Can't Get No Satisfaction

 Deveria, Satisfaction

Honor and shame from no condition rise;
Act well your part, there all the honor lies.
— Alexander Pope, Essay on Man

"He who does something at the head of one regiment will eclipse him who does nothing at the head of a hundred." — Abraham Lincoln

My father was a perfectionist. A mechanic by training, there was nothing mechanical that he couldn't fix. And everything he fixed was almost too perfect. He derived a great deal of satisfaction from a job well done. Unfortunately for him, and everyone who came in contact with him, he was dissatisfied with everyone else's performance.

Our society is a difficult world for a perfectionist to live in, for the obvious reason that it is a highly imperfect milieu. In my own life experiences, I have rarely encountered, outside of my home, people who are conversant with the concept of "a job well done". The majority seems primarily focused on deriving their dose of satisfaction from maximizing their personal benefit-to-effort ratio. It's a "f*ck the other guy" mentality that has swamped the traditional American integrity that made our Nation great.

Nowadays, the common objective is some ludicrous get-rich-quick scheme that will somehow provide a shortcut to that "glamorous" life led by our modern day role models, the skanks and dimwits of Holyshitwood who, I suspect, "can't get no satisfaction" despite their excess. Maybe satisfaction is a zero-sum game.