By Pamela Paul / The New York Times
Recently I’ve been told that I’m perfect, something I’m perfectly aware I’ve never been nor ever will be.
This generous assessment has come from strangers when I apologize for bumping into them and from the exceedingly cheerful salespeople at the store where my daughter shops for clothes. “No, you’re perfect!” they’ll insist when I explain the need to rest my Gen X weariness on the fitting room floor where a modest “No problem” would have sufficed.
The urge toward pronounced perfection is annoyingly catchy. Almost against my will, I now respond to emails with a knee-jerk “Perfect!” where I once would have said something more in line with the nevermind sensibility of my generation. “Sounds good,” for example, or “OK.”
Even our artificial intelligence exhorts us to greater heights of enthusiasm. To an email in which an acquaintance notes pleasantly, “It was nice seeing you last night,” Gmail suggests a more boisterous reply: “It was great to see you too!” or “So fun!” Our chatbots likewise communicate with endless effervescence, just as we have taught them to do(!).
When not being perfect, we are decidedly good. Should I so much as display a downbeat facial expression when fumbling a social nicety, the response is nothing short of impassioned: “No, you’re good!”
Being good is for everyone. We are all good now that “You’re all good” has replaced both the Commonwealth “No worries” and the American standard “That’s OK.” And it’s not always personal. Frequently, declarations of goodness come in the form of an expansive statement of general excellence: “It’s all good.”
But is it all good, really?
It’s hard not to read something slightly defensive into this relentlessly bright veneer. Even when the zeal seems genuine, if misguidedly so, the new affirmative language has an almost oppressive bent. Most of us are willing to believe we are OK or that we are at least not a problem. It was easy to be no big deal. But who among us can live up to being all good, let alone perfect, all the time?
I asked a colleague what she made of these current linguistic tics and her explanation was unmitigated passive aggression. “If someone tells you ‘You’re all good,’ it means, ‘You stupid old lady,’” she explained. “It’s like saying ‘I like your shoes, for a mom.’”
The rise of “It’s all good” is commonly thought to have originated, like much American vernacular, in Black culture. According to a New Yorker article dedicated to the popularity of the phrase, M.C. Hammer’s 1994 hit “It’s All Good” was instrumental. Now everyone seems to use “It’s all good,” sometimes as a way to shut down conversation around something that may actually be pretty bad.
Everyday chitchat once defaulted to a certain bland “I’m OK, you’re OK” neutrality. People were always “fine,” even if we weren’t remotely fine and in no mood to discuss it. As far as everyone else was concerned, we would insist it was “no problem.”
Today, the real world is approaching the nightmare scenario in the “Nosedive” episode of “Black Mirror,” set in a future in which everyone rates daily interactions in real time on their devices. People in “Nosedive” earned likability scores based on other people’s snap judgments, which then had social and economic ramifications, such as employment opportunities. Meanwhile, in our world, you can earn a one-star Uber rating for asking a driver to turn down the music. Perhaps we are going beyond the requisite niceties merely to ward off the chance of getting written up somewhere.
But this does create a vague aura of dishonesty around our daily interactions, and may even perpetuate it. One teacher friend pointed out what he called the “toxic positivity” of AI-generated college recommendation letters (yes, they’re becoming common), which tend to blurt out the same saccharine phrases of endorsement. Just as all kids cannot be geniuses, all assessments and the emotions that convey them cannot be this oppressively upbeat.
It’s hard not to see mindless optimism as an effort to balance the forceful nastiness and negativity of social media. It’s as if our emotional expressions have become as polarized as our politics, with the extremes loudly articulated at the expense of the old middling opinions and equivocal feelings.
Perhaps humans have collectively decided that we could all use a little pick-me-up, a way to offset the online and offline grievance discourse out there in the world. Or at least mask it. Maybe this is a way to convey online emoji in the real world. How else to say “100%” in bright-red type or “smiley face blushing” to another person without a superlative flourish or two?
Of course, one must look on the bright side. In the grand scheme of what merits complaint, emotional inflation is probably the least of our most pressing problems. One could even say it’s just fine. Or perhaps that it’s all for the good. As we head into what looks likely to be a bumpy 2025, it may not be entirely wrong to call it perfect.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2025.
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