Curse of vision

Maalvika Bhat explaining the curse of vision in her post about how being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage.

We are perhaps the only species that suffers from our own imagination. A bird building a nest does not first conceive of the perfect nest and then suffer from the inadequacy of twigs and mud. A spider spinning a web does not pause, paralyzed by visions of geometric perfection beyond her current capabilities. But humans? We possess the strange gift of being haunted by visions of what could be, tormented by the gap between our aspirations and our abilities.

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Watch a child draw. They create fearlessly, unselfconsciously, because they have not yet developed the curse of sophisticated taste! They draw purple trees and flying elephants with the confidence of someone who has never been told that trees aren’t purple, that elephants don’t fly. But somewhere around age eight or nine, taste arrives like a harsh critic, and suddenly the gap opens. The child can see that their drawing doesn’t match the impossible standard their developing aesthetic sense has conjured.

This is what leads most of us to stop drawing. Not because we lack talent, but because we’ve developed the ability to judge before we’ve developed the ability to execute. We become connoisseurs of our own inadequacy.

And this is where our minds, in their desperate attempt, devise an elegant escape. Faced with this unbearable gap, we develop what researchers call “productive avoidance” — staying busy with planning, researching, and dreaming while avoiding the vulnerable act of creating something concrete that might fail. It feels like work because it engages all our intellectual faculties. But it functions as avoidance because it protects us from the terrifying possibility of creating something imperfect. I see this in wannabe founders listening to podcasts on loop, wannabe TikTokkers watching hours of videos as “research,” and wannabe novelists who spend years developing character backstories for books they never begin.

The spider doesn’t face this problem. It spins webs according to ancient genetic instructions, each one remarkably similar to the last. But human creativity requires us to navigate the treacherous territory between what we can imagine and what we can actually do. We are cursed with visions of perfection and blessed with the capacity to fail toward them.