Spoiler Alert: Read with caution if you haven’t finished watching Season 4 of The Bear yet. There are a few references to the end of season that some might consider spoilers.
“Mistakes.”
When I heard this word uttered in the latest season of The Bear, it cut like a knife. This single word accentuated the theme for the season: perfectionism. Carmy, the head chef and lead of the show, said it when his colleague and sometimes screaming match partner, Richie, asked him what he was thinking about after a grueling night at the restaurant.
With only a word, Carmy let all the perfectionists watching know exactly what he was experiencing. He was ruminating over his past failures. They were swirling in his mind. It’s fair to imagine they had been with him that entire day, screaming in his ear while he was trying to live his life. Fans of The Bear also immediately knew that they had been with Carmy a lot longer than that.
Perfectionism Can Be a Mistake
The surprising thing that you come to see later is that one of the mistakes that Carmy had to have been thinking about was perfectionism. In the episodes that follow this tepid bath of negative thoughts and self-recrimination, Carmy makes some positive steps forward. He scales back on his overly ambitious strategies. He eases up on his colleagues, Syndey and Marcus, enough to see that they have become masterful chefs. And he even apologizes to his girlfriend months after a panic attack caused him to flee the relationship and ghost her.
As I watched the season, I couldn’t help but see it as a mirror for my own life. I joked with my husband that watching this season in college would have saved me a whole lot of heartache over the years. Just like Carmy, perfectionism was never something I chose but it continues to be something exceptionally hard for me to stop. As the show illustrates, some of us are incentivized for our efforts to be perfect. This makes it very hard to see that perfectionism has its downsides too.
The Downsides of Perfectionism
Season 4 of The Bear shows us these downsides. It shows us how Carmy can’t enjoy success or relax with peace. It shows us how perfectionism can erode the relationships around us and wear down the people we love. It shows us that good results are a double-edged sword for perfectionists.
We may feel good for a moment, but as soon as that moment fades, we are thinking, often unconsciously, of how we can raise the bar higher. When that bar gets too high, and it always does, we crash and feel like failures. This can cause us to turn what we love into a grind, so that even the things we are good at suddenly feel hard.
The Bear Is a Realistic Depiction of Perfectionism
If you are thinking that I am telling you that Season 4 of The Bear is painful to watch, you are right. It was painful for me to watch, but only because it was so painfully true. I knew how easy it is to absorb perfectionism even if no person in your life consciously pushed it on you.
Even if we come from a loving family, the desire to be good and create something good can get twisted by what we miss or maybe by what we see too much in childhood. By the time we get out of school, our tendency to be organized, conscientious, and high performing helps us excel in demanding and intense professions.
And before we know it, we start to emulate the very behaviors we told ourselves we never would. We do this all with the noblest of intentions. We want to make something better, more decent, and gentler than we have ever had. It’s just that we never learned the skills to build this peaceful life we want.
The Good News for the Perfectionists Out There
It absolutely hurt to watch Season 4 of The Bear and to relive all the ways I have hurt myself and others in the process. The good news, for me and for all the perfectionists out there, is that the season has some light at the end of the tunnel. By the end of the season, Carmy has stopped thinking so obsessively about all his mistakes. He starts instead to face them and tries to learn how to avoid repeating them. He stops isolating himself. He gets out of his head. He leans on his friends and admits how he feels.
By the end of the season, Carmy is not fully self-actualized. It is a TV show after all and TV shows about peaceful people who have things figured out would probably not get very good ratings, let alone a slew of Emmy awards. Instead, the season ends with you questioning whether Carmy is once again running from goodness by threatening to leave the restaurant he founded and all the people there he loves. It may turn out that Carmy makes yet another huge mistake.
Mistakes Happen to Us All, Perfectionists Included
And you know what? He probably will. And so will I. I don’t know you, but I bet you will too if you are a perfectionist. Because perfectionism doesn’t leave us easily and for some of us it may never leave entirely. I’ll have to wait for Season 5 to know how it turns out for Carmy, just like I must wait for retrospection to arrive to know if my life choices were really the product of perfectionism. I’m going to keep rooting for Carmy, though, and hope he can learn that mediocrity is sometimes amazing, flaws are opportunities for connection, and you can learn to be okay with peace.
Until then, if you find yourself sitting at a table somewhere with only mistakes rolling around in your head, I hope a friend comes up and asks you what you are thinking about. I hope even more that you do what Carmy did and tell the truth even if all you can muster is a single word.
Want to learn more about mindfulness and compassion? Check out my new book, How to Be a Badass Lawyer, for a simple guide to creating a meditation practice of your own in 30 days. And to share mindfulness with your little one, check out my new children’s book, Mommy Needs a Minute.
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