A perfect world has a short half-life.
A perfect world has a short half-life. You’ve arrived in utopia—everything is just as you wanted. The temperature’s ideal, your playlist is psychic, and your neighbors wave, but never ask how your day’s going. But give it a month, and paradise will dissolve into petty bickering. Why? Because ego life ruins perfection.
Podcast Discussion
Welcome to Utopia
(Featuring “The Matrix,” “Free Guy,” “The Truman Show,” and a Little Dutch Wisdom)
Take The Matrix, where Neo realizes humans can’t handle a perfect reality. The Matrix’s first version was a flawless utopia that people rejected. Give us everything, and we’ll break it for a taste of struggle. Or Free Guy, where chaos is daily, but when Guy gets everything he wants, he gets bored. He craves meaning, and suddenly, paradise isn’t fun anymore. Conflict makes him feel alive. Even in The Truman Show, perfection feels like a prison, and Truman’s dissatisfaction pushes him to rebel. We crave freedom, but without struggle, freedom loses its flavor for asserting ego identity.
This brings us to negative merging—the defense mechanism we use to avoid feeling separate. Even in a perfect world, we stir up problems to feel connected, clinging to conflict to avoid isolation. It’s the ultimate irony: the more we chase perfection, the more we crave imperfection to merge with others, even negatively.
Negative merging, and the attachment to negative relationships, is produced by the part of you that doesn’t want to give up. There is a tremendous mountain of hope supporting this part. This is what I sometimes call the libidinal ego, the ego infused with libido, full of energy, vigor, strength, and instinctual intelligence. Because it is always going after this wonderful object, and because most of the time it cannot attain it, it ends up in a frustrated, ungratified condition, which we call negative merging. – A. H. Almaas
The Dutch, as humorously described in The Undutchables, show us how this works. In a culture built on precision, they’ll still find something to complain about—because that’s how humans are wired. Even when things are perfect, we nitpick, finding connection through shared dissatisfaction. It’s the human condition. Give us utopia, and we’ll ruin it to feel real again.
As explored by A.H. Almaas, negative merging is the ego’s way of blending with negativity—fear, frustration, anger—because it’s easier to cling to conflict than confront separation. We create drama, stir up chaos, and make peace feel unreal because we can’t handle being truly separate. Instead, we merge with conflict to feel connected, even if it’s not a real connection.
When we cling to our suffering, we make it a part of our identity. Letting go of suffering is letting go of the self we think we are.
A.H. Almaas
It’s the Connection Stupid
So, when you fantasize about perfection, remember that even in utopia, humans are destined to create conflict. We don’t seek peace—we seek connection, even if it’s through negative merging. Peace might be nice for a while, but conflict? That’s our ego’s bread and butter.
We become attached to our suffering because it defines us, even when it destroys us.
Gabor Maté