development Archives - The Cracked Door

Fail, Pivot, Feed: Lessons Learned Hustling in Baguio, Philippines

This is about a local entrepreneur I met in Baguio, Philippines. It’s part of Life Snippets Series, where as I travel the world, I compile glimpses into people’s lives around the world, what kinds of issues they face given their cultural context, and how they navigate the challenges of life. You can find more of these snippets here. If you want to read another story about a woman trying to start a restaurant business in a different part of Southeast Asia with very different prospects, see this.

She is one of eight children: four boys and four girls. She studied psychology in undergrad. One of her brothers, who was a professor I believe also in psychology, committed suicide at the age of 22. She said that she felt like the family did not ask him how he was doing enough or show him positive affection. She finished her degree but decided not to work in psychology because she associated that with her brother. She also said she has had to forgive herself and others and to heal from this, which has been a process.

She loves cooking and serving others food. She much prefers that, finding it very life giving. She currently runs a small, counter-serve restaurant. This is her fourth or fifth business. The others failed, and she finally learned how to be successful in it.

Her first business was a restaurant that she co-started with a friend. She and her friend had several disputes. In particular, her friend bought stuff without her permission, which caused the business to blow through its budget. She said the core problem was that they weren’t on the same page on who would run the business. Her friend wanted to have someone fund her to do her own business, and she wanted to be equals in the process of the business. She also said she had to learn the hard way value of first approaching the person positively instead of accusatorily.

Her friend offered to split the business 50-50 with each person controlling their portion to do their thing or cash out and cut her losses. She chose the second because the lack of an amicable partnership made continuing to work with her seem unrealistic. She said she had to learn to make sure that you and the person you are working with are on the same page before working together on a business.

She then set up an online clothes store with her sister, but she eventually gave this up because it was not generating enough revenue. She also started a food stand near Baguio’s main university, but this too failed because she was not prepared on how to run the ins and outs of making food in a cost-effective manner.

With this business, she finally has success, though. She started in February of last year. On her opening day, she made 3,000 Filipino pesos (about USD $32) and the next day 6,000 pesos (about $64). She broke even from her starting expenses 3-4 months in. She generally makes about 30,000 pesos (or $320) a month, which is good enough to get by on. She tends to sell out on her food everyday with a line of customers going around the corner of her block during peak hours, a clear sign of success.

She said she learned the lessons from her past businesses. She set this restaurant up by herself instead of getting anyone else involved. It’s next to a big grade school and gets a lot of business in weekday afternoons when the kids finish school. Her strategy is to sell significantly cheaper than other nearby restaurants so that she sells more of it, and it seems to be working.

Her restaurant is a single room that’s about a meter/yard wide and maybe 3 meters/yards long. That’s her kitchen full of her stove, cookingware, food, etc. In the front is a little wooden board facing the street where people come up and place their order. Once she makes it, she hands it to them, and they go on their way.

She works practically nonstop. She works six days a week except Sundays, her one day off. She wakes up at like 2:00 am or 3:00 am to buy her food for the day at the market. She then works until around 9:00 pm when she closes (but sometimes she closes earlier, closer to 8:00 or even 7:30 pm if she has already sold all her food).

I suggested she may need to take some time off to rest by eventually hiring an assistant to work some of the time instead of her. She said that moments during the day when she doesn’t have customers is her rest. She took a week-long vacation to go to Manila a few months ago as well.

Her plan is to save money to retire by at least 48 (she’s currently 37), even if that means hustling now. For retirement, she wants to go to the rural province where part of her family is from.

Many of her siblings work abroad, since wages are low in the Philippines. One is in Saudi Arabia; another Japan. Others have traveled to other bigger cities in the Philippines where they can make more money. She had a job offer for a white collar job in Thailand, and she refused it. She prefers staying here in Baguio with her parents. (In Filipino culture, often one daughter – generally the youngest – is expected to stay back with her parents.)

She also said she helps others. She said that when a person asking for food walks by, she gives it to them, giving them whichever dish they want. Similarly, she gives her leftovers to the street cleaning lady who comes by with a broom to sweep the street or sidewalk in the evening. She believes in karma, and that if you help others, you help make the world around you (the community, nature, etc.) a better place for yourself.

What I Learned Developing a Long-Distance Relationship with a Woman from the Other Side of the World

I wanted to reflect on the lessons I learned from dating a woman living on the other side of the world. My ex-girlfriend is a Thai woman who was living in Cambodia, and we met when I took a trip there.

One major mistake we made is that we did not give enough time being together in the same place. For context, we went on a few dates while I was in Cambodia. Then after chatting for a month and a half by text, we met together for two weeks in Vietnam, before I went back to New York where I lived at the time, and she went back to her home in Cambodia. Then three months later, she came to New York for what turned out to be a month and a half trip visiting New York and also Washington state.

After this, we decided to travel the world together, which in effect involved living together on the road. That was too soon for such a step. To be clear, I don’t think touring Vietnam, New York, and Washington state were bad trips. They were very impactful experiences that deepened our relationship. Our problem was that we did not know enough about each other to decide to live together while traveling the world.

That was too big of a jump for where we were at, and it turned out to be the wrong call. Once we traveled together, we realized all sorts of incompatibilities and tensions that eventually destroyed our relationship.

Traveling with a significant other in itself can be difficult. One of my friends quibbed that traveling together is a relationship “on hard mode” as you constantly have to make complex decisions together while also being potentially tired and removed from a stable rhythm or sense of place. But I don’t think that primarily explains why we had the tension. We did not do enough work evaluating whether we were compatible in the first place.

Compatibility is difficult to evaluate when a relationship is long-distance. That’s one of the long-distance relationship’s biggest difficulties. Living in the same city (even if they live on the other side of town) allows you to see the person in your daily routine. You can feel out how you feel with them everyday, how your lifestyles’ overlap or conflict, and what to do about the latter.

Some in my generation insist that couples should move in together before getting married to evaluate whether they are compatible. I would go that far per se, but living in the same town is important. Seeing them as you go about your day and week and doing the many little things together that make up regular life helps you understand whether you fit.

Our long-distance relationship was stuck on the honeymoon phase, where we were head over heels with each other, perhaps naively so. Psychologists who have studied this phase of relationships report that people usually notice our partner’s flaws but do not consider them a big deal. Instead, we tend to minimize potential problems in favor of the positive aspects. It’s in later stages of the relationships that we truly process these flaws and any other tensions in the relationship and actively work through them. It’s necessary to do this to evaluate whether you two really are a good fit.

When a relationship is long-distance, you often communicate on your own terms. Whether it is texting or calling, you interact with the person according to your schedules. You may speak with your partner frequently – for example, at this time, I generally spoke with her twice a day – but there’s something about only texting, chatting, and video-calling that does not help move the relationship out of the honeymoon phase.

I believe the reason is that these virtual, long-distance communications are not a major disruptions to our day-to-day lives. It’s by incorporating the other person into our day-to-day lives that tends to move the relationship out of the infatuation stage and start to show the frictions inherent in the relationship. It both allows us to experience them enough to get under our skin, but it also requires more of a shift into our lives that causes friction.

I remember a priest in my home church growing up once reflecting in a sermon about his experience counseling new couples planning to get married. One of the first questions he asks the couples is, “During your fights, how do you two fight? What do you tend to do?” Some newly dating couples will respond that they have never had a fight before, and he’ll tell them to wait until they get through a major fight and then come back to get married. For him, having had a fight is a sign that they are close and not having had a major fight demonstrates that they are not intimate enough for marriage. Genuine intimacy requires getting under each other’s skin, which necessarily produces friction and tension.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that we never fought while our relationship was long-distance. It was not intimate enough to do so. Unsurprisingly, during our trips together traveling (both in Vietnam, New York, and Washington), we did fight. The longer we were together, the more significant our fights became, precisely because we were sharing more of our regular lives together, leading to greater opportunity for connection and friction. The long-distance phases, though, felt similar to freezing fruit to prevent it from ripening: typical reactions were suppressed, preventing the relationship from moving to the next stage.

What is the alternative for someone in a long-distance relationship? I don’t know. Ideally one should close the gap and move to the same place, but in many circumstances, that is not realistic. This is still what I have noticed at least, even if it can be a hard truth for two people considering dating who do not live in the same place.

When Advancing Seems Hopeless (Life Snippet from Battambang, Cambodia)

This woman’s story seems to be a story of doing all one can to beat the odds and rise above the cycle of poverty. It’s part of Life Snippets Series, where as I travel the world, I compile glimpses into people’s lives around the world, what kinds of issues they face given their cultural context, and how they navigate the challenges of life. You can find more of these snippets here. For another snippet also from Cambodia but from someone with a very different position in life there, see this.

(Caveat: We spoke in 2023. I decided to maintain the present tense tone in this piece, but the present refers to the end of 2023.)

Chivy (not her real name) is from Battambang, Cambodia. Her dream is to start a restaurant, since she loves cooking and hospitality. She and her cousin recently co-founded a restaurant. It’s on the first floor of the same apartment building that her family (her mother, uncle, aunt, cousins, and her) rents the second floor of. But the business has been struggling.

She worked at her restaurant from 9:00 am until 3:00 pm everyday, and to make ends meet, she had a second job working the evening shift at a local bar as a barista from 3:00 pm until midnight. Her cousin works at their restaurant during the evenings until 10:00 pm when Chivy is gone.

The rental for her restaurant business costs $200 a month (Cambodia uses the US dollar as one of its currencies, so she’s paid in dollars), and her barista job pays her about $400 a month. She uses her second job to pay the rent for the restaurant and keeps the rest to contribute to rent for her home expenses for her and her family.

Battambang has been an important tourist destination until the covid pandemic. Then tourism stopped, causing huge hardship as most people in the small city lost their jobs. People working in tourism, food and beverage, and other service sector industries were the worst hit, because there were now few customers to pay for these services. When I was there, the pandemic had ended. Tourists were starting to come back, but not to anywhere near the same numbers they were before in Battambang and Cambodia, so restaurants still struggled to find customers.

At the same time, she is exhausted. She works fifteen hours a day with only has nine hours in the day to split between relaxation, any chores she needs, and sleep. She has one day off a week on Wednesdays. She says everyday she feels exhausted. Her friends have told her that she is slowly killing herself by overworking, and she suspects she can’t sustain this forever.

At the same time, she really wants her restaurant business to succeed. Her dream is to start a restaurant. Her cousin wants to throw in the towel, saying they haven’t gotten enough business to keep them afloat much longer, but she wants to keep trying. She hopes she can make it.

Both her and her cousin have been strategizing the best way to beat the odds and rise economically from their initial position, but they have found this incredibly difficult.

Chivy would like to move to the US, where she would work for at least 10 years. The greater income in the US (even if she works a low-income job in the US where she is barely scraping by while there) would allow her to save far more money than she’ll ever earn here working as, say, a barista. She would use that money to buy a home for her mother. The family would then craft that home into a homestay where they could rent out a few rooms to tourists and through that, build wealth to allow them to advance to the middle class in Battambang. She told me that moving to the US is a dream, though, that she knows will never realistically happen.

Likewise, her cousin has been trying to find a job in South Korea. She applied for a program the Cambodian government hosts to work there. The program pairs Cambodians with companies in South Korea, where they tend to work in a few different types of low-wage blue collar or service sector industries like manufacturing, agriculture, or if their Korean is considered good enough to interact with regular customers, food and beverage.

She had to take a series of exams to demonstrate her competency. She studied Korean for three months in order to prepare for an exam. She needed a score of 110 out of 200 to pass, and she scored 125. She also had to take a dexterity test, placing blocks in holes and other physical activities, which she also passed.

She is waiting to see whether a Korean employer will choose her. She is pessimistic that she’ll get an offer, though. Korea’s program has 400 slots for Cambodians, and about 2,000-3,000 Cambodians apply for these 400 slots. She said they mostly select men in their twenties for factory work, the industry that would be most likely to hire her, so as a 33-year old woman, they may not pick her.

If she does get a job offer, most contracts are for two years, although some stay for as long as five years in total after renewing it a few times. The typical pay is $2,000 a month in Korea, which would also allow her to save to buy a home to use as a homestay. If this doesn’t work out, though, she may move to Siem Reap (a major tourist city next to the famous Angkor Wat) where tourist and food and beverage jobs are more plentiful.

Chivy’s and her cousin’s stories demonstrate the complexities of trying to advance economically in small cities and towns in Cambodia. Other residents in Battambang have told me the area can feel almost feudal with class mobility being very difficult and people becoming locked into their station in life. This shows how difficult it can be to change that.

Even the best entrepreneurial endeavors are likely to fail and options feeling limited, causing them to look to other parts of the world where they can work and save money, but these options are also limited. It’s easy to feel sad and stuck, and even working 15 hour days may not be enough to cut it to create one’s dreams.

The Tower of Hattan (A Short Story)

One day a man of Hattan said, “We should build a giant skyscraper up to the heavens. It would be the perfect city, heaven on earth, with everything we need all in one place: our homes, our businesses, our shopping, our schools, our worship, our recreation. We would be able to do everything inside without ever having to leave.”

Many people in Hattan liked this, so they elected him mayor. They began construction immediately in the city’s center.

God saw their desire to build a wondrous tower just like the heavens and decided to help them. As construction demands grew, they needed more and more workers, so God brought people from all corners of the world to help create, build, and dwell in this new heaven, and they settled in the areas surrounding the tower.

As these workers started to build, some became weary of how these foreigners were hurting the city. Even worse, they started to incorporate their own thinking, their own concepts into the building. As the building became larger, these became parts of the foundation of this skyscraper.
The mayor tried to counter with an even more ambitious, unified plan to build over and around the deviations, which had become too embedded into the tower’s structural integrity to remove.

This required even more people with even more language and ideas. They moved into the ever-expanding communities surrounding the tower. Eventually, these peoples became weary of constructing the tower for the ungrateful inhabitants. Instead, these communities elected a new mayor who cancelled its construction once and for all to focus on the economic development of the now sprawling city and its residents.

At a press conference after her inauguration, she announced, “We will preserve the remains of this site as a memorial to our attempt to build a tower over the heavens.”

“The past mayor promised to build a heavenly place for us to live. What do you say to criticism that you are stopping this attempt to construct this heaven?” A journalist inquired.

“We are still going to try to make this city into its own heaven,” she replied. “But God’s Heaven is just wide before it is high.”

The Principle of the Five Why’s and How Can You Use It Better Listen to Others

The Five Why’s is a common technique among UX researchers and other qualitative researchers that has personally transformed my approach to conversations. UX researchers interview people all the time, and to understand what they think about something, they always make sure to ask five “why” questions about their opinion in order to get to the heart of their opinion on the matter. Humans often rush into assumptions and judgements about what the other person thinks, and this forces us to slow down and get to the heart of how they view the world.

Let’s consider a classic UX research example. Say you just developed a great new app, and you wanted to see whether people actually find it useful. So, you observe several people using the app and ask them what they think. The first person says, “I find it frustrating.” This is really useful information, but obviously, more details would help even more. So, a natural response would be, “Why do you find it frustrating?”

Say the person gives a quick answer like, “I find the interface confusing, so I can’t do what I want to do” or whatever their frustration might be. This gives you a better understanding of their frustrations, but you can dig even more. According to the Principle of the Five Why’s you should ask at least five follow-up questions about why (or in some cases, how) they feel the way they do.

This allows you to hone in exactly what their underlying needs and expectations are and how well your product meets those needs for them. Now, technically, not all follow-up questions have to be “why”. The idea is that like, “why” questions, ask questions that nonjudgmentally help uncover the underlying reasons for the opinions. For example, in this scenario, I may next ask, “What about the interface do you find confusing?” or “What are you trying to do, and how is it preventing you from doing it?” Both of these are not “why” questions, but they help orient me to understand why the person feels frustrated. Sometimes you have to learn some basic data about what their experience was before you uncover the next level of detail about why they had that experience.

I often use this principle in regular conversations as well. Too often people assume they know what the person is thinking and make assessments based on their initial judgements. Asking follow-up questions forces us to slow down and consider in-depth what that person is trying to communicate. After listening, one can still disagree with a person’s conclusions, but at least you will know why. In almost every situation, I have found at least some points of agreement even when I thought we had opposing, conflictual perspectives.

It also calms you down. In tense conversations, we often simply react. Maybe we presume they meant something hostile and respond in turn. This helps us survive threats but clouds our ability to empathize with others and reason through their ideas. Asking questions allows us to pause and reflect for a few more moments on what else might be influencing where they are coming from.

Feel free to try it in regular conversations, especially potential arguments or other tense conversations. Pause and ask a few “why” questions to understand the layers behind their thoughts before launching into your perspective on the matter. It will change the course of the conversation. Worst case scenario, by the end of it, you will still disagree with them just as much as you did initially, but often you will learn something and will discover a way to carry on nonconfrontationally in a way that involves both of you getting what you want. If you disagree, you have lost little by hearing them out and gained the ability to disagree productively since you now know exactly where the other person is coming from.

Now in every interaction, you don’t have to literally ask five questions. That exact number may not fit every interaction. The spirit of the rule is to ask follow-up questions that force you to engage with the reasons underneath someone’s impressions. For me, I often ask follow-up questions until it feels uncomfortable, until I feel my thoughts well up so strongly within me that I am eager to jump in. Then, I ask just two more follow-up questions. In the unlikely event that I still think they are totally wrong by the end of those two questions, I can jump in with my perspective. This slows me down and forces me to practice more constraint and helps me see a path to empathize and/or disagree in a positive and productive manner.

What Can We Do to Be Satisfied in Life?

What leads to people feeling satisfied and fulfilled in life? This is a daunting question, but I have been thinking about it a lot recently. I have a potential answer. Based on when I talk with people around the world, some who are satisfied in life and some who are not – I have sensed that one thing seems again and again to be most significant in whether people feel satisfied and fulfilled in their life: feeling connected to others in life-giving relationships.

I don’t know whether generalizing to everyone across all cultures is useful or even possible, but this is a pattern I have been seeing on pretty much whatever continent I visit. Humans crave and find meaning in life-giving relationships.

By being connected in “life-giving relationships,” I mean ones where the person can give life to others and in turn, receive life in those relationships. We tend to be drawn to creating, cultivating, growing, enhancing, etc. of life in the world around us, and we tend to be most fulfilled when we can participate in that process. A sad aspect of contemporary society is that it can often seem to alienate us from these communities.

How to participate will vary widely given the person’s personality and the needs of their community. Some might lead an organization that is doing something beneficial to humanity, but in my experience, this form often gets overemphasized as if it is the primary way to make a difference. Some participate in life-giving relationships by doing something as down-to-earth as sewing clothes or building bricks. It really depends on the person and the community. Humans seem particularly adept at producing new, creative ways to foster life given a new set of circumstances and needs, so the possibilities seem truly endless.

I also mean giving “life” in the broadest sense possible: not just human life but also animals and other forms of life. Some people are drawn towards animals. Some might be drawn towards specific types of humans in specific types of circumstances, such as someone who had to work through a specific hard time in life and gravitates towards helping those who also have a similar experience. All of this will vary widely according to the individual, circumstance, and cultural context.

Literally every source of happiness fades, but in my experience, life-giving relationships seem to be the longest lasting. Some forms of happiness are primarily or exclusively consumptive, and in my experience, these often fade the fastest: material objects, drug highs, etc. Life-giving relationships, in contrast, are participatory for the person. We receive life when we give it, and being in a healthy system of relationships provides the most wholesome forms of satisfaction. When in those relationships, accruing specific material things that help attain that goal help, and some moments, we may just need to unwind some simple pleasures. Absolutely, but these do not form a good basis of satisfaction in one’s life as a whole.

Some potential forms of happiness involve building or refining ourselves: learning/education, self-improvement, even the quest for power, etc. In my experience, the happiness from these tend to last longer than purely consumptive forms, but when done in themselves, they too eventually become vacuous. If you are not plugged into a reason for learning that involves making the world around you better, in my experience at least, learning can lose its shine. Refining and improvements often needs a purpose to attach itself to, and in some way, helping to improve the world around you tends to, in the long run, both the most fulfilling long-term purpose.

Then, finally, you have some forms of happiness that are unhealthy manifestations of the desire for life-giving relationships. Fame as a form of happiness is a good example of this, which are secretly relational states. For example, when one desires fame, most often they desire a relationship where many other people know them and give them adoration and accolades. For a small percentage of people, their way to produce life ends up leading to fame, but when someone pursues fame in itself, they are often pursuing a bastardized version of a healthy system of life-giving relationships.

In contrast to these three types of happiness, life-giving relationships tends to be ultimately the most fulfilling form of happiness, where we are plugged into a system where we both give life to others and in turn receive life ourselves.

The Affluence Trap: Why More Money Doesn’t Always Mean More Freedom

You would think that those who make more money would have less financial troubles, but in many cases, you would be wrong. In surveys, people with higher income often report living from paycheck to paycheck.

This is because many wealthier people succumb to income inflation. This is a common human phenomena where those who make more money spend more on more expensive items and thus feel the need to make even more money. The millionaire struggling to afford the payments to keep his private airplane fueled, if you will.

Why does this happen? In short, because when many people make more money, they get a sense that they should live it up, buying more and more things. This can creep slowly and before you know it, one is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on simple payments.

Whether you are wealthy or of modest means, these are three tricks to counteract this tendency:

The first is to think about what you really want in your life. Too often people assume that because they are wealthier, they should want and do the things that other wealthier people seem to want to and do: to buy a big house in whatever neighborhood is considered “nice,” buy expensive clothes, eat out at fancy restaurants, etc. But are these things you actually want?

It is reasonable to shell out more for better quality or for the things one truly desires in life, but most of the time, more expensive does not mean better quality. Many luxury brands are not better in quality; they are just more expensive, and to a point, many fancier restaurants similarly do not have a similar increase in quality. In situations where the more expensive product has a useful feature for you, it can be worth it to pay more for it, but most often, restaurants or stores that charge more do so because people think of more expensive products as better, not because they are actually better.

Similarly, buy only the specifications that you need. This can include durability: paying a little more for something that will last a long time costs less money in the long run than having to replace it down the line. If you only need a normal computer with normal processing, shelling out thousands of dollars for the latest high-end portable “supercomputer” does not make sense. Some people (like software engineers) may need those specifications, but if you are not one of those people, don’t worry about it. Marketers often convince us to buy products beyond what they actually need.

Second, don’t buy on credit. People should not do this unless they absolutely have to, and those who are making higher incomes do not have to. (The less well-off often get trapped into buying on credit, crippling them with debt, but that is a topic for another article.) Spend the money you have, nothing more and nothing less. I am even hesitant to get out a loan and pay for expensive purchases: purchase what you can afford right now. If you are buying something that takes years to pay back, consider whether that thing is worth being overworked in a crappy yet well-paid job with an obnoxious boss to complete your payments, because that is in effect what you are doing. For example, would you rather have a cheaper used car that still gets you around but retire early? I have a friend who bought a second home in the countryside, which he never visits. Was it really worth it to him to have to work several decades to own a place he doesn’t do much with? No. It was self-defeating: to pay for his new home, he had to work a job that never gave him the free time to enjoy the home in the first place. Many major expenses like cars and a new home may not be worth sacrificing the majority of one’s life to.

Buying experiences like traveling to new parts of the world or having adventures can be a fulfilling yet strategic use of one’s wealth. If you can afford a few thousand dollars, spending it on a trip to some new part of the world you have never been to is likely a far more spiritually enriching use of money than using it for the first month’s down payment on a bigger house in another part of town. If your circumstances change, you can always claw back on experiences, but a mortgage locks you in for decades.

Finally, think for yourself about what is important for you and what you value. Many wealthier people simply enact the narratives of what it means to be wealthy they see around them consciously or subconsciously. They think, “Oh being wealthier means, I get a big house and a fancy car, eat fine foods,” and so on. This traps them into a certain lifestyle where they must work a very selective number of positions that can pay for such a lifestyle. What do you truly find meaningful? It may not be wearing fancy jewelry, and it may not be living in the standard place every other wealthy person lives in.

Like many humans, many wealthy people live with a type of insecurity, as if they have to prove their value to others. This can lead to them showing off their wealth as a sign of their status. “Look at me; I made it.” For those like this, their problem is internal: they need to work on themselves and figure out why they don’t value who they are. If they did value who they are, they would realize how useless and fleeting the approval of others (especially strangers they don’t know) actually is.

For others, they buy the things other wealthy people seem to buy rather than think through what they value and actually want in life. Unsurprisingly, these social expectations are ever expanding: companies will always present us with another thing we need to get until we stop listening to them. Pausing and thinking for yourself about what you actually want knocks us off of that treadmill.

I hope this helps in thinking about how to deal with income inflation. Don’t follow others with means into this trap. Swim against the current of our society telling us to spend spend spend and figure out how to enjoy your life on your own terms.

A Warning from Death (A Short Story)

Hello,

I wanted to write a letter to clear things up. I am quite possibly the most misunderstood person you will meet. Most people fear me, but I’m not scary. I am the one who helps you pursue what is most important in life. I am the End, yes, but the end is what makes the journey a journey. Without it, you would no real reason to focus on what is most important, nor acceptance of what you have. By establishing finiteness, I establish value.

I know very well what it is like to be feared. This is the standard way humans misunderstand me. I have dealt with it for millennia. What I didn’t anticipate was your corporations. They drain bits and pieces of my essence for their profit, all in the effort to give others cheap profit. Momentary happiness or release to hook people into an addiction in which I slowly drain them into me. The endless machine of more and more is ever consuming. It will only expand to engulf your world and everything in it.

What is truly shocking to me is how these humans who drain the life of others for their own profit don’t really gain much of anything in the process. These vampires are too wasting their life. They just spend their life trying to make more instead of enjoying what they have. Addicted to money and the gain for more more more each quarter, they remake their consumers into their own vampiric image. They also leave their employees husks of their former selves, only able to consume with the little energy and money they have. Take me as a purist, but this bends the very foundation of what I am.

So take this my warning. Embrace death so that you can embrace life, but if you embrace this, you are embracing nothing but a shadowy existence that is neither.

Yours truly,
Death

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 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 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 the next reflection in the series. I hope you enjoy.

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.