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Is “The Good Place” Really Good? Using Foucault to Explore Afterlife Engineering

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. I hope you enjoy:

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?

The Good Place Miniseries (Introduction)

I recently rewatched “The Good Place” (spoiler warning), one of my favorite sitcoms in this century so far, 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. I hope you enjoy:

Revolutionizing Sitcoms: “The Good Place’s” Unique Window into Making Television

Navigating the Afterlife’s Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Empathy, and Organization Change in “The Good Place”

What Kind of Morality Does the Good Place Promote At the End of the Day, Part One: Utilitarianism (First part in a reflection on The Good Places’s Moral Framework, reflecting on how the show depicts utilitarianism)

What Kind of Morality Does the Good Place Promote, Part Two: Deontology (Second part in a reflection on The Good Places’s Moral Framework, reflecting on how the show depicts deontology)

What Kind of Morality Does the Good Place Promote, Part Three: Virtue Ethics (Third part in a reflection on The Good Places’s Moral Framework, reflecting on how the show depicts virtue ethics)

What Kind of Morality Does the Good Place Promote, Part Three: Virtue Ethics

This is the third and final post in my miniseries about ethics in “The Good Place” (see Part One, Part Two, and all my other reflections on the Good Place here). All of this is part of a wider series I am writing about that TV show. In this post, I will talk about how the series portrays the ethical theory called deontology.

Now for the final major ethical theory in Western philosophy: virtue ethics. I think this one is the closest one to what the show adheres to. Virtue ethics emphasizes the development of people’s characters, focusing on how to develop virtues. Virtue ethics often emphasizes developing conducive environments where people can cultivate the instincts or dispositions to think and act virtuously.

This is in contrast to consequentialism, utilitarianism, and deontology, which seek to create a unifying criteria for how to determine what is right and wrong in all circumstances. Virtue ethics, instead, focuses on how to grow individuals’ character so that they have the skills and natural desire to make moral decisions on their own. Many virtue ethicists emphasize on how to develop the right settings that encourage people to develop virtuous behavior.

One way virtue ethics comes up frequently in the show is in its emphasis on doing moral behavior for the right reasons. This is most apparent with Elanor whose major flaw is selfishness. She frequently tries to perform good acts, but her points do not go up because she is doing it for self-centered reasons (e.g. to earn her way into heaven). And she is not the only character that encounters this. In a pure consequentialist or deontological framework, all that matters is whether the action is moral or immoral (even if they disagree on how to tell whether an action is moral), and thus one’s internal reasons for doing the right thing are not as important. For virtue ethics, though, one’s motivations are crucial: they impact what type of person someone is becoming.

As a matter of fact, the whole show seems designed to cultivate virtues. The world Michael created to torture humans accidently forces them to develop as people in a trial by fire, and overtime, saving the themselves and all humanity ends up perfecting them as people. Their adventures force each character to confront and work through their major flaw and develop positive virtuous instincts. Then, the show concludes by replicating aspects of this environment for all humanity, who after death must go through a simulated environment forcing them to work through their major flaw/flaws and develop perfected (or at least better) virtuous characters.

The show routinely demonstrates that the environment produced by being with the others in the group is what causes each character to grow. For example, the judge tests all the characters in isolation, and pretty much each one fails. Similarly, when she sends each human back to earth to see whether they are better people, they quickly relapse into their old selves. It is only when Michael brings the group together reconstructing the dynamic they held in the afterlife, that they improve as people. The judge’s tests focused on whether each individual had grown by themselves beyond their personality problem, and the show demonstrates this to be the wrong question. They grow and improve as people when put in environments that help foster that in them.

The show starts with a consequentialist, multiversal afterlife system with a points system to determine moral worth to reflect that, and over time, the show demonstrates how lacking such a system is, consistently showing that instead humans develop virtues in relationships with others.

At the same time, the afterlife system is a labyrinth of bureaucracies full of various afterlife beings, so the main crew’s attempts to reform the universe amount to a pragmatic institutional change. Relics of the old system still persist at least at first: they still seem to use the consequentialist points system to ultimately assess people’s moral worth even in the afterlife. Many of the afterlife beings in that institution don’t understand the change and at least initially still operate within the old mentality. Maybe overtime, they learn this new way of thinking.

This leaves open whether this new system will work. Will these beings be able to change their approach as they operate within the new system? Will the continued use of the points system to evaluate whether someone is able to enter the Good Place introduce corruption, or will the fact that each human has an infinite chance to improve mean that eventually everyone will? In the show, the series heavily implies these kinks have been worked out, and the new system is working great. But, I am not sure the show did enough work to convince us of that. That said, the series clearly values virtue ethics, and the characters try to create an afterlife system that will foster virtues in every human.

What Kind of Morality Does the Good Place Promote, Part Two: Deontology

This is the next post in my miniseries about ethics in “The Good Place” (see Part One, Part Three, and all my other reflections on the Good Place here). All of this is part of a wider series I am writing about that TV show. In this post, I will talk about how the series portrays the ethical theory called deontology.

Deontology evaluates the morality of one’s actions based on a set of principles or rules. Different deontologists may have different principles (ranging from divine commands to general values or principles of what makes the best society), but deontologists view strict adherence to it as key in evaluating whether something is ethical.

Most of the series depictions of deontology center around Immaneul Kant, one of the best known modern European deontologists. Chidi, the main philosophy character in the show, was a Kantian scholar and considered himself a follower of Kant. In short, his system of ethics emphasized the importance of not using other people but treating their autonomy and freedom as paramount. Thus, for him, our actions ought to be those for which, if everyone did that action in that situation, would not hurt or constrain others in the world.

Chidi’s presence in the show is a constant reference to deontology. This is especially reflected in Chidi’s strict adherence to his principles about what the right thing to do is. Yet the show seems to use him to critique deontology. It puts him in situations where he must break his own rules as a source of plot conflict: forcing Chidi to agonize over whether to follow his principles or do the “dirty deed” necessary in the moment. For example, he must decide whether to lie for a noble cause, whether that is to not disclose that Eleonor (and later Jason) do not belong in the Good Place or pretending to be a fellow demon when a secret agent in hell itself. Kant famously argued that lying is always wrong, and even in a situation where it seems better to lie, it actually is not. It’s better for humanity overall to always tell the truth even in a situation that harms you or those around you.

Each time, he is put in a situation where he must decide whether to lie for a good reason. He struggles, but ultimately does lie. This seems to ultimately critique deontology, as if the show is arguing that sometimes the rules must be broken. Especially when the others around you are not willing to be nice or cooperate (like demons) or when the stakes are the eternal damnation of all humanity. Sometimes, though, he lies to uphold a contradictory value (such as to keep a prior promise made not to help before knowing that helping involves lying), but in a number of circumstances, it is clear that in some circumstances, he and the show thinks it is necessary to forsake one’s principles when push comes to shove.

Chidi’s insistence on adhering to strict moral principles is part of what causes him to struggle to make decisions, his biggest flaw in the show. At the same time, though, his principles were his most virtuous trait. It influences the other characters, catalyzing their own development: in almost every time the characters’ minds are wiped, Chidi ends up teaching them philosophy, which betters them as people (especially Eleanor). His strict adherence to more principles makes him reliable.

One penultimate example of this during a major climax in the series is Chidi helping the entitled and narcissistic former CEO, Brent Norwalk. The character seems almost utterly unredemptive, but in the heat of the moment, when helping could mean eternal damnation, Chidi was the only character willing to help him. He did so not because he thought that Brent deserved it (Brent had done no redemptive action) but because of his internal principle that it is morally right to help others in need. Through this and other moments, the show illustrates how standing by your principles can be an incredibly morally virtuous act.

Another way the show reflects on deontology is in how the show emphasizes the people’s motivations and inherent goodness or badness in its points system. The points system uses people’s intentions to determine how good or bad an action is. Utilitarianism or other forms of consequentialism often do not see internal motivations as important: instead what happened is only what matters, no matter their intention. In the show, though, being nice for a selfish reason seems to lower the point value of the nice act (and in some cases, make it wholly negative). Although keep in mind, this could really better reflect virtue ethics, which I will discuss in my next article in this miniseries. This aspect of the point system could be a thread deontology.

All of this illustrates the show’s complex relationship with deontology. Overall, the show does not endorse deontology, preferring more nuanced, maybe pragmatic, circumstantial ethical deliberations cultivated overtime than developing universal ethical principles for all time. Chidi has to overcome his principles constantly throughout the show, arguing that at the very least strictly following one’s ethical principles is too much. Life (or the afterlife) is too complex for rigid moral rules.

At the same time, it illustrates how honorable it can be to have principles and stick to them. Importantly, in all of these quandary moments, Chidi decides to do what is best for others around him, especially those in a vulnerable position. Thus, it presents helping others as honorable, whether that means lying to protect someone or like in the situation with Brent, selflessly risking one’s own salvation to help save another. Its view of when to follow principles and when to break them is more fluid, but having ethical principles in itself is noble.

What Kind of Morality Does the Good Place Promote At the End of the Day, Part One: Utilitarianism

“The Good Place” spends a lot of its runtime evaluating and critiquing the various ethical theories, making it difficult to classify it according to some predefined ethical school of thought like checking a box. It also has its ethical theory unfold over the show, both defining and refining its views over the seasons.

Chidi, in one episode, remarked how there are three forms of morality in Western philosophy: utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics. And all of them stink! Well put: these are the three major moral frameworks someone might learn about in an Introduction to Philosophy class, but most people’s views of morality in the real world draws from aspects of all three. In this three part series, I will investigate to what extent the show advocates for each of them . Through this I will investigate the nuances of how the series works through morality. (See Part Two on Deontology, Part Three on Virtue Ethics, and all my other reflections on the Good Place here.)

Utilitarianism

Let’s start with utilitarianism. Utilitarianism argues that what is moral is what produces the greatest amount of happiness. It’s a form of consequentialism, since it uses the consequences of actions to evaluate whether something is moral. So, in some forms of consequentialism, if I intended something good or positive, but something bad happened instead, then the bad consequence, not my good intentions, is what matters, and we should condemn that action as immoral. For example, if I gave someone a candy bar as a gift, with good intentions, but they died eating it from a peanut allergy, then that action would be unethical despite my positive intentions.

At first glance, the points system seems rather utilitarian or at least consequentialist. It evaluates the morality of human actions based on whether the actions have positive or negative consequences in the world. The show emphasizes multiple times that this includes instances where a character was not aware of and did not intend those bad consequences.

But the characters ultimately argue that this is a flawed way to evaluate morality. For example, when discussing the potential problem with the point system, Michael describes how thousands of years ago, giving someone a gift of flowers was seen as a good thing, but now, because of societal consequences unknown by the character, such as the poor labor conditions of the flower picker or environmental costs required to ship the flowers, the action is bad. These bad consequences are outside of the person’s reasonable knowledge or control, and thus it is not fair to use them to condemn the person for deciding to give flowers.

The show ultimately presents the points system as a flawed way to evaluate morality, and thus I do not think it endorses utilitarianism. But they do seem to present aspects of utilitarian and consequentialist thinking as valuable. The points system turns out to be fundamentally flawed, but they do not do away with it altogether. It is still the primary way they evaluate humans morality throughout their lives; they just limit the extent to which that the points system is the final decider of each human’s fate. Instead of damning those who failed to eternal torment, created a space for humans to refine themselves until they got a sufficiently positive score.

The main cast’s criticism is not that people’s consequences cannot be used to evaluate the morality of their actions, but that modern individuals cannot be reasonably held accountable for these unforeseen consequences because it is too difficult to keep oneself abreast on every potential result of their actions in the increasingly interconnected modern world. Thus, the show still seems to endorse a type of limited consequentialism but with caveats on the degree and scope of what consequences are reasonable and unreasonable to hold someone accountable for.

But, maybe making only a change to allow humans to reform their behavior and earn their place in the Good Place was a pragmatic move from the time-crunched main cast (and show makers who seem to condense the series at the end to wrap it up early). A massive bureaucracy of supernatural beings governed the afterlife, and maybe this was the one practical change they thought they could make to reform it over time. It would undermine the whole points system as an evaluation of morality anyways, without having to officially change a point system that many supernatural beings like.

It is hard to say, but the points system is still the basis of people’s moral worth and whether they made the subsequent moral improvements necessary to be considered “reformed.” Thus, it still has the central role in evaluating people’s moral worth.That said, I do think the show makers intended to seriously critique utilitarianism and consequentialism, although were not able to fully eradicate the system in the world without spending too much time articulating alternatives. Thus, the series inadvertently endorses these two systems while trying to officially oppose its excesses.

Navigating the Afterlife’s Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Empathy, and Organization Change in “The Good Place”

Part Two of my Good Place Series. Click here for Part One and for all my other reflections on the Good Place.

Organizational change is a quiet yet constant theme in “The Good Place”. Its explicit discussion of philosophy, ethics, justice, and the afterlife get more attention, but at the end of the day, the series’ plot mostly revolves around a series of organizational changes within the complex and traditionalist afterlife bureaucracy.

Through all of this, the characters’ primary conflict is convincing the established bureaucracy to refine the system. In this quest, Michael is the primary protagonist. He consistently advocates for organizational change throughout the series, starting as an innovative form of torture and morphing into a reform of the entire afterlife system.

Often the show creates one specific “leader” character to personify the system itself. Being in charge, this is the sole character they must convince, a move which not only gives a tangible strategy to enact their goals (they must convince this stubborn leader) but also a symbolic representation of the system itself. These leaders start complacent in the system unwilling to listen to its problems, very realistic for anyone who has tried to enact organizational change. Four such leader characters represent the types of complacency in the system:

1) “Not my problem” with the Head Accountant: The head of the cosmos’s accounting department (primarily tasked with creating the supposedly objective points system that damns all modern humans. When confronted with the problem, he responds that the system is objective and cannot be wrong. When pushed on that, his basic response is, “It’s not my problem.” He and the accounting department have a job/role, and such a change goes beyond their directives. Thus, it is the problem of whoever else is in charge of that.

2) Slow, ineffective action by the Head “Angel” of the Good Place: This character is in charge of the Good Place, along with a team of angelic beings. He listens to the team’s concerns and believes them unequivocally. He raises the alarm bells to do something, but his (and his angelic team’s) plans are too slow to be of much use. Developing a committee (including developing a committee to develop the committee), then more time to develop the name of the committee, and then after an even longer to research the matter before in effect writing a strongly worded memo to the powers-that-be to look into this.

3) Anger towards Change by the Head Demon: The Head Demon of the Bad Place, who serves as the primary antagonist for most of the show, represents the visceral anger towards institutional change and the desire to continue doing things as they always have. He tortures other characters for fun (including abusing his power as head demon to torture his own demon minions after they are done helping him). His anger manifests as visceral anger to those around him, personifying the often angry pushback for things to remain the same (which just so happens to be violent torture in this context) that occurs during attempts to make organizational change. At the end of the show, he finally concludes that torturing is boring, unfulfilling, and that he is unhappy, the only reason he is willing to agree to the change.

4) The Judge’s lack of empathy: When confronting the problem with the judge, she responds with a basic response of “Well, that’s just how it is.” This embodies the empathetic response one also finds when trying to advocate for change. She is not the only one; multiple supernatural beings fundamentally do not understand human existence, existing in their eternal state unaware of experientially what life is like on planet earth. Because of this, they cannot understand the difficulty of what life is like in the “real world” (aka human world) and the system developed did not take into consideration the complexities of life on earth. Embodying a perspective removed from the ground, bureaucracies and other organizations often oversimplify complex phenomena from their vantage point into easy to quantify metrics in a way that filters out the nuance and humanity of the individuals involved.

The cure for this lack of empathy is to inhabit the human world and experience what it is like to be a human. Even though most of the supernatural being’s exhibit this lack of empathy (with the potential exception being the angels discussed in 2, who are empathetic and willing to make a change, just ineffective), the Judge actually becomes empathetic, by going to Earth and living there for a time. This causes her to realize how complex life is and how unfair the afterlife system is. The show portrays walking in another’s shoes as the best way to cultivate empathy, and such empathy as being necessary to understand the faults inherent in the bureaucratic machine.

All of this demonstrates the complexities of organizational change. Modern sitcoms do not usually handle the intricate themes of organizational change within bureaucratic structures, and I am glad that the Good Place does. Though the show often lessens the intricacies of organizational change by narrowing them into a conversation with a few head leaders. The characters egregiously break the rules of the system until the leader of the system comes to accept such actions as necessary, rule-breaking common in Hollywood that would probably not fly in the real world. The sitcom format may be difficult to portray the slow minutiae and give-and-take that real-life organizational change often requires, so to me, that is forgivable.

Its take on the forces that oppose organizational change is accurate and compelling even if how they overcome them was unrealistic. I found it refreshing that a show decided to discuss these forces in the first place.

Revolutionizing Sitcoms: “The Good Place’s” Unique Window into Making Television

Michael from “The Good Place” looking smug

In this first reflection of The Good Place, I will describe how the sitcom covertly portrays slides in a discussion of the process of making a sitcom itself. Metatextual commentary and humor is “in” right now in popular US media, or at least during the years the show came out. This includes fourth wall breaks, discussions of the tropes of a show’s/movie’s genre within the work itself, shows about making shows, etc., but the Good Place had a clever way to embed some of the central tensions in writing a show into the story itself, allowing characters to reflect and confront them directly.

To understand how, we first must discuss how mainstream TV sitcoms get made. Usually, the writers have one or a small group of main characters. Each has a lovable or entertaining flaw that limits them in engaging and interesting ways. For example, Homer Simpson is an idiot; Michael Scott in The Office wants love and adoration, and George Costanza in Seinfeld worries about trivial matters. Out of this fundamental flaw emerge both endearing traits and other sub-flaws that produce a more fleshed out character (more details on this process here).

The show writers then create a world that constantly rubs up against this fundamental flaw that brings it out in dramatic and hilarious ways. The writers develop the conflict in each episode and the other cast of characters who inhabit the world (both major and minor) in ways that maximize that conflict with the main casts’ fundamental flaw (e.g. Michael’s family in Arrested Development seem almost hand-picked to bring out his judgmental yet enabling nature). This forms the show’s backbone, the basic structure that each episode replicates. Structurally, all other phenomena in the show (like witty one-liners) generally flow out of this premise.

The Good Place crafts this very structure into the premise of the story world itself. In the first season, the show takes a more conventional sitcom approach. The characters are in a world with tension that demonstrates their fundamental flaw:

1) Eleanor is in an afterlife she does not deserve, which inadvertently harms everyone else there. This high stakes environment highlights her fundamental flaw of self-centeredness.

2) Chidi becomes embroiled in helping her, forcing him to make complex philosophical decisions, which highlights his fundamental flaw of indecisiveness

3) Tahini is given an elite role in the Good Place but frequently has to push to demonstrate and maintain that role, which highlights her fundamental flaws of insecurity and elitism

4) Jason is given the role of a silent monk, conflicting with and thus highlighting his natural fundamental flaw of impulsiveness.

From the perspective of these characters and first-time viewers, these conflicts over how to stay in the Good Place (or at least avoid the Bad Place) while fixing the issues their presence produces are “real,” but by the end of the first season, that turns out to be a ruse. Instead, their flaws have caused them to be condemned in the Bad Place where demons have intentionally constructed this universe antagonize each character’s flaw and torture them for their entertainment.

One interpretation I have is that these demons embody the sitcom developers. The writers are the ones who take advantage of the characters’ flaws, constructing artificial scenarios that directly pull at those flaws, for the sake of entertainment. This becomes most explicit in the first part of the second season where Michael and his demons intentionally design each detail of their world to exploit their flaws. That is the process of writing a sitcom in a nutshell. The torturous world they build can be seen as a type of “live-in” TV set, composed of various sets (such as yoghurt cafes and a clown-based home decor) to annoy the characters and then create conflicts to antagonize these personality weaknesses.

Only, the characters eventually realize the artificiality of their world, concluding that this must actually be The Bad Place. This forces the demons to reset each’s memories and start over. This parallels sitcoms, especially episodic sitcoms where each episode is a stand-alone entity. Sitcoms, especially classic sitcoms from the era before streaming services of regular television networks, tend to involve no or little character change. Within each episode, the characters may or may not go through a series of character developments, making them a different person at the end of it, but between episodes, they are usually right back to who they started with the same flaws as before. This way the same types of conflicts can unfold in each new episode with different specific details.

In the Good Place, this becomes tedious overtime and ultimately fails. The demons become increasingly exasperated at the constant repetition of enacting the same type of story over and over. And the human characters eventually realize how this world is an artificial facade. This represents how nauseatingly repetitive sitcoms can feel overtime. Even though I did not watch enough media at the time to analyze this in-depth, but I tended to see a pattern in the 2010s of shows reflecting on the constant churn of repetitive content, and I think as streaming services enabled TV shows to become more serialized, encouraging greater degrees of character growth, several media explored the repetitiveness of classic sitcoms in particular. The Good Place seems to be an example of this.

As the “producer” of these hell episodes, the head demon Michael seems to represent the show’s progression the most. In a way, he is the main protagonist of the story, since he progresses the most throughout the show and does the most to shape the cosmos around him. Over the course of the show, he grows from a demon exploiting their weaknesses for torture to working with them to avoid his own “damnation” to genuinely caring about their wellbeing and ability to get into the Good Place to fighting to reshape the entire afterlife to be more fair and lifegiving for all humanity. Throughout the show, he is a visionary whose vision shapes the world of the show, whether envisioning a new way to torture humans or trying to change the entire afterlife.

All of this gave a platform for the characters to explicitly discuss the characters main flaws in the universe. In the beginning of the show, they did this by torturing them in hell, and as the show progresses and the plot centers on the characters getting into the Good Place, this shifts to them explicitly working through their flaws to become good. This happens in multiple cycles, ranging from the Judge’s tests to being sent back to earth to see whether they are different (a reuse of magical forgetting to make the characters go back to square one and have us see them work through their flaws again). Their character growth and reshaping of their afterlife world go hand-in-hand, paralleling them working through their flaws with changing their sitcom world and premise. Through these cyclic fits, relapses, and restarts, the main cast still make slow progress not only of their own characters but also of the very foundations of their world they inhabit.

A Year Traveling the World: A Reflection on 2024 and What to Expect in 2025

I hope for three things in 2025 as I travel around the world:

1) Find balance

This past year, I ended up discovering how I want to live my life (or this current chapter of my life at least), and this year, I need to learn how to live that life in a balanced, sustainable fashion. In 2024, my girlfriend and I decided to start to travel the world. 2024 served as its childhood to develop, refine, and mature how to travel the world.

Now, I suspect 2025 will see an adolescence and introduction to adulthood. During the “childhood” of 2024, I determined whether I enjoyed this life, which I do, but then also encountered practical problems in how to bring it about. Like, how should I balance adventuring and seeing new places with the desire to do creative projects and other things like keeping up with friends, daily chores, etc.? What kind of stuff am I most interested in creating or doing? How do my girlfriend and I juggle our respective needs and paces when traveling together?

In childhood (in Western beliefs around psychological development at least), one also focuses on general skill exploration and development. You explore the world and attend school where you are supposed to learn the most basic foundational skills for your society. Likewise, in 2024, I have been similarly focusing a lot of my time on my own general skill development without knowing it.

Then in Western psychology, adolescence is the time when individuals most wrestle with their identities and emotionally how they will resolve the issues that come their way. One reason teenagers have so many mood swings is because they are encountering adult stressors for the first time and are initially developing their emotional techniques for how to respond. As they get older, these emotional techniques become ingrained as the patterns for how they will react when they encounter similar stressors, and thus they do not need to adjudicate between as many potential emotional responses as when they were a teenager.

Similarly, by the end of 2024, I seem to have encountered some of the big issues I will face traveling the world while also trying to do creative work), and I suspect I will use the beginning of 2025 to wrestle with how to best juggle all my priorities and how to overcome these potential problems. For example, I felt like I was not sufficiently in the moment and did not ingratiate form as much cross-cultural connections as I would have liked. Instead, I got too caught up and stressed out by the many many items I put on my to do list. I will likely test out different approaches, some of which will help and some won’t, determining over time what works best for me.This I consider my adolescent period for traveling the world.

As I finalize figuring that out, I predict my lifestyle will eventually transition sometime later in 2025 into a “young adult period” where I start to find my groove. How long will the adolescent period take? I predict I will be done and have a sense of balance by the first half of the year, with a decent likelihood I will be done by March or April, but I really don’t know. That may be way too optimistic, like maybe this adolescence will take the whole year, and if I read this in the future, I may chuckle at my own naivety. But I am still going to tentatively go with it.

2) Create something I am proud of

I would like to develop something insightful and useful for the world in 2025. In 2024, I focused on my own exploring, learning, and experience: being able to see interesting and great places in the world, having my own adventures, and learning about the world. But as I work through my adolescent stage and hit my stride, I would like to take those skills to good use and produce something interesting, insightful, and potentially useful to others.

I will still explore new parts of the world (don’t get me wrong), but I would like to spend more energy trying to produce something as well. Right now, my thoughts are writing a book or starting a podcast series, but I have a nearly endless list of other minor or less thought out ideas. I predict I will set my ambitions too high like I always do at first, but I will ultimately produce something that I am proud of.

The Elitist Fallacy and Why You Should Watch Out for It

There is a surprisingly prevalent but flawed type of argument you may hear people make that I call the “Elitist Fallacy.” The Elitist Fallacy is a way to falsely position one’s skills, approach, and/or discipline as crucial in a given situation.

This is how the argument goes:

1) X Skill is crucial or necessary.

2) I cultivated X Skill through Y Practice.

3) Thus, Y Practice is the only and/or best way to develop a needed skill.

People more often invoke this kind of reasoning implicitly rather than explicitly, especially since when you see the argument laid out like this, you may easily spot its flaw. Just because someone developed a skill one way does not mean it is the only way to develop that skill.

The first two premises may be true: X Skill may be important, and the person in question may have used Y Practice to cultivate X Skill. It is wonderful that they were able to develop that skill in that way. The error comes in assuming that since this was the way they did it, it is thus the only way to develop that skill. There could be many other ways that work for other people, and if you are to present your way as the sole or at least best, you must carefully explain why the others do not work as well as it does.

People often invoke this argument to sell themselves as the sole or best person to hire to invoke that skill, and disciplines often foster it to institutionalize their way to teaching the skill or conducting that type of work as the only important approach so that they receive more attention, money, and/or following..

But, it falsely elevates one’s experiences to rank of the sole experiences in a given matter, making it elitist. As such, watch out for it in others and try to be aware if it creeps into your own assumptions.

Do you assume your path to understanding is the only way to develop a particular skill, and if so, do you have explicit justifications as to why? Try to engage with others around the world who do something similar to see whether they had a completely different way of developing that skill in their context.