The paradox of perfection: When happiness becomes lethal

Key topics:

• Universe 25 mice thrived yet perished from meaninglessness, not scarcity.

• Excess comfort erodes purpose, desire, and natural social behaviour.

• Struggle and adversity are essential for growth, meaning, and fulfilment.

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By Bart Dijkstra

Picture, if you will, a luxury retirement home for mice. Unlimited food pellets drop from the ceiling whenever anyone feels peckish. Water bottles runneth over forever. Nesting material lies in soft mountains. No cats, no owls, no winters, no hunger, no effort. The penthouse apartments are all vacant and the lifts always work. John B. Calhoun, an American ethologist with the earnest solemnity of a man who has never quite recovered from reading too much H. G. Wells, built exactly this paradise in 1968 and called it Universe 25.

He began with four breeding pairs of healthy, bright-eyed house mice. Within a year they had multiplied to six hundred. By day 560 the population touched 2,200 and then, like a party guest who realises the champagne is non-alcoholic, quietly began to leave. By day 920 every new pup was dead within hours of birth. By day 1,588 the last conception had occurred. The final mouse died alone, beautifully groomed, in a spotless corner, surrounded by more wealth than Croesus and not a single reason to care.

What happened?

The textbooks mutter about “behavioural sink,” a phrase Calhoun coined when he noticed his earlier, smaller universes collapsing under social stress. Yet Universe 25 never actually became crowded. The enclosure could comfortably house three thousand; at its peak it held fewer than that, and vast areas remained empty. The mice had space, safety, and surplus. They simply stopped wanting to be mice.

The males sorted themselves into types with the neatness of characters in a Jacobean tragedy. There were the aggressors, wired on testosterone and boredom, who patrolled the floors biting anything that moved.

There were the pansexuals who mounted anything that didn’t, including the already exhausted.

There were the drop-outs who sat in the middle of the floor staring at nothing, like undergraduates after a three-day thesis bender.

And then there were the beautiful ones. Ah, the beautiful ones. These exquisite dandies did nothing but eat, sleep, and groom themselves until their fur gleamed like patent leather. They never fought, never courted, never reared young. They were the original nepo babies, born into abundance and choosing Instagram over existence.

The females, meanwhile, gave up on motherhood with the weary relief of a Victorian heroine refusing a third season. They kicked infants out of nests, forgot to feed them, or simply wandered off mid-lactation as though they had suddenly remembered an urgent hair appointment. Infant mortality hit one hundred per cent. The species quietly voted itself out of the gene pool.

Calhoun watched this slow-motion suicide and concluded that when life becomes too easy, the psyche invents dragons to slay it.

Remove every external problem and the organism turns on itself. The mice did not die of plague or starvation; they died of meaninglessness.

We sneer at mice, of course. We are taller, vote in elections, and have mastered fire. Yet the experiment keeps nagging at me whenever I scroll through another sun-dappled feed of people living their best lives in tastefully appointed minimalism. We have built ourselves a rather larger Universe 25, only with ring lights and oat-milk lattes.

G. K. Chesterton once remarked that the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried. The utopian ideal, by contrast, has been tried rather thoroughly and found lethal. Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Butler’s Erewhon, Skinner’s Walden Two: every last one ends up either guarded by philosopher-kings with whips, or quietly abandoned when the inhabitants discover that perfection is unbearably dull. Even the Garden of Eden came with a single rule, because apparently God understood that infinite permission is the quickest route to existential nausea.

Nietzsche, never a man to miss a chance for melodrama, declared that to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering. He was thinking of tuberculosis and bad reviews, but the mice of Universe 25 would have nodded vigorously if they had not already lost the will to move their heads.

When the suffering is removed by fiat, the meaning evaporates with it. We are narrative creatures; take away the plot tension and the story ends, usually with the protagonist eating himself to death out of sheer narrative frustration.

Look at what happens when we try to sand the edges off childhood. We wrap them in cotton wool, ban conkers, abolish winners and losers, schedule their playdates, and medicate every flicker of discomfort. The result is a generation that arrives at university unable to cope with a B-minus or a roommate who voted differently. Adversity is not merely useful; it is the whetstone on which identity is sharpened. Without it we remain blunt instruments, beautiful but useless.

I think of the old Icelandic sagas, where a man’s worth was measured by how many polar bears he had killed with a table leg. Absurd, yes, but those Icelanders slept soundly. Compare that to our current insomnia epidemic, soothed by whitenoise machines and weighted blankets. We have outsourced our polar bears to logistics companies and then wonder why we feel hollow.

Even art collapses without friction. The most harrowing novels, the most sublime symphonies, the funniest jokes all emerge from constraint.

Shakespeare wrote his best work while the plague closed the theatres and he was stuck indoors with nothing but a quill and existential dread. Give a writer unlimited grant money, a silent retreat in Provence, and the assurance that no one will ever criticise him again, and watch the paragraphs atrophy like the reproductive organs of a beautiful-one mouse.

We tell ourselves we want ease. We want the food pellets to fall from the ceiling. We want the temperature always seventytwo degrees and the Wi-Fi password “guest.” Yet every lottery winner who ends up miserable, every trust-fund enfant terrible who overdoses in a penthouse, every early retiree who takes up competitive pickleball and still feels dead inside is enacting a private Universe 25.

The mice teach us that happiness is not a destination reached by the removal of obstacles; it is the by-product of engagement with them. We need something to push against. We need winters so that spring can matter. We need the possibility of loss so that love can feel like victory. We need, God help us, a few proper dragons.

So let us stop trying to build a world without struggle. Let us instead cultivate the art of struggling well. Let us teach our children resilience the way we once taught them Latin: not because it is easy, but because it is hard, and hardness is where the soul is forged. Let us write books that might be misunderstood, love people who might leave, plant gardens that might fail, and run races we might lose.

Because the alternative is a penthouse full of beautiful ones, grooming themselves to death while the species quietly expires. And that, dear reader, would be a most unmannerly way to go.