The Postcard Life: Why Perfection Always Rings Hollow

I can’t shake an interview I heard thirty years ago—an offhand confession that stuck to me like burrs on a wool coat.
Terry Gilliam, the Monty Python animator turned fever-dream film director, was talking with Charlie Rose. Gilliam described a moment straight from a high school dream: he was walking the Santa Monica Pier on a twilight evening, a beautiful woman on his arm, the beach shimmering under a dying sun. It was the kind of moment that screams You’ve Made It! if you’ve ever been a teenage boy with a tragic imagination.

And yet, Gilliam said, he felt nothing. Not euphoria. Not awe. Just… flatness. Like he wasn’t even in his own life but rather trapped inside one of his own cartoons—a two-dimensional fantasy drawn by someone who had seen too many movies and lived too little.
That was his grim epiphany: we don’t chase life—we chase the idea of it.

Gilliam’s teenage dream had come true, but it rang hollow because it wasn’t connection he had caught. It was a postcard of connection, a lifeless image polished smooth by years of expectation.

I’ve thought about that moment a lot, especially in the slow burns of my own life, in all the arenas where the blueprint of perfection crashed hard against the walls of reality.
Take teaching: I’ve taught college writing for forty years. More times than I care to admit, I walked into class with what I believed was a masterstroke of a lesson plan—polished, structured, airtight. And then I delivered it like a robot with tenure. The students, bless them, tried not to visibly expire.
Only when I threw away the script and talked to them like a breathing, flawed human being did I finally see heads lift and eyes focus.

It’s the same poison at work: that blueprint, that false idol of how it’s supposed to be.
Therapist Phil Stutz calls it the Magical Moment Frozen in Time—a mental snapshot of ideal beauty, love, success, whatever, that we spend our lives trying to recreate. And like the cruelest mirage, it recedes the closer we get.
Because it’s not life.
It’s a knockoff. A counterfeit so slick, it fools even the person living it.

It’s sobering, humiliating even, to realize how often my life has been a performance for an audience that doesn’t exist—measuring real experiences against some fantasy standard cooked up in the caves of my mind.
Maybe Plato had it right all along: we’re prisoners staring at shadows, mistaking flickers on the wall for the blazing, complicated, imperfect mess that is actual life.
And every time we chase the shadow instead of the fire, we walk the Santa Monica Pier at sunset, hand in hand with a beautiful illusion, and feel… nothing.