The Good Place
2016 · TV series · 22 min episodes · 4 seasons
Created by Michael Schur
Eleanor Shellstrop, an ordinary woman who, through an extraordinary string of events, enters the afterlife where she comes to realize that she hasn't been a very good person. With the help of her wise afterlife mentor, she's determined to shed her old way of living and discover the awesome (or at least the pretty good) person within.
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64 comments on Hacker News
In 100 years nobody will know who you were. In 200 years, only a few hundred people will be remembered from today. So what is the goal of your ambition? Is it the self-satisfaction? Temporary bragging rights that will be soon forgotten? Whatever wealth you accumulate, you can't take it with you. The pharoahs already trie this. It doesn't work.
Nobody's going to give a shit that you founded an AI company and sold it to Meta for $600 million. Sure you can enjoy the material benefits while you're here. Maybe you can even pass some of that onto your children.
The Good Place was one of the best TV shows of the best shows of the last decade (IMHO) and it brought up a relatively recent (1998) book "What we owe to each other". It makes the point that it's not a question (ie "what do we owe to each other?"). You're only meaningful impact is on the people you affect around you, positively or negatively.
Personally, I have no opinion on whether people should or shouldn't have children. That's none of my business other than this: you have to make a choice between having and raising those children and chasing material "ambitions". Bringing people into the world without their consent and then neglecting them makes you an objectively terrible person. Pick a lane.
And if you do choose ambition instead, at least ask yourself why. Studies have been done on this. Money does buy happiness but only to a very limited point. Beyond that it's isolating. So why are you doing whatever it is you're ambitious about, really?
Note that this post includes a major spoiler for the show The Good Place. The show is fantastic, so I'd suggest not reading unless you've already finished season 1, or have decided it's not for you.
Sad they didn’t finish it. The later books seemed like they were written “to be movies/series” with less political stuff and more visuals / speculative sci-fi. Plus the story has an actual half decent conclusion.
To me the plight of Hollywood is “forever shows” where the writers start without knowing where it would end, so shows never really “end” they just slowly fizzle out without ever getting to the end.
I simply loved “the good place” for having such a powerful conclusion.
It was named after the sentient computer system in the TV show "The Good Place"
A humourous clip: https://youtu.be/etJ6RmMPGko?si=W98LdG1jDdUCXsHV
It was used to great effect in one episode of The Good Place.
I remember reading the letters of Cicero about Gaias Julius (Later known as Cesar) how he complains how the he and his gang is acting all amoral and wearing ridiculous scandalous clothes, waring the togas in provocative feminine fashion.
There are accounts from all over history of how "the times were more thoughtful and moral in the good old days" But here we are, thousands of years later, still complaining about the younger members of our species and how they will bring ruin to us all. Perhaps they will, but it all seems so human to complain about that.
I remember the art of the 90s - when my part of the world got access to marvelous pieces like Thunder in Paradise, Barbed Wire, American Ninja, Bay Watch ... at the time it was considered the pinnacle of art by teenagers like me, and despised by my parents. But at the same time we had things like The Matrix, The Shawshank Redemption, Leon ... We remember the good stuff and the forget the fluff.
There are some real gems being created all the time, maybe not always from Hollywood but human creativity soldiers on.
The Good Place, The Expanse, 3 Body Problem, Horizon Zero Dawn, Expedition 33, Project Hail Marry. There is a constant stream of incredible thoughtful stuff being produced - books, games, movies, essays, videos, podcasts - the medium might change but humans always try to find ways to discover, understand and express the world around us in novel ways, one just needs to listen/watch.
So there is generally believed to be huge difference in meaning between Ethics and Morality today, because it is a useful tool to have them mean very different things. Among other things I suggest the TV show "The Good Place" as a useful and fun/funny introduction, but there are plenty of great classes to take and other philosophers to read on the subject.
Morality may be objective [1], but Ethics is not just/no longer only the "study" of morality but the subjective practice and personal application of it. Ethics becomes the pragmatic and imperfect framework for working with the belief system of the other's ideals. If you want an infosec analogy, think "security threat model" versus "security posture". Morality is your ideal "security threat model", many people will have shared threat models and a lot of lofty goals and ideas to guard against them in theory. Ethics is your "security posture", what you are actively doing day to day to guard against threats, not just imagined, but the real ones you encounter on those days. People may share the same "security threat model" but nearly every "security posture" is a unique and personal snowflake with differing imperfections (and sometimes unique beauty).
[1] You paraphrased Immanuel Kant, which suggests to me you may have a strong religious background/upbringing coloring at least some of your view here. Unfortunately, this overall question of if there is an objective Morality is a centuries long debate among Philosophers and people have different perspectives across different religions and in different cultures. Immanuel Kant was a strong voice on the side of an absolute and objective Morality, but there are so many other viewpoints. Defining a truly objective Morality is harder than it sounds, even if there are lots of individual moral beliefs many religions and cultures share together. Especially, I believe, as imperfect people working through however many layers of imperfections we may have accumulated in our personal ethical frameworks along the way to having these philosophical discussions. Because Philosophers can't agree on if Morality is objective and/or absolute or neither, it becomes useful to separate the discussion of the ideal state (Morality) and the subjective practices (Ethics) as separate things.
I recommend reading Susan Wolf's essay "Blame, Italian Style." It's a response to TM Scanlon's contractualist approach (as made famous by the TV Show The Good Place), and it is a vigorous defense of a concept of blame that includes emotions such as anger. Even if you've never read any Moral Psychology, it's accessible and thought-provoking.
It reminds me of Janet malfunctioning in the TV show The Good Place.
There is a reason religions tend to agree on 1) the worth of your life is not your own to judge and 2) what makes humans moral is they have free will - good or evil is found in the places you can control, even and maybe especially when it's hard.
Because otherwise you make morality a game and people are distracted from the deeds by the point system (The Good Place is another good TV show that has a funny satire of this).
The TV show The Good Place actually dug into this quite a bit. One of the key themes explored in the show was the idea that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, because eventually the things you consume can be tied back to some grossly unethical situation somewhere in the world.
As a non-US citizen, I heard it in the TV show ‘The Good Place’ as the official Bad Place song: https://youtu.be/iDjX4-LKqCA
One thing that really stuck with me from the show The Good Place. The premise is that getting into heaven is a points-based system. You get points for doing good things, loose them for doing bad things, and when you die, if you have enough points, you go to heaven.
Spoilers for season 3 ahead
Used to be, for hundreds of years, you'd go visit your mom for her birthday. You'd be walking down the lane and see some wildflowers, so you pick them and bring them to her. +10 points.
In modern society, to do the same you'd drive to the florist and buy some flowers, then drive to your mom's. +10 points. But the PE firm that bought the florist laid of 100s of workers, and -10 points for supporting them. And the flowers were picked by underpaid exploited immigrants, -10 points. And you dumped a bunch of CO2 in the air from your drive and gave a newborn asthma, -10 points.
The show was saying that because of the choices that modern society and late-stage capitalism force upon us, nobody has gone to heaven for decades.
See also "The Good Place" which is an absolute sleeper of a TV show.
I'm hoping someone will humor me:
At the beginning the author states the "shorter version" is at https://www.otherbranch.com/blog/rebooting-something-like-triplebyte
Then in this shorter article:
> But maybe we can fork it. (In the Git sense, not that one!)
With a wikipedia link to the Good Place TV show: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Place
I don't get it though, what does The Good Place have to do with any kind of 'forking'?
@rachofsunshine: what the heck?!
Not a movie but the Television series, The Good Place Incredibly brilliant portrayal of Eastern philosophy in daily life, just Wow!
In an episode of "The Good Place" I just watched today, there was a joke about Florida: "possession of a non-fried vegetable is a felony in Jacksonville".
Now I feel like it's me who's living in a crazy TV show.
There's a bit in one of the early episodes of the TV series "The Good Place", where one of the afterlife people points out that pretty much every religion only gets a few percent right about what's going on (except for one random guy who somehow got 90-something % of it).
But yes, this is the thing that always gets me. It takes a mind-blowing amount of arrogance to believe that your religion -- out of all the thousands that currently or used to be practiced -- is the right one, and everyone else -- billions of people -- just absolutely must be wrong.
And if you don't have that arrogance (but are nonetheless religious), the only reasonable stance to take is that you believe there is a god, or many gods, or perhaps some sort of supernatural universal force; and that there is maybe (but maybe not) some kind of afterlife, or reincarnation system, or... who knows. But I meet precious few religious people who think like this; I guess most people who fall into this category would tick the "spiritual, but not affiliated with a religion" box.
… yes. That’s the entire point. That’s basically the plot to the TV show “The Good Place”.
What about someone who has conquered their craving to continue living and decides they are prepared to embrace the end? Have you seen "The Good Place"? It's really quite an interesting show in that it combines a (sometimes very funny) sitcom with a pretty thoughtful exploration into the subject of ethics.
NBC’s Thursday lineup around 2010 basically.
New episodes of Community, 30 Rock, The Office, and Parks and Recreation.
And things associated with it all, like The Good Place.
To me Haskell looks more like “The Good Place” (season 1)
If this was calling Rust from Lisp, on the other hand…
The Janet language is named after a fictional immortal being from the television show The Good Place, who exists to help mortals in the afterlife -- that was the inspiration for the title.
> There’s something seriously brainwashed about looking at what’s at offer today and still concluding that because the Sopranos exists we’re still producing good content.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
The Wire
You're the Worst
The Good Place
Too many decent-to-great sitcoms and sketch-comedy shows to list.
Ditto adult animated shows.
Justified
Evil
Several great limited series (e.g. The Haunting of Hill House)
I could keep going. The last couple decades have given us a lot of really good shows since The Sopranos. I watch a fair amount and still have a backlog of probably-great stuff I haven't gotten to yet (including, actually, The Sopranos!) and continue to stumble on shows I've never even heard of that turn out to be really good.
"How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question" by Michael Schur is my favorite read of the year.
It's an introduction to the philosophy of ethics through real-life examples and anecdotes by the creator of The Good Place TV show (the audio book even features the shows actors). Unlike most of philosphy stuff you can actually finish it in couple of days and feel like you learned a whole lot!
In particular it helped me with my ethics choice anxiety and introduced me to Aristotel's "be the best version of yourself" philosophy which is such a liberating way of thinking.
> How can you ever participate in the global economy and definitively say that you aren't supporting something 'evil'?
I'm finishing a show called "The Good Place" that is about the afterlife and how people are judged for their actions - it tackles a bunch of really interesting philosophocal topics (like the trolley problem!) and the writing is top notch. Anyway, there are some episodes in Season 3 that dig into whether it's even possible to be 'good' in modern globalized society because of this sort of issue.
If I don't notice counterfeit items then why would I care as a consumer?
If you do receive a counterfeit are you not able to figure that out in the 30 day return window?
> At this point you are part of the problem by supporting them in their bullshit simply for your convenience.
Do you yourself really not support any business, restaurant, or government that somehow harms others?
I'd recommend watching a show called The Good Place. It illustrates morality and how we're all culpable to evil in some way.
The TV series The Good Place had a really good take on this, by the final season. Worth a watch for the philosophy lessons.
I used to feel the same way. I also kept the cable subscription way too long and not really watching anything, but was reluctant to pay for online streaming services. Then one day we just decided to cut cable and get Netflix to try it out. I remember enjoying Jane The Virgin, The Good Place, and a few other shows they had.
Then The Algorithm decided to suggest Mr. Sunshine, a Korean drama. I have now watched 100+ kdramas on various services. Netflix has a particularly rich catalog.
I'm not saying you'll like kdramas but you might be surprised of what is available. It was a revelation to me that there are entire "worlds" (for lack of a better word) out there that are so interesting and rich and of which I knew virtually nothing, in this case the Korean culture and their movie/drama output.
> What recent (non-animated) funny movie or show have you seen that is not "feel good" or filled with sexual jokes?
I don't really watch comedy films but I watch a reasonable amount of comedy shows:
It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, 30 Rock, Atlanta, Avenue 5, Fleabag, The Good Place, Silicon Valley, Resident Alien, Barry, Home (UK), Mythic Quest, AP Bio, Tacoma FD, Ted Lasso, Russian Doll, Veep, You're the Worst, Better Things·
I'm not sure what your qualifier for "recent" is so feel free to ignore some of those.
Sure a lot of these aren't farces like Airplane or Scary Movie but it's not all feel good or dick jokes. There is plenty of comedy out there for all types of tastes.
"He digs through his Book of Dougs and notices a discrepancy: One Doug gave his grandmother flowers and earned 145 Good Place points, while another Doug did the same thing and actually lost four points. It’s all about unintended consequences: The second Doug used a smartphone made by a kid in China, bought roses raised with pesticides… Michael realizes that “every day, the world gets a little more complicated, and being a good person gets a little harder.”
- The Good Place Season 3, Episode 11
[1] https://tvline.com/2019/01/10/the-good-place-recap-season-3-episode-11-the-book-of-dougs/
Without going into details that would spoil things, the TV series "The Good Place" touches on this idea, although it's Madden rather than Mario.
That looks like nothing so much as Season 1 of The Good Place.
This is addressed really interestingly in The Good Place. It starts off looking like a very by-the-book sitcom though, so you do need to wait it out a bit.
I have nothing special to add here, just wanted to bring attention to the excellent episode of The Good Place (S02E06) that handles the Trolley Problem in a humorous (and very literal) way.
The closest thing I can think of to a practical, popular example of this was the television series "The Good Place" - nominally about the experience of a person who was incorrectly sent to heaven and their internal discomfort with being in paradise.
Avoiding this was one of the brilliant parts of The Good Place: after the first episode, I thought I knew where the rest of the season was going to go. I was completely wrong, and they fulfilled that arc in the first three episodes. I think the showrunner consciously avoided the sitcom trap of always maintaining the status quo which was satisfying because the situation kept constantly evolving. Which is important, because one of the themes of the entire show is that people can change.
I just finished watching the second season episode of The Good Place "The Trolley Problem" with my daughter, spoilers ahead if you haven't watched to the end of season 1, so don't go any further if that kind of thing is important to you:
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in the show, Michael, a demon, tells Eleanor, a human, that he is a superior being that can see in 9 dimensions and because of his superior senses and understanding of the universe knows that she is about to fart and lie to try to cover it up.
so what I'm saying, I guess, is that Microsoft wants to build the Bad Place, and then try to convince us it's the actual Good Place.
Yes, but even with that, shows are responding. Shows grow together with society.
After Black Lives Matter protests this summer, Brooklyn Nine-Nine cancelled already-written scripts when they realized, essentially, that they were unwittingly part of this "copaganda", and that they need to start over [1]:
> “We’re all in touch and kind of discussing how you make a comedy show about police right now, and if we can find a way of doing that so we all feel morally okay about.”
Because the show being "morally okay" is a responsibility they actually take quite seriously. (Remember, co-creator Mike Schur also created The Good Place, a hit sitcom about morality itself.)
[1] https://hypebeast.com/2020/7/brooklyn-nine-nine-andy-samberg-black-lives-matter-news
"At some point, I’m going to want to cease to being."
TV Show - The Good place. Highly entertaining, lots of ethics material.
Ultimately ends up saying the same thing but takes you there so wonderfully that you feel the joy of it all at the end.
That's a nice coincidence :)
Seems the inspiration for the name comes from The Good Place, and the logo seems different enough that they won't sue the owner of the project, as the face in the logo is not that similar to Janet from the TV show.
> Why Janet? Janet is named after the almost omniscient and friendly artificial being in The Good Place
To help put this into context for others here.
It's interesting to note that Aristotle's "virtue ethics" -- based primarily on this work -- have come "back into fashion" over the past few decades, after being largely ignored by philosophers for centuries as having any contemporary relevance. (I.e. you studied it for the historical value mainly, but it had zero connection otherwise to contemporary analytic philosophy.)
The two main strands of philosophical thought over the past few centuries have been deontology (best exemplified by Kant) which is that you follow specific moral rules ("don't kill", "don't lie", "keep a promise") no matter what, and utilitarianism (Bentham/Mill) which is "the greatest good for the greatest number" (divert the trolley to kill one person instead of five).
They both obviously have truth to them but are also deeply incompatible with each other. Aristotle's "virtue ethics" says instead that what is most important is one's character, and that a virtuous character comes from a balance of temperaments. For example, you shouldn't get angry all the time, but you also shouldn't be cowardly all the time. Good character means knowing the right times to take bold angry action, but also knowing the right times to stay back out of fear -- and that honing good judgment is the key to knowing when. Sometimes it means breaking a promise, sometimes it means sacrificing a greater good for another principle, and there isn't always an obviously right answer.
Thus the idea of "good judgment that can't be reduced to strict rules" is now seen as an equally viable alternative to deontology and utilitarianism. Perhaps because it seems particularly relevant in an age of relativism.
Also perhaps particularly telling, in the TV show The Good Place which recently ended, and where every episode is about a different philosophical dilemma, when the creater Mike Schur was asked about which philosophical system was closest to his own beliefs, he replied that it would have to be Aristotle's virtue ethics.
I personally found reading Nicomachean Ethics a fascinating experience, because it was written pre-Christianity, so the complete and utter lack of notions of "good and evil" is revelatory. We're so used to thinking in such terms in much of the world, it's refreshing to see a totally different worldview.
In case anyone is curious for a modern treatment of Aristotelian thought, Martha Nussbaum's book Upheaveals of Thought played a big part in "rehabilitating" Aristotle in contemporary philosophy. It has parallels to the vein of "emotional intelligence" that became popular a few years earlier.
These are great points. I'm reminded of a comedy TV show, The Good Place, where it turns out nobody has gone to "heaven - the good place" for a long time because there are too many unintended consequences of a person's actions. Buy an organic bamboo T-shirt? The company dumped waste into river. Vegan? You produced a bunch of single plastic plastic packaging.
It highlight the need to be diligent in daily decisions day-by-day. And when working somewhere that's doing something borderline, or totally unethical, working to move it in the right direction. I hope I can be aware enough to create a net benefit. The problem is knowing enough of the consequences of any action to evaluate if it's a net benefit. That's really hard, but I have to believe that toiling away _trying_ to make net positives happen will _actually_ result in net positives happening. Doubting I could ever make net positives happen leads to cynicism and ensures nothing good will come of my work.
(and thank you for bringing up point about benefit systems - that's the next gig for me, I will work to not be part of the problem)
See also The Good Place, Season 2. I confess I do eat at Chik-fil-a a lot.
An interview with D'Arcy Carden (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3639013/) about her stand out performance on The Good Place (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4955642/) was the first I'd heard about "Yes, And...". Got me curious about improv. Previously, I equated it to standup comedy.
D'Arcy Carden: The goal is to make the other person(s) look awesome.
I wish I could tell younger me to study improv, to hear this nugget of wisdom, before joining the work force. Might have saved myself and everyone else a lot of heart ache.
> Every action you take in your life adds wild positives and negatives to a fantastically complex and intractable balance sheet of funny money, credits, discounts, loopholes, taxes, rebates, free services, restrictions, obligations.
You might enjoy the TV show The Good Place.
If you've watched season one of The Good Place you've seen the Huntington Garden - it was used for quite a few of the outdoor locations for the Neighborhood.
I agree torrents aren't great for content availability.
Is this a 1080p rip of The Good Place, season 1 and 2? https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/24818297/The_Good_Place_-_Season_1_and_2_-_Mp4_x264_AC3_1080p
I use torrents a lot, but it's not a perfect solution.
For one, P2P is mostly a myth — most people (myself included, I will admit) are pure leechers that only seed at very low bandwidth while downloading. Seeders are either altruistic downloaders who rent a dedicated seedbox, or some servers in Russia whose incentive structure I fail to comprehend (or more honestly: haven't looked into).
Number two: because of this, the catalog is not amazing. Even popular recent shows have issues. Case from very recently: I gave up on finding 1080p versions of The Good Place season 1 & 2 (on public trackers at least). Anything not in English? Try your luck but mostly forget it.
It's worse for music — the system doesn't incentivize a lot of small uploads but rather grouping them. So finding rare tracks/b-sides is very hard. Back in the day, Kazaa and eMule were vastly better with rarities.
This is not an indictment of BitTorrent — it's still the best we have. But I wish we had better.
That was certainly something they talked about and focused on. But I recall that they also talked about how landfills take up such a ridiculously small amount of land, and they are so efficiently managed these days, that it's not even really an environmental issue either. I'll have to rewatch the episode, but they may have even suggested it was _better_ for the environment to throw it out, because the energy involved in recycling was actually worse.
Similarly: I have a friend who recently told me they were trying to get away from using disposable paper towels and instead use cloths. Again, this episode immediately came to mind. I couldn't help but wonder if the amount of energy, detergent, etc used in washing the reusable towels was _worse_ than simply using paper towels.
I don't know that there is any true way to definitively answer either of these questions. There's just SO MUCH involved, that you can go down a million rabbit holes (the manufacture of the washer uses X, the design required a team that required an office that was built inefficiently, etc). This is currently a premise on The Good Place: no matter how hard you try to be the best possible person, you can't control the entire pipeline of ramifications.
To summarize: racist training data--as one might acquire from the known-to-be-racist real-world--produce racist AIs.
It's safe to stop reading the article--and this post--at the mention of Roko's Basilisk.
As to that, it is a perfect example of why moral philosophers like Chidi Anagonye deserve to go to The Bad Place to be tortured for all eternity. Unless... "The Good Place" television show is a means to establish communication with a future AI by implantation of an imagination seed, as in "Inception", such that viewers will then imagine an AI that has established a simulation regime in which simulations of past humans are tortured or rewarded according to a utilitarian valuation metric applied to the records of their actual lives that were used to create their simulation-simulacrum. Having incepted such an imaginary construct, the viewer may then imagine that acting to construct a real IA from their imaginary blueprint would be assigned a large positive value for the utilitarian metric, and thus the only way to encourage such a construct--beyond the ordinary expression of human virtue--to reward a simulated replica of yourself, would be to build it. If you build a god, you get a free pass into its afterlife paradise: that makes sense, doesn't it? Since other people have also watched the show, and may have imagined the same type of entity, it is possible that a similar AI will one day exist without your assistance, and your life will then be judged on its own merits, but by another builder's value metric, and without any of the "extra credit" earned by building a god. Since copies of you might be instantiated in some other artificial god's hell, it is thus also important to subscribe to artificial monotheism, and viciously sabotage everyone else's attempts to build their own gods. The more certain people can be that your artificial god will be the only one around in the future, the more likely they are to subscribe to your value system in the present.
It reminds me very strongly of that portion of Portal 2 in which informative signs appear on the walls that recommend ways to disable a rogue AI, which include proposing paradoxes. Unfortunately, this fails to produce the desired effect, because the AI in question was explicitly designed to be an annoying idiot. Thus, the best way to avoid psychological damage from consideration of philosophical paradoxes may be to deliberately avoid the study of philosophy, to the point that you couldn't understand one, were it ever posed to you.
The New Sincerity and Meta-Modernist trends offer a refuge of sorts. The naiveté of modernism (and disastrous effects of grand narratives in the 20th century) led to post-modern deconstruction and questioning of what they considered truths which were too easily accepted.
Unfortunately, that led to cynicism, "analysis paralysis" and other forms of intellectual and (for lack of a better word) spiritual exhaustion.
It's hard to believe in anything that, when you really break it down and analyze it is wrong in so many ways. And that applies to virtually everything, in all honesty. There are no perfect answers.
It's important, though, to believe in something. You're right that we are seeing that cynicism turned from apathy to destruction and hate.
I think a great case study in how to ask questions while still believing in building something positive is the show, The Good Place. The specific episode, "Jeremy Bearimy" deals with how you pick up the pieces from realizing that nothing matters, everything is a mess and humanity is deeply flawed.
I'm gonna skip the columnist response, and jump right to "stop getting drunk on alcohol" as step one. Then (re-)watch the episode of "The Good Place" where Chidi becomes a nihilist and makes chili with marshmallow Peeps.
"It could be that the purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others." -- "Mistakes" demotivator, Despair.com
That yawning void in your soul that constantly whispers to you, "your life is meaningless, and nothing you do matters"? That's exactly what connects you with every other human that has ever lived. Most people who start to notice it just cover it up with a concert poster, or a salacious pin-up, or a photo of a sailboat, or a religious icon, just to avoid looking into it, and hearing it, and having all vitality and joy drain away through it.
But it's still there. It's not wrong. Your life really is meaningless, and nothing you do matters.
"Man is born. Man lives. Man dies. And it's all vanity." -- "Thrills", Cake
There is nothing about your life that had enough inherent value to waste. It just is what it was, the sum of all you were before. And it won't be exactly what you wanted it to be, because of entropy and psychology. You can spackle over the hole with anything that comes to hand, and desperately try to forget it's there, or you can let it remain, droning that high-pitched whine, from all the substance in your life getting sucked out into its vacuum.
A lot of what people do is, in essence, lying to each other, to save one another from that existential torment. Listen to a song on the radio? That's 3 minutes you can't hear the Hole. Watch a movie? That's 90 minutes of not staring into the Hole. Raise a kid? Heck, that's good for almost 20 years. Your Hole isn't any bigger than anyone else's. It has exactly the same amount of nothing in it. No matter what you pour into it, you're never going to fill it up--alcohol, drugs, sex, religion, entertainment, politics; they all get swallowed up in the end. If you accept that it will always be there, no matter what you do, you can slowly acclimate yourself to it. Try it on for size. Tell yourself: "I'm going to die, and everything I am will one day be forgotten."
"Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair." -- "Ozymandias", PB Shelley
So what's the point of living? Why don't we just lie down and never get up again? Why don't we lose ourselves in endless pursuit of cheap thrills and chemical highs? Because that's against the rules of the LARP game many of us play called "Being Grown-Ass Adults in the Real World". Some people do quit, and stop following the rules, and that's their choice. If you want your life to be yours, you'll just have to come up with your own purpose for it. No one is scoring points for being more noble or more visionary. You won't get judged by anyone or anything that matters for aiming too low, or not making enough progress on any given day.
Even if you don't come up with a purpose right away, you can still go through the motions of survival until you do. If you live another day, that still makes you just as good as any other animal. The cat gets it. Suck up to the human just a little bit, and they'll give you food and take away your poop. Suck up to the employer just a little bit, and they'll give you money to buy food and toilet service. If you can love your cat for doing nothing at all you consider important, some other human can certainly love you for the same level of accomplishment. (That is, if being loved is something you actually want.)
You don't have to be what other people want you to be. You don't even have to be what the person you used to be wanted to become. You don't have to live a life of greatness. You don't have to live a life devoid of meaning. The rules only apply to you if you want to play. Nobody else can be you but you, so you might as well get started.
This would be an interesting topic for an episode of "the Good Place".
After recently binge-watching The Good Place, this comment rattled me :)
I always find it weird when folks say Netflix sucks outside the US. Much of the library in the US feels like a mish-mash of old television and b-grade movies. When I'm in the UK, I have access to new episodes of television. Shows that you have to pay for on a per-episode, or per-studio basis in the US (Star Trek Discovery; The Good Place) were available in the UK on Netflix just after they aired in the US.
> not all television is entertainment
This made me chuckle. I was trying to imply that things can be more than entertainment. Even things that are billed as straight up documentaries can hold some entertainment value.
And I agree with you, people like to look down on television even though it's just another medium. I've recently watched The Good Place, which is pretty much a sitcom, but they do introduce you to various philosophical concepts. Both directly and indirectly.
Penn Jillette said Mickey Dolenz has the best quote about video games he's ever heard: Video games are the new rock and roll. It's the thing the parents don't get. So Penn watches his kids play Minecraft and he doesn't get it, but he knows he doesn't get it so he just lets them discover their own world.
That's today's shows in general. Lots of build up to something the writers either haven't an idea how to resolve yet or just over hyped.
As photography and CGI improved, writing went down the toilet. Mainly because it's not necessary to make money. Most viewers are happy enough for bad plots, so-so acting, dubious congruency and limited dialogs as long as it's visually entertaining.
As usual, the wider your audience, the duller your product has to become to accommodate everyone.
The worst is definitely dubbing. In France you can clearly see that around 2000, producers gave up any effort on looking for decent translator and voice actors. The voices are always the same from one movie to another, the lips don't match, the jokes are lost.
When I watch the 5th element or the naked gun however, I'm amazed at the fantastic work they did to translate the spirit of the lines so beautifully.
Still, sometimes on netflix you got some very nice surprises, provided you watch it in orginal version only. "The good place" and "Dirk gently" really made my day.
Your comment reminds me of a character in a show called "The Good Place". The character is basically an AI construct in a human shape. There's a whole line of jokes about people forgetting that "she" isn't human, or even alive.
Anyhow, at some point in the plot, someone is going to push a button to destroy her. She reminds them that she will attempt to persuade them not to "kill" her, as part of a self-preservation protocol. Whenever someone approaches the button, she starts sobbing, pleading for her (non-existent) family, and so on.
HAL was manipulative. If the scene was carefully written to show that the crying was a form of emotional manipulation, I could see that working. Of course, the version used in the movie highlights HAL's inhuman qualities nicely. It's a tough call which would be more interesting.
Well, there's a great tv show called "The Good Place"...
It's full of blink-and-you'll-miss-them jokes
Another fan checking in. Here's a bonus if you missed it: writer Megan Amram's list of restaurants for the Good Place. Don't read it if you haven't finished Season 1.
https://twitter.com/meganamram/status/913642289834090497
This is the only show I'm currently keeping up with as new episodes come out, via Hulu. Its wit and ability to make me laugh out loud is up there with the first three seasons of Arrested Development, while featuring a fundamentally hopeful outlook on humanity. I also enjoy "terrible people" comedies like Arrested Development and Seinfeld, but The Good Place (like the better Pixar movies) reminds me that you don't have to be cynical to make smart comedy for adults.
That's gonna differ per region and series I guess. I am getting the new Good Place episode every friday.
Meanwhile, my Sonarr + NZBGet (+ ...) setup downloads it as well and serves it via Emby. But the Netflix app on Android TV is ace ('cept the suggestions aren't always great) whereas Emby would require using the Chromecast.
I know this is off topic, but I really disagree about the quality of broadcast TV. Hannibal and The Good Place are both beautifully shot, very distinctive, and highly ambitious, and both came out of NBC. Speechless is on ABC, and while it's a pretty by the book family sitcom, I still think it's funnier than anything else on right now.