How to Be Perfect

How to Be Perfect — summary

The day you tried to be a good person and failed

Picture this. You wake up one morning and decide today is the day you stop being a vaguely okay person and start being an actual good one. You pick up the litter outside your apartment. You buy cage-free eggs because the carton has a smiling chicken on it. You skip the burger and order the salad. You help an old lady cross the street. That night you watch a serious documentary on a streaming platform and feel virtuous enough to fall asleep in your sneakers.

Then a Universe Goodness Accountant shows up with a clipboard. Your coffee cup is now drifting toward the great Pacific garbage patch. The cage-free label, it turns out, has almost no legal meaning, and your sneakers were stitched together by underpaid teenagers who did not get a salad for lunch. The streaming platform funnels profits into a defense contractor that sells drones to a dictatorship. The documentary director is, separately, a creep. Oh, and the old lady you helped across the street? She was on her way to a Nazi memorabilia auction. The accountant tallies it up. You owe the universe a refund.

That is the joke that opens Michael Schur's *How to Be Perfect*, and it is also the entire problem of being alive in a complicated world. Schur, the writer who built *The Good Place*, *Parks and Recreation*, and *Brooklyn Nine-Nine*, spent years trying to figure out what made a fictional person "good" enough for heaven. He ended up in a long argument with three thousand years of moral philosophy, and this book is the cheerful, profane, slightly anxious tour he wants to take you on.