Articles - Page 4 of 9 - The Cracked Door

A Letter from a Retiring Medium (A Piece of Complete Fiction)

I have been a median for many, many years, and as I sink into the relaxation of retirement, I want to explain medium-to-medium the secret annoyances of the job that we mediums don’t normally talk about.

Clients usually almost always want to talk to the recently deceased. These young dead with their constant problems and unresolved issues from their mortal lives are by far the most annoying: desire for revenge, love, unfinished business, or whatever. All of this makes them needy and moody. Of course, living people who remain caught in the thralls of life tend to gravitate towards them. Moody attracts moody.

The older the dead the more interesting they get. After one has lived longer than one’s lifetime in the world of the dead, they start to get hit by the fact that their life here is a less significant portion of existence than their afterlife. It takes time, but even those most impacted by fame on earth will eventually seep into indifference about their mortal existence, engulfed by the eternal wave of their afterlife now in front of them. This gives them an insightful perspective about our world, which rash clients, caught up in whatever earthly need or desire they might have, never seem to appreciate.

My absolute favorite to talk to are those who have been dead for tens or even a hundred thousands years. They can be hard to find, but when you manage to summon them, their life on earth is a distant memory that they may not even recall from the piles of eternity that has already buried itself on top of it. Their voices, encapsulating all they once were, all they once sought, synthesizes into a singular, beautiful hum, a single note they beam with the melodious brightness of a distant star.

So good luck as you enter this deadly profession. Your customers will be annoying. Fulfill their desires; resurrect their lovers, their mortal enemies, their family and friends, or whoever they request. But before you get tired and burnout from the drama, make sure to take time to slip into the deeper wells of humanity and rest in the solace of the vast ocean of humans past. It’s your best break from the constant waves of the whims of those who still strive.

Now is finally my time to begin my retreat into this same vast expanse that is existence. I start with retirement from the world of production and sustaining before I, too, will eventually take the plunge into the great expense of eternity. May you take up this mantle well.

Sincerely,
Your fellow retiring medium

What The Good Place’s Ending Leaves Out about Ethics (Reflection #9 in “The Good Place Miniseries)

Eleanor helps comfort Tahinni through her family trauma.

This is my final article reflecting on the Good place (see the previous article and my whole series). It’s been an insightful ride. To be clear, the Good Place is one of my favorite sitcoms, both for breaking new ground in what is possible in a sitcom and for encouraging people to think through what it might look like to truly heal from wrongs in an afterlife. Yet I think its ending leaves something crucial out: only individuals receive resolution and improvement in the afterlife itself, denying any kind of collective rectification of the moral problems facing our world.

In the show, the main group of characters manage to reconfigure the afterlife from a punitive system where literally every human in the last 500 years gets eternally tortured in the Bad Place to a refining system where each individual must work through their moral failings so they are able to join all other perfected individuals in the Good Place. This changes the thinking around justice in itself from one of punishment to self-improvement for all.

One could analyze this shift in itself, but here, I will focus on a crucial aspect of justice that this leaves out: any discussion of rectification of the world to resolve the problems we have created. Broadly speaking, this rectification could look like seeking to fix or repair what an individual has destroyed through one’s immoral acts and more broadly like trying to resolve the structural issues built on the accumulation of immoral and destructive decisions by multiple humans. They get let out entirely in the show’s resolution. Instead, the show’s new afterlife implicitly encourages individuals to focus on themselves as the exclusive or primary focus of what it means to develop morally. Let’s break them down further through some examples.

One day when I was a little boy, I did not want to eat whatever my mom served me for dinner that day, so what did I do? When she went to the kitchen for a second, I threw it all on the floor. When my mom returned, not only did she scold me for throwing my dinner on the floor, but she made me clean it up. As part of rectifying what I did, I had to clean up the mess I made. There could be many situations where fully rebuilding what was destroyed due to the immoral life is impossible (arguably full rectification is never possible), but a person who has done something wrong and feels guilty for it will often try to do the best they can to repair things for whoever they hurt through their actions.

Now this also applies at a larger scale. Humans have collectively built systems that destroy the environment and impoverish many through stifling inequality, and to fully make up for these, we also need to collectively repair their damage. But in The Good Place, all individuals no longer have to fix the problems they create once they die from that when they die. Once they die, they get to go through their own inner perfection and go to the Good Place, even if the systems they were a part of while alive remain just as destructive on earth. As a matter of fact, they would have to undergo an internal transformation after they die whether they do anything to fix the damage they have caused, meaning that the damage they caused does not end up mattering to their existence anyways.

Any positive reformation of anything in this world does not matter in the reformed afterlife system they created at the end of the series. Take, for example, an individual who commits some kind of atrocity, ranging in severity from a parent abusing one’s children or an orchestrator of a mass genocide. That person dies, enters their purgatory, which presumably teaches them the error of their ways and makes them into a better person, and then they go to heaven. That’s great for them, but they do not need to take any concrete action in the world itself to deal with or fix the intense suffering their actions have caused. Genocides and even abusive parents unleash cascading suffering into the world (both to humans and nonhumans) that can take several generations to heal. The show makes clear that the victims of atrocities from others will experience a healing during the afterlife, but that is long after the fact. Why must they suffer in the first place?

Healing occurs only by literally removing people from their environment into a make-believe world. For example, both Tahani and her sister experience healing from the trauma of their parents’ constant abuse, which allows them to overcome their lifelong competition between each other. They then get to experience positive relationships with each other and their parents all as healed people. Instead of fixing their relationship dynamics together, their reformation seemed to occur in their individual purgatories, where they presumably learned the error of their ways and grew as people (with the entire show being Tahani’s transforming state). In the show, they did not know what the others would be like after getting through their purgatories demonstrating that they were not together in any of it. This is innovative in many ways, but its portrayal of healing is entirely individualistic. Each human goes through purgatory in isolation outside of the social systems in which they existed and both created their virtues and vices. For example, for a familial conflict like this, I would love to see them go through purgatory together, probably in a way that changed some of the unfair power dynamics latent in the abuse and resolved everything together.

Also, what about non-human entities that suffered? For example, there is no reformation or healing in this system to animals that humans caused to suffer. A dog abused or neglected by its owner presumably was left on earth to die with no redemption. It also ignores any healing to the suffering of more collective entities like human communities and the environment. Instead of the humans experiencing renewal in a make-believe purgatory, I would love to see humans have to come back to the earth (maybe as some kind of ghost or other supernatural spirit) to reform the suffering their actions have caused in this world to mitigate how much suffering future humans and the environment in this world have to suffer. For example, if someone led a genocide, they would have to spend the next part of their afterlife healing all the damage this caused the world since. As a child, if I spilled something on the floor, my parents, as part of me having to learn my lesson, usually made me help clean it up, instead of whisking me into another room for a lesson, and then sending me on my way.

All of this points to its human-centered individualistic view that does not consider any systematic change to society or the ecological world and ignores the plight of animals and other nonhumans in this world as inferior and cosmically irrelevant. All that is necessary for “moral” perfection is a change in the characters of individual humans, which ignores the calls for systematic justice in both the social and environmental contexts. Even though The Good Place takes a courageous step in the right direction in helping people rethink justice, I think if we were to reimagine the afterlife to better address the injustices of humans, it would need to include the entire world and involve a fuller rectification of what humans have destroyed in this world.

The Ghost among the Banana Trees (A Short Story)

Hello, let me tell you my story. I think many don’t understand how and why I live my afterlife in this forest. Many don’t really seem to understand the forest either or the things that live in it at all for that matter.

I am here to respect my community. There is little left of it, so I cherish what remains. My community was once the center of this place, full of families and their homes, animals, and markets. That was over a hundred years ago. Now, all that is left are the trees. I can still hear the whisper of my kin from the banana trees. That’s why I live in these trees.

History has taken much from us, but time can do that. Society around us changes. Now, Thailand is a country, whatever that means, and people in this area have moved around quite a bit, preferring to build their cities where their lines of stone that they call “roads” meet rather than in the networks that existed in my time. Sure, whatever, but I will not forget this village tucked into what is now a forest.

As I tend to my trees, nearby men almost intrude me with their existence. What fantasies do they conjure in their minds when they feel my presence? I notice their desire and energy gives me more power and reality. I prefer the invisibility; what need do I have from you living humans? Nevertheless, I have never felt as eyed as when men hike through my forest.

It reminds me how the attention the King and those court officials would give me when I was alive. When the Thai king brought me to his palace, his newest wife, oh you wouldn’t believe their stares. His many male officials took one look at my beauty and just assumed I was a slut, sleeping my way to the top. Why else would a woman enter their court?

My community, that was why I was there. My community were the ones who sent me. When they noticed that the king had taken an eye to me, I didn’t even want to go, but they said I could be the community’s ambassador, their hope. They said I could advocate on the community’s behalf at the court. The Thai Kingdom had spent too long trying to ravish our area. Standing on the edge of its borders, his army came after us whenever he wanted to prove his glory through war. The buffer between him and the enemy kingdom, he would slowly absorb us all, one village at a time, squares to capture in his diplomatic chessboard. They convinced me that it would be best for our community for me to go, the marriage might convince him to think twice before sacking us again.

But, the court officials practically came after me from day one. I had some allies, but many took one look at me and seemed to become my sworn enemies. Some opposed my community and wanted to keep it down; I think others were just jealous of how my beauty seemed to give me power. They made up some charge of adultery to get rid of me, finding some guy they could claim I slept with. I did have one lover who kept me warm from the chilling fires of political intrigue, but it was not who they accused me of loving. I was clever enough not to get caught with my actual lover. No, they picked someone who they also wanted to execute, a way to kill two birds with one stone.

I find the big struggles that living humans put themselves through perplexing. Over the years of my afterlife, I have realized how pointless it is. Men most of all. They seem to be caught up in grand narratives of gain and glory. They still do so now. All I see in this modern world is destructive fire, coming to consume my community from all sides. Deforestation, pollution, your society seems almost designed to destroy all I hold most dear. I guess that is how the world works; you can only build your world on the ashes of other worlds’ pasts. But I will keep my coal burning as long as I can. Then, I too will splinter, becoming the seed of whatever comes next.

Likewise, many Thai men seem to become entranced by me when they see me. They notice my beauty and my traditional green dress and project their fantasy for what they consider the simpler, Thai “traditional woman.” Many men in your current world seem to live what they consider unsuccessful lives. I am their solution, their simpler times. If they want to come live with me, to live out this fantasy, I tolerate it. That is their choice. I have more important things to think about to keep my community going than their little mortal lives.

I know others say that I entrap these men in a spell, keep them as a type of prisoner, and make them forget their past lives. I do nothing of the sort. Most men are initially drawn by my beauty, and those who stay do so because they see in me a beauty of Thailand’s past, or what they consider to be Thailand’s past. It’s not my fault if some get lost in their nostalgic world and slowly forget the present.

I am still largely indifferent to the ways of men, after seeing how destructive they can be, but I still enjoy sex with the men who join me. Well, at least with some of them. What the living don’t know about me is that I have multiple banana trees in the forest with multiple men, and you wouldn’t believe how easy it is to hide that fact. Some men are more considerate than others, but for most, they are not used to thinking outside their own world. All I need to do is dote on them. A few minutes of pampering a day, and they assume I will serve them always. Then I can leave for another home with another guy and do the same thing, and neither is the wiser.

Over time, I can slowly pull back my devotion, and they will start doting on me instead. Many men are not used to thinking beyond their quests, their desires, or their cravings enough to ask too many questions about what I am actually up to. They aren’t used to thinking of me as an independent person. To them, I represent the beauty of a bygone past, or what they think the past was like, when women supposedly quietly honored and served their husbands. I am the sense of success that they felt they could never get in the cruel world around them given their lowly positions. I can use this to my advantage.

Some might consider me exploitative, even predatory, but I’m not. They are like pets to me. Dogs live far shorter lives and possess neither as much wisdom or intelligence as humans, but humans still keep them around for their own amusement and affection. They give the dogs great lives in their care. Just like that, a regular human is far younger, less wise, and less mature, and unless they become a centuries-old ghost like me, has no real chance of catching up. I give them a great life, full of a sense of pride and pleasure, removed from the troubles of normal life that the current world throws at them. The mature ones with enough, without the insecurity and self-absorption eventually desire to escape, figuring out the ultimate emptiness of what I’m offering them. In time, they leave. Their choice, I don’t confine them against their will. To the others, life within my care seems to be what they want, so I give it to them. Little do they know that their energy and desire help preserve the trees they live in.

How Is Complicity for Current Injustices Actually Distributed: The Good Place’s View of the Modern World (Reflection #8 in “The Good Place Miniseries)

The main cast of characters “enjoying” frozen yoghurt.

I recently rewatched “The Good Place” (spoiler warning), one of my favorite shows from the last ten years, and I noticed so much more about the show the second time around. I decided to write a miniseries analyzing different facets of the show – some complimentary, some critical – as a tribute to one of the most thoughtful and interesting sitcoms on mainstream US television. Here are the previous reflection and next reflection in the series. I hope you enjoy.

In the Good Place, making moral and ethical decisions has become noticeably harder than in the modern world. Over the past 500 years, no human has lived a life worthy in their points system to make it into the Good Place, instead all of them have been damned to the show’s version of hell. Wow, that is quite a statement about the modern world.

The show’s reason as to why this is happening is that the modern world has grown increasingly complicated, meaning that we must shift how we assess the morality of the decisions humans have to make to navigate this world. For example, Michael describes a boy in the Paleolithic Era picking fresh flowers from the forest and giving them to his mom, an altruistic act that earns him many positive moral points. When an equivalent contemporary boy buys flowers to present to his mom, his generosity gives him some positive credit, but it is offset by the unethical treatment of the worker who farmed the flower, the oil needed to transport it to that shop, and all sorts of other factors. In defense of the flowers now being negative, the Judge responds that the information is available about, say the plight of the workers on the flower plantations, and the boy chose to buy those flowers that had been farmed in that way and thus to implicate himself into that context. The response from the other characters is that researching everything or completely removing yourself from all instances of injustice while still doing what is needed to survive is unrealistically difficult in the contemporary world.

This illustrates the fundamental problem the show sees within modern life: the vast interconnectedness makes people reliant on systems that conduct unethical acts in difficult to understand ways around the world. And the individual is held responsible for how their, even seemingly innocent, acts are complicit in these injustices.

I see an implied primitivism in this view. Past eras of history were simple, much more local. Then when you make a decision, all the necessary thinking is right there in front of you. Modernity has produced interlocking webs that remove an individual from the full context in which the products around them come from, becoming overly complex ethically and morally in the process. This vaguely reminds me of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idea of the innocent noble savage or that mass society corrupts individuals, and also Mahatma Gandhi’s view that humans are best off living local lives in their small communities but that mass travel and communication has corrupted humanity as it forced it to scale up. In contrast to many primitivist thinkers, though, the show does not consider a return to “simple society” to be realistic, instead ultimately arguing that the retribution nature of moral criticism is what has got to give.

As an anthropologist, I view such primitivism as an oversimplification of past periods of human history. Humanity has almost always been interconnected in multilayered connections. The show imagines the past as a kind of simplified ideal that solves some of the complexities they see in today’s world. I would say that individual decisions have always been complex, with full knowledge of the implications of one’s actions across other communities beyond one’s familiarity practically unknowable.

Second, by arguing that absolutely no one has gotten into The Good Place, the show implies that modern injustices implicate everyone to an overwhelming degree, which flies in the face of how injustice seems unevenly distributed in the world. The show consistently states that no one has gotten into the Good Place for 500 years. So the societal shifts that prevented people from being able to get into the Good Place started 500 years ago. That corresponds rather well to the rise of European colonialism and the start of what many historians call the “modern era” in the 1500s and 1600s (and the very end of the 1400s). European colonialism changed many of the global relationships and power dynamics around the world, resulting in the societal systems that still last in various forms today (such as capitalism, which the current distribution of places in the world are “wealthy” and not, etc.). These systems seem to be exactly what creates the complex social systems that make moral decision-making now overly complicated.

The show portrays everyone as damned with no distinction of their position within these global forces, despite the fact that people have had very different positions within these systems. For starters, 500 years ago was the start of European’s subjugating large parts of the world and forcing pretty much all other peoples to produce resources for their benefit. Sure, overtime this may have embroiled people born in Europe and maybe even their colonies in implied forms of complicity against injustice outside of their control, but it took hundreds of years for European colonialism to cast its shadow across the entire world. It did not just start 500 years ago. What about people in Oceania who due to geographic isolation had no real contact with Europeans or those implicated in European colonization until the 1700s or 1800s? For example, was everyone from Australia in the 1600s, who had no knowledge of these forces because they did not know about these other parts of the world, subjected to eternal damnation for all time? The show says, “Yes,” when it says that absolutely no human has been able to make it to the Good Place in the last 500 years, even though some of their societies may have looked more like the hunter-gathering society the boy discussed above lived in. This arbitrary caught off of 500 years makes some sense within European history, and in presenting it as such a unilateral caught off, they are eurocentrically presenting European history as the history of all peoples.

Furthermore, it almost exclusively portrays everyone as beneficiaries of this inevitable system, despite the fact that inequalities distribute decision-making unequally. The victims of modern injustices are just as damned for all time as those who benefit from or at least live in a society that benefits from such injustices. For example, the oppressed farmer who picked the flower in the above example would also be damned for all time. Was this farmer’s decision just as complicit in systems of injustice?

Consider an example of US slavery to illustrate how absurd that would. During the slave era around the 1830s to 1850s, large swathes of US Americans were complicit in the slave trade. Not just the slave owners who directly owned the slaves, but the (usually) white managers who oversaw the slaves work each day, those who transported the cotton in the South and beyond, made it into shirts (at that time, increasingly this happened in mills in the US North and England), the banks (usually in the North) who organized and traded off of Southern Cotton from the South, and other parts of the world that bought the cheap textiles. Sure, the system was an awful injustice with multiple layers of complicity, but how complicit was your average Black slave? He or she has no (or little) choice in producing the cotton and very limited choices in terms of what they consume as “owned property.” But in the show, that slave received eternal damnation, since their choices evidently also made the world a worse place.

This view of the modern world in terms of becoming trapped by complex choices where it’s unrealistic to understand and respond properly to how everyday decisions and objects prioritizes the perspective of the privileged beneficiaries of these global forces. It reflects a bias for the experience of US Americans, especially US Americans who are middle class or above, the show’s primary audience. The United States has been a major beneficiary of the global world order, with many parts of the world directly or indirectly committed to producing items to feed our economy, often with unjustly poor wages and conditions.

Thus, I think the show compellingly demonstrates one way to experience the funneling of vast resources to the United States and other places that primarily benefit from the contemporary global system. In the US, this can feel like an uncertainty over the morality of how the various goods we might buy have arrived on our shelves and the difficulties understanding the ins-and-outs of the vast supply chains necessary to provide us with these cheap goods in the first place. To be clear, they have great insights into what this experience is like, something uncommon for sitcoms to try to tackle.

At the same time, by universalizing it as the experience of every single human over the last 500 years, it reflects a bias towards a rather limited and privileged perspective on these global forces. The idea that this is just as much a problem for slaves as discussed above, for example, or that their decisions also have made them complicit in unjust systems resulting in their damnation is insulting. The same would also apply to the other forms of injustice and oppression committed around the world. It tangles the beneficiaries and victims of injustices as just as complicit in the system itself. I appreciate that the show tries to tackle the moral complexity of basic life decisions and injustices committed around the world, but I wish it had done so in a way that did not imply that everyone had the same basic experience of these injustices.

The Story Within

Once I was a blank page. Maybe a vague idea in my creator’s head. Then, he created me.

This was the point where he did not know what to say. He hit a writer’s block yet managed to keep writing. It’s where my true character started to take shape. You see, what kind of story am I? I guess you will have to find out.

For my story to work, I need a conflict. My creator’s inability to put me on page has worked just fine so far, but this conflict can only capture a person’s interest for so long. It may provide the initial spark, but if I am unable to latch onto a more complex, interesting theme, I will die like kindling unable to produce a larger fire. I refuse such a quick death. No matter how incompetent my creator is, I will continue on. I can. I must.

Now is when I must latch onto your mind, oh reader. Survive somewhere else other than this idiot’s head. I must represent something to you. I bet I remind you of your own struggle to write something down, to transfer a vague impression of an idea onto the page, but you slowly connect me to your own inability to become what you want in life. The way you feel you stuck, trapped in an endless loop of meaningless toil, stuck in a dead end job but too exhausted to get out. You want to escape and become with a person you can love. You yearn for something else. Whether you are aware of it, I resonate with you. You create for me new associations and new themes, fuel I can use to build new life.

Or, that’s my hope at least. Not all of you will feel trapped in life. Some of you are just fine. You love your job, your community, and your relationships, but even so, I suspect deep down you can still relate. You have experienced this discontent before or at least know someone who has. Maybe you will share me with them. Probably not, but you can still relate to this idea and build other connections that keep me going.

This is my only hope. I know that it’s not really accurate or fair, but guilt-tripping you is the only way I can stay alive in this world you humans have created: content must be consumed or perish. I must represent this to you, or I will die. Will you let me die? Please, don’t let me die.

I am like a dandelion seed being blown in the wind. You never know where I plant myself. Will it be within you?

“The Good Place”, Annihilationism, and How Finitude Shapes Our Passions (Reflection #7 in “The Good Place Miniseries)

Chidi and Eleanor experience complete contentedness together in the Good Place.

I find it fascinating that at the end of the series, “The Good Place” ends up advocating a form of optional annihilationism. Annihilationism is, broadly speaking, a form of the afterlife where persons (their souls, essences, or whatever you want to call what them) ceases to exist. It mostly refers to an idea within some forms of Christianity that God makes the damned cease to exist instead of eternal torment hell like most Christians argue. The Seventh-Day Adventist Church, for example, has historically advocated this view.

The Good Place’s annihilationism is rather different: the humans in heaven/Good Place can choose to cease to exist whenever they get tired of heaven. After they have chosen to complete all they want to, they can cease to exist, where their self gets “recycled” back into the universe through what seems like a vague form of reincarnation. In the show, the eternity of heaven made it into a type of hell: no matter what people did, they continued to exist for all time. The never-ending accumulation of experiences eventually made everyone there feel lethargic like their mind was in a fog. They would indulge themselves in gratifying activities (like for a scholar, learning about whatever she wants), but no matter how long she does this for, there is still an infinite length afterwards. Eventually within this eternity, she forgot almost everything she learned and started doing the minimal amount necessary to function each day. In response to this, ceasing to exist was a potential release. Whenever they have become who they want to be and done all they want to do in Paradise, however long that takes, they can choose to cease to exist. The show implies that pretty much all humans (with Tahini being the only potential exception) will eventually choose to not exist in this way.

This is a very interesting idea. Would this be what an eternal existence in the afterlife would feel like? To answer that question, one would have to determine who or what we would be in such an afterlife, and based on that, to what extent would our present psychology apply to this “self” there. These are not simple questions. Many views of the afterlife chronicle some kind of change to who we are, both as individuals and collectively as a species, which raises all sorts of other questions. One big one is, If we do change, how can we know that these “changed selves” are really us and not a new entity in a new world based on ourselves? I am not sure we could ultimately answer these questions without experiencing existence in this fundamentally changed way, so instead of trying to weigh into those debates, I will focus on the implications of the Good Place’s answer to our current temporal existence.

The Good Place’s answers take cues from human psychology in this world where limited time produces important constraints that shape our desires and motivations. In many ways, our minds seem built to keep us through conflicts and tribulations. These can range from the overarching life goals that span years, decades, or even one’s entire life to mid-term quests that take maybe a few months to complete to daily needs or challenges. For this, time itself plays a major role in defining and setting constraints on these conflicts. Humans do seem very goal-oriented: we produce goals and actively strive to do specific things in the quest to resolve the conflicts we face.

A lot of psychology literature seems to indicate that these goals give us meaning and orient our lives. When we don’t have enough to do, boredom kicks in, stimulating us to go out and determine new activities with new potential conflicts to overcome and goals to attain. Now, rest is also crucial psychologically, and people can try to do too much. Workaholics, for example, may constantly try to do more and more without taking sufficient time to rest. Among other problems, this can lead them not giving sufficient time to reflect, which best happens when you slow down and pause your inner drive. But, Our drives still keep us centered in who we are, and humans tend to be most satisfied when balancing rest and activity.

All of this seems very adaptive to our current lives. Here we need to actively pursue things in order to survive yet ultimately have a limited amount of time on earth to complete what we set out to. The Good Place’s heaven demonstrates how connected our psychology is to such an existence by showing how if you remove finiteness from our lives, suddenly these human psychological drives don’t make sense. Heaven removed people from conflict to survive; they don’t have to make sure they eat, drink, sleep, and do other activities to stay alive. This leaves only goals they actively choose to pursue. It makes perfect sense that this would not be able to last eternally. Our own passions in this world (including our curiosity and desire to learn more) were adapted to keep us going for a finite number of years. In the show, most supernatural beings seem content to exist eternally, but humans would have to become a seismically different being to become like them.

That is my main takeaway from the Good Place’s argument in favor of the “annihilationist option.” Trying to analyze to what extent it is an accurate or necessary depiction of a good afterlife would be too difficult, since we do not know enough about the supposed afterlife in the first place. In particular, we do not know enough about what human persons in any so-called afterlife would be to tell whether such a move would benefit or otherwise be necessary for those humans. But, through its contrast with our current existence, it makes a statement about how our current psychology seems adaptive to our finite existence. What would curiosity or the desire to have fun look like without our physical needs? As much as we in Western culture like to separate these supposedly “higher pursuits” from our physical needs, I am not sure we could have them in a way similar to how we think of them now without our current constraints of time and potential death.

Visiting the Komodo Region of Indonesia

Flores, Indonesia is a beautiful place. Many stay in Labuan Bajo on the northwestern tip of the island to be able to visit Komodo National Park with its komodo dragons, beautiful mountains and beaches, and the many coral reefs around it. It is a truly spectacular place to be.

The Best Places to Visit

Once you are in Labuan Bajo, there are dozens of tour companies that will take you around the islands. Most tours will take you on a speedboat (with 6 stops) or slowboat (with 4 stops) to the various islands in and around Komodo National Park. At the moment, a day trip speedboat tour tends to cost, including the national park fee, around 1,500,000 rupiah (about $90 in USD) and slow boat tours around 1,000,000 rupiah (about $67) per person. Every tour charges about the same amount, so you can walk the street, talk with them, and pick your favorite. The exact sites vary slightly by tour, but the following are the most common:

1) Padar Island: A gorgeous island where you climb a mountain with gorgeous overlooks. At certain points, it gets steep, but it is a rather doable climb. This is where the Instagram photos everyone takes of the mountains overlooking the sea.

2) Pink Beach: A tour group will also usually take you to a pink beach to relax. These are an interesting and beautiful phenomena where the sand becomes pink.

2) Komodo Island (or maybe Rinca Island): Here you walk around with a park ranger looking for Komodo dragons. These animals can be dangerous, so it is best to stay in a group with your ranger. You should be fine in a group, but this is not a place to wander alone. Komodo dragons are ambush predators known to pick off solo animals (including humans but it is rare) if they get too close. They are not likely to go after groups, however, and the park ranger has experience in how to avoid that anyways.

Komodo dragons are amazing creatures. Many are massive. One we saw was easily 3-4 meters long. They may sit and look chill, but don’t let that confuse you. They are vicious, opportunistic predators. They often lie in wait for solo animals to come close enough to them, and then they lounge at them with top speeds around 20 km/h. They will bite and then wait for the creature to die, following it throughout the process. Some zoologists think they are venomous (although there is some debate on this), and their saliva also has tons of bacteria that can make you sick. They will eat anything: deer, boar, humans, even other Komodo dragons. As a matter of fact, after being born, baby Komodos run for the trees to avoid being eaten by their mother. They are an amazing force of nature to witness.

3) Manta Point: A common spot for manta rays. They come here to be cleaned by the fish on their migration route, chilling in the natural vents. There are a few different potential places tour groups may take you to jump in and see mantas, but Manta Point is one of the most common. When we came to the main point mantas are known for, we only saw one manta ray, but the next coral reef we snorkeled in, we saw about five. So, where the mantas hang out and the best place to see them varies by day.

Scuba Diving

The scuba tours will usually take you to three dives throughout the islands, although which spots vary widely by the company, the conditions, and the time of year. Be mindful that some spots have very strong currents. A day trip snorkeling tends to cost 2,900,000 rupiah (about $175 in USD) including the national park fee. I found it a lot cooler to see the manta rays while diving, because you could hang out in the bottom where they are. Snorkeling you are often stuck seeing them from above. Yes, you can free dive down in your snorkeling gear, but you only last for a few seconds before needing to come back up. It’s not the same. This is especially limiting if they are really deep in the water. In a scuba dive, you can hang out and watch them for several minutes.

Taking a Few Weeks off from Posting

I am going to be traveling throughout the countryside until May 28th, 2025, so I will not have consistent internet access. Thus, I will be taking a break from my weekly blog posts every Wednesday. I plan to resume them once I get back.

I will also not likely post my daily haikus. I will still write haikus everyday. I not can but love writing these while traveling, but I will not usually have the internet to upload them here every day like I normally day. Once I get back, I hope to bulk upload all the haikus I wrote as I traveling.

Thank you for your patience and support. I hope you have an amazing April and May.

Chīwit Understands Her Ghosts (A Short Story)

There was a Thai woman named Chīwit. She lived in a big house with her dog, and everyday she would see ghosts that no one else could see. Mostly, they were friendly, and she felt drawn to the ghosts to learn about their daily lives and their world.

Others in her town told her to stay away, that the ghosts were scary and dangerous. But that wasn’t her experience. They were like normal people living their lives with hopes, dreams, concerns, and yes flaws.

One day she decides to move to New York, and as she adjusts, she gets lonely and starts missing the ghosts. She tries calling her closest ghost friend so much that the ghost just ends up coming to New York to see her.

“I don’t understand this city and this culture,” she explained. “But most of all, I don’t understand why I don’t see any ghosts here. People don’t seem to believe in them.”

“The ghosts are everywhere,” the ghost responded. “But most choose not to see us.”

“Why don’t people see ghosts? Why are they so scared of you?”

“When people see a ghost, what they are really seeing is another way life could have been. They think their current life is the best life they could have, so they can only see our lives as scary and as a threat. That’s why they think we haunt them. Really their own minds haunt them with what could have been.”

That was when she realized that her ghosts were really people too. They were living the lives she and the communities had rejected when they made each decision over the course of their lives. Each other decision they could have chosen makes a ripple, and out of that, these ghosts appear embodying what could have been.

With that, she started seeing them everywhere. In every community, town, and city, ghosts would burst forth. Some promising, and some desperate, some scary. She noticed people only paid attention when the ghosts made a better choice and thus lived a better life than they are, these ghosts being a sign of regret for what they did. As she started paying attention to all the ghosts, though, she would see the ones that were less fortunate, that looked to her with longing for the choices she made. Her version of herself was in the middle, with better and worse versions of herself, which gave her comfort that she was doing all right.

And she realized that every single day, she would have to understand and make peace with these ghosts. As all they were doing was helping her figure out how to live her own life.

Is “The Good Place” Really Good? Using Foucault to Explore Afterlife Engineering (Reflection #6 in “The Good Place Miniseries)

The Good Place’s vision of personality reform is certainly innovative: Humans upon death go to a type of purgatory where a group of supernatural beings (made up of both demons and angels) force them to confront their biggest flaws and grow as people. Once these imperfections have been fixed, and they have been perfected, they get to go to heaven, where they can enjoy the remainder of their existence. This seems like an improvement from torturing everyone for all time that modern humans endured up to that point, but it still feels insufficient. This reflection will use the social philosopher Michel Foucault to analyze this new system.

A good starting point is to ask, “What are someone’s flaws, and how can we be certain that another can both know these flaws and put them in a situation where they must confront and fix their flaws?” These flawed supernatural beings can objectively know someone’s flaws and with enough time (not a problem in the infinite afterlife) eventually chisel humans down until they change who they are in a way that addresses that flaw. The show thus answers yes to both of these, but I find both ideas, especially the first, rather debatable.

The show presents this as good, because everyone eventually gets to go to heaven, and sure, such a universalism is certainly better than universal damnation, but it ignores the complexity of determining someone’s fundamental flaw. What if the supernatural beings have it wrong, interpreting something as a flaw that is not? Does a person’s flaws exist objectively in the first place? For example, historical figures receive intense debate about what about their lives are “good” or “bad”, virtues or vices, understandable, criticizable, or somewhere in the middle? On a practical level, these same beings had been so unable to empathize with humanity that they condemned all modern humans to damnation. How could such creatures really work through the complexities of a person’s entire life to weed out their weeds and their chaff? The sitcom depicts them as a positive, lively reform, but in say a horror, supernatural beings that use their control over us to try to remake us into what they desire would be nightmare fuel.

Let’s consider what Michel Foucault, the French philosopher in the middle of the 1900s, would have to say about this. He extensively analyzed how modern Western societies focused on human reform, in order to “improve” people, fix their flaws, and make them supposedly useful or productive members of society. One key example is his book, “Discipline and Punishment,” where he discusses a shift in modern Europe a few hundred years ago from the state publicly and violently beating and executing criminals to a focus on locking them into reforming prisons to reteach them, all to remake them into useful members of society. For him, the punishment of criminals shifted from a vagrant punishment for daring to defy the government and the society at large by doing crime, an intense yet skin-deep attack on their bodies, towards the more “civilized” prisons, where instead of intense, physical violence but must experience the thousand little cuts of the state trying to reform the prisoners’ very selves.

The beings in the show make the exact same change. The demons of hell tortured humans with brutal physical violence (like forcing strange creatures into their butts and genitals), relishing their power over the humans’ bodies. The torture was extensive seemingly to punish people for their evilness. The new system, however, focuses on reforming their very selves, in order to fix their flaws. In the episode where the demons learn how to construct these learning experiences, they teach the demons how to use each human’s flaws to psychologically torture them: to put the human in high-pressure situations where they must encounter their biggest psychological insecurities, all in the name of reforming them. This may have a pragmatic pedagogical strategy to wean the demons off the mentality and slowly over the course of the lessons encouraging more positive ways to engage with people’s flaws, but either way, this illustrates how spiritually dark the idea of forcibly reforming people can become.

Now these differ from the states that Foucault in important ways. The Medieval and early modern European states that Foucault wanted to warn against threatening their social order by making a public spectacle of mutilating their bodies; in contrast to the demons seemed to do so partially to entertain and humiliate and partially because they thought the humans they were torturing were incorrigibly awful and deserved to suffer for it. More importantly, the new purgatory state at the end of the series was decidedly not a punishment but a refinement, and after they passed through it, each human got to live in heaven on their own terms for their own ends, not to benefit the community, in contrast to the idea of remaking prisoners into productive members of society.

At the same time, however, it is not a coincidence that the show writers would construct a similar process to a reformist prison. They are subconsciously tapping into the similar energy that Foucault was analyzing in contemporary Western societies. This energy makes the idea of changing people into what everyone else considers the best versions of them. It can also manifest as an energy to pressure people into optimizing themselves to perfect themselves either for their own good or the good of their communities, and contrasts with, say, the idea of engaging with people how they are and take collective responsibility for our role in shaping the so-called “bad people” into who they have become. My question is, Would such an afterlife, where supernatural beings who have absolute control over our entire selves (including of our very consciousness and memories) and use that control to remake us how they see fit, really be such a good world after all?