Improving Ourselves to Death
While I agree that we (where we is a reader of the NYT or other western individuals) focus on hyper optimizing our life towards a perfect, unachievable goal, I am not at all comfortable with the authors assumption that it is inherently bad to do so, and that we should instead be happy with a life of mediocrity.Every single time humanity visibly progresses, it is because  one person (or many) found a problem with themselves or the state they were living in and attempted to remove the problem in hopes of having themselves or their environment become more 'perfect'.  If people today decide to stop progressing towards perfection and just be happy with what they have, then there will still be large swaths of people living in extreme poverty, dying from preventable diseases, and suffering from human rights abuses.  I really do believe that it is imperative from a humanitarian perspective that while we still have problems in the world, we strive to do everything we can to fix them—and that not doing so is horribly selfish.