Almost Paradise and the Problem of Imperfection
The moral case for realizing that you can't have the perfect life.
We all dream of having the perfect life.
Of a life where things work the way we want them to. Where we get what we want and don't have to worry about anything. Living such a life feels like a beautiful ideal. Many of us have some idea of what that perfect life will look like, although few of us have exactly the same idea of what that life is. Yet there are obvious things we all crave. A life where we don't do much more than relax. Often in a place where we don't have to think about the weather or money. We just think about how much fun we're going to have when we have that type of life. This kind of life so often comes up as living in something resembling a tropical paradise. We idealize this place even though there are still problems in places like that.
There's a reason why it's so attractive to us. People hate having to worry about every little part of their lives, whether it's their jobs or their ability to find shelter. All of it causes us frustration and anger if not pain and suffering. So instead we dream about a life where these problems are taken care of for us. What we don't see though is the little imperfections that come up in a life like this. Tropical paradises tend to have problems like tropical storms. They're also very attractive to people with a lot of money and power, sometimes even people who didn't get these things through the most respectable ways. If we ever did manage to find our way to a tropical paradise, we probably wouldn't have the perfect life. Not to mention the fact that living under such circumstances would get very boring.
Having things taken care of for you means you're not doing much. You struggle to put effort into things because you don't have to worry. That worry is part of what makes life a certain amount of interesting. So long as they don't get out of control to the point of causing us real suffering. A perfect life would, rather ironically, naturally end up causing imperfections. You can't really have the perfect life, but we dream about it anyway. The dream itself makes us strive to find it, no matter how unlikely it would actually be.
Almost Paradise is fundamentally about what happens when you try to find the perfect life. Alex Walker, as played brilliantly by Christian Kane, has come to find a perfect life. He's spent years struggling and feeling the frustration of never quite being able to achieve that life. As a DEA agent he tried his best to make the world a safer and some might say a perfect life. It's only when he comes to understand that there's never a point where perfection can be achieved, that he leaves and tries to find that life elsewhere.
Even as he does though, his life in a tropical paradise has its problems. No matter how much he might want to let go of his need to fix things, he can't. He ends up messing up his idea of a perfect life but this only leads to what some might consider a better life. He has so much of what he wants, but it's far from perfect. It's an imperfect life, which is what makes it so perfect.
Do yourself a favour and explore the problem of imperfection by checking out Almost Paradise as soon as you can.
You can watch Almost Paradise on Amazon.