have been dedicating their lives to slowly and methodically shaving 0.01 of a second off the world record to reach that hypothetical platonic sprint and Americans as a society has been dedicating literally millons of dollars so that we can witness an incremental improvement in the moving of a human body 100m. When you are so deep inside a culture, it can sometimes be hard to see the ridiculousness of it but if you step outside for a bit, that fanatical dedication and obsession over reaching the platonic human sprint makes $100 apples seem perfectly sane by comparison.
So the way to start to get a grasp of what drives this push, then just imagine the mindset of a competition sprinter and apply it to every other facet of life. Would people ever complain that "That kid ran a 9.85, he doesn’t need a coach anymore, he’s good enough as it is. Or that “That kid ran 9.81 and the coach is still pushing him, he should get more free time”. Even at high school levels, it’s accepted that your best is never good enough and that they only way to succeed is to constantly push your boundaries and improve. Precisely the things the OP is complaining about.
And the question to ask is why do americans seem to only hold this mindset for sport and almost not anything else? Why should we not approach math the same way? Why this acceptance of mediocrity in almost every other field, that one can reach a certain stage and then cease to improve? In part, I think it’s because American society allows people to live with mediocrity. You can be mediocre in American society and lead a perfectly comfortable life. Hell, even be celebrated because you’re so “down to earth”. Asian culture is exactly the opposite. It’s only been until very recently that there’s become a burgeoning middle class. Before that, it was either to excel or be poor. But even now with the rise in living standards, a mediocre person with the same physical living standards would be drastically less happy in Asia because to be mediocre is to lose face. Face has always been a tricky concept to explain to people who didn’t grow up in that culture but to lose face is to basically become a pariah and to be shunned by your social network. To not try and improve yourself when you have the ability is a moral failure. Again, I want to note that this only applies really to a small subgroup of people within asia except that this subgroup happens to be a) highly influential and visible within their own culture and b) far more likely to emigrate and so overrepresented in American culture.
This is not to say that either of these approaches is neccesarily better than the other. The American approach seems fundamentally pragmatic. Why should I have to do any better than I neccesarily have to? Doing better is a hell of a lot of work and if it doesn’t net me any rewards, then it is a waste of my time. And while the whole perfection thing works great when you’re judging it against some objective standard such as sprinting times, it blows up massively when you start using relative measures such as university entrance requriements. People work harder and harder to just stay in the same place until eventually the whole system explodes.
And so a lot of this tension among second generation children is this shifting from one world to another. The parents are still stuck within their existing networks of friends and social mores so a child which does not excel is one which brings loss of face and disgrace among their family. To the child, their social circle is American or American thinking and so hedonism and physical incentives are far more important than working hard to please your parents so they perceive their parents as overbearing and outmoded. Both sides can see the massive downsides in the other’s way of thought but both are too deep inside their own culture to recognise it’s flaws.
Anyway, I’m going to stop writing here and get to bed. I hope this clears up a few things for people.
