Perfection Is Dead. Long Live the Mess.

Everything Looks Perfect Now, But We've Never Been More Bored

We live in the most curated era in human history. Every photo can be filtered, every flaw erased, every angle optimised before it reaches another person's eyes. Our feeds are endless streams of perfect lighting, perfect skin, perfect rooms with perfect plants in perfect corners. We have more control over our aesthetic presentation than any generation before us. And yet, paradoxically, we've never been more bored.

The reason is simple: perfection kills texture. And texture is what makes life interesting.

Think about what actually catches your eye now. Not the flawless influencer photo that took forty-seven takes, but the blurry snapshot with bad lighting where someone's laughing so hard their face is scrunched. Not the pristine minimalist apartment that could be anyone's, but the cluttered desk with coffee rings and half-read books. Not the perfectly styled hair, but the messy bun with pieces falling out. The things that feel alive are the things that feel undone.

This isn't nostalgia or contrarianism. It's a response to a fundamental shift in how we experience the world. When perfection becomes instant, a matter of swiping through filters or letting an algorithm smooth your skin, it loses all meaning. What's the value of something flawless when flawlessness requires no effort, no skill, no time? Perfection used to be rare, which made it remarkable. Now it's the default setting, which makes it invisible.

The theory of imperfection  

The preference for the undone isn't just personal taste. It has deep roots in how humans create and perceive meaning.

Cultural theorists like Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre spent their careers studying what they called the "aesthetic of the everyday." Their central insight: meaning isn't produced in grand, perfect gestures but in the small accidents, flaws, and irregularities of daily life. A scuff on a wooden table tells you someone actually uses it. A worn book spine reveals it's been read and re-read. These traces of human activity are what we subconsciously search for when we look at something. Perfection erases those traces. It creates surfaces so smooth there's nothing to read, no story to decode.

This idea echoes through Japanese philosophy in the concept of wabi-sabi: an aesthetic that values impermanence, incompleteness, and irregularity. A cracked tea bowl isn't ruined; it's made more beautiful by its history. The asymmetry of a handmade object reveals the hand that made it. In wabi-sabi, things become more interesting precisely because they're undone, because they hold time and process and individuality within them.

Compare this to what Jean Baudrillard called hyperreality: the condition where polished images become simulations that replace reality itself. Your Instagram feed isn't a representation of life; it's a curated performance that substitutes for life. When everything becomes a simulation of perfection, nothing feels authentic anymore. And authenticity is the nutrient we're starving for. Without it, we get boredom, not the boredom of having nothing to do, but the deeper boredom of living in a world that feels increasingly fake.

Why our brains can't stand perfection 

There's a neurological reason why overly polished things feel unstimulating. Our brains are prediction machines, constantly scanning for patterns and irregularities. When something is too smooth, too uniform, too perfect, there's nothing for your brain to process. It habituates, stops noticing. This is why you can stare at a perfect white wall and feel nothing, but a wall with texture, cracks, variations in color holds your attention.

Designers and musicians have understood this for years. They deliberately introduce what's called a "cognitive itch": slight imperfections that keep your brain engaged. A rhythm that's almost but not quite regular. A color that's slightly off. Even in ASMR videos, the appeal often comes from irregular sounds, tapping with unpredictable intervals, paper crinkling with organic randomness. Perfect sounds bore us. Irregular sounds soothe us because they give our brains something to track.

When perfection removes what psychologists call "processing richness," it removes the very thing that makes something worth paying attention to. A flawless face gives your brain nothing to decode. An interesting face, with asymmetry, character lines, unusual proportions, invites exploration. Your brain has to work slightly harder, which paradoxically makes the experience more pleasurable.

This is why boredom isn't a personal failing. It's a psychological response to environments that have been over-optimised, stripped of the irregularities that human brains need to stay engaged.

The algorithm of sameness

The problem has accelerated because perfection is no longer difficult. It's instant, automated, algorithmic.

Twenty years ago, if you wanted to look perfect in a photo, you needed professional lighting, a skilled photographer, maybe even a makeup artist. Now you tap a screen. Filters remove pores, smooth skin, enlarge eyes, slim faces, all in the second before you post. AI tools offer perfect symmetry, perfect brightness, perfect composition. Interior design follows aesthetic algorithms, everyone's apartment looks like the same Pinterest board. Fashion influencers converge on identical "clean girl" looks because anything too distinctive is brand-unsafe.

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman described our era as "liquid modernity": everything flows, everything is optimised for flexibility and smoothness, nothing commits to being rough or permanent or particular.

Our images have become liquid too. They're endlessly editable, infinitely smooth, completely uncommitted to representing anything real.

When perfection becomes an algorithm, imperfection becomes a rebellion.

But it's not a rebellion most people are consciously choosing. It's an intuitive response to aesthetic exhaustion. When everything looks the same, the human eye starts hunting for difference. When everything feels processed, we crave something raw.

The great flattening 

The consequences play out everywhere. There's the "same face" phenomenon: Instagram face, K-pop face, TikTok face, different names for the same beauty-standard convergence created by identical filters and identical procedures. Wide eyes, small nose, smooth skin, plump lips. Scroll through any platform and faces start to blur together. Not because people are actually identical, but because the tools we use to present ourselves erase individual variation.

Then there are the rooms. The carefully curated spaces where every object serves a double purpose: functional and photogenic. Nothing out of place, nothing personal, nothing that might suggest actual living happens here. These rooms don't feel like homes; they feel like showrooms. And when everyone's room is a variation on the same minimalist-plant-aesthetic theme, they stop being spaces and start being symbols of class aspiration with no personality attached.

Online identities have become performances managed like brands. People curate not just their photos but their opinions, their humor, their vulnerabilities. Everything is tested for optimisation before posting. Sherry Turkle has written extensively about how this constant performance creates a gap between our online and offline selves, and how exhausting it is to maintain. We're not living; we're generating content. And content, by definition, must be polished.

The result is what Guy Debord predicted in "The Society of the Spectacle": we no longer live our lives; we perform images of lives. The image becomes more important than the reality it supposedly represents. And when everyone's performing the same curated perfection, the spectacle becomes monotonous.

People struggle now to enjoy unedited moments because they're constantly aware of how those moments would look photographed. Would this be postable? Is my face good from this angle? Does this experience fit my aesthetic? The spontaneity gets killed before it has a chance to happen.

Revenge of the real

There's been a quiet revival of film photography, not despite its grain and unpredictability, but because of it. People want photos that look like they weren't trying. The messy bun became a fashion statement. "Bed hair" went from accident to aspiration. Fashion editors talk about "unfussy" style, clothes that look like you just threw them on, which of course requires careful curation to achieve.

In design, brutalism has made a comeback: raw concrete, exposed materials, rough textures, intentional asymmetry. These aren't mistakes; they're statements. They say: this wasn't perfected by an algorithm. A human made choices here.

On social media, "photo dumps" replaced carefully curated grids. People started posting mistakes, bloopers, behind-the-scenes chaos. The entire indie sleaze aesthetic, deliberately unflattering flash photography, disheveled looks, grainy quality, came back as a reaction to ultra-polished content.

This isn't random nostalgia. It's a cultural correction. When perfection becomes cheap, when anyone can achieve it by tapping a screen, imperfection becomes valuable again. Flaws become proof of authenticity. Roughness becomes a signal that something is real.

Walter Benjamin wrote about how mechanical reproduction destroys the "aura" of art, that sense of uniqueness and presence that makes something feel special. Digital perfection has done the same thing. When every photo can be flawless, no photo feels special. The aura has migrated to the imperfect, the unrepeatable, the things that can't be replicated by an algorithm.

What the undone actually means 

We're not bored because our lives lack beauty. We're bored because everything looks finished but nothing feels lived in. Perfection is now easy and predictable, which makes it the opposite of interesting. It requires no interpretation, offers no mystery, reveals no personality. It's a dead end for attention. Your brain looks at it, finds nothing to process, and moves on.

Imperfection, by contrast, invites questions. Why is that there? What happened to create that mark? Who chose to leave that asymmetry? The undone has gaps that our minds instinctively try to fill. It creates space for imagination and interpretation. It feels human because it bears the traces of human decision-making, including the decision not to perfect something.

The things we're drawn to now are things that feel like they have a history, a personality, a story embedded in their irregularity. Not because we're romanticising flaws, but because perfection has become so ubiquitous that it no longer registers as meaningful. The smooth has become boring. The rough has become interesting.

This matters more than aesthetics. It's about how we experience meaning itself. Meaning requires texture, something to push against, something to interpret, something that resists being instantly understood. When everything is optimised for instant comprehension, nothing stays with you. The undone stays with you because it's incomplete. It leaves room for you to finish the thought.

That's why messy hair looks better than perfect hair now. Why rough edges feel more honest than smooth ones. Why people are tired of seeing the same curated perfection everywhere they look. We're not rejecting beauty; we're rejecting the kind of beauty that has nothing left to say.

In a world where perfection is automatic, imperfection is the only thing that still feels like a choice. And choice, real, visible, human choice, is what we've been missing all along.

Written by Vanessa Twerefou