THE GOOD PLACE

THE GOOD PLACE

This NBC show had a lot of stuff that spoke to me. Well, I don't believe in heaven or hell. I'm not religious, so, ya know, this isn't really some sort of fear of damnation. But it spoke to me in a "Hell is other people" sort of way. Most of all, it went into detail that if you boil it down, we all do some unethical shit without ever realizing it.

That salad you are eating because you feel that it is saving some animal's life... well, what cost is it at or how ethical are you when you realize that the lettuce in it comes at the cost of child labor or poor working conditions for farm workers. How much water is going into growing that to make such large amount of produce that is taking clean drinking water away from someone else?  What about the fact that the amount of work to grow it comes at the cost of pesticides or water run off that hurts others.

It really brought to light that the goals of getting to "the good place" really have a scaled tipped against you at all cost. That you can just do your best at being a good person as you can and live in the moment because, well, who the hell knows what an after life could be. It may very well be that the Good Place is straight up the Bad Place tricking you into it.

On top of that, it shared my mentality of soul mates. In which that they don't exist. Or if they do exist, it isn't something that you just flat out have a soul mate out there that you have to stumble upon. To me, that was always the worse possible thing you could ever put out there as a concept.Given how large and vast this world is, the odds of finding said soulmate just seems so...  bleak.

Soulmates aren't found. That's what the biggest take away is. They're made. You basically just have to realize that there's not one soulmate out there for you. Soulmates aren't found at all, they're made. People meet. They get a good feeling. They enjoy the time they spend together and most of all they work at being together. Because ultimately that's what it comes down to. They don't magically stay together because they were meant to be. They stay together and what binds them together is the work building a relationship with one another.

Some times people forget that they love each other because the world around them is so chaotic. Sometimes life just zaps the hell out of you and you can't give what you need. But what it is to be soulmates is doing the work and understanding and working towards that better life together.

And even though you can spend forever with them, eventually you are ready to move on to whatever the next step is. I love that the show didn't tell us what happens when the characters stepped into the portal and became fabric of the universe. You don't get to see the answers to that. You just have to live in the moment that you can and do what little you can to appreciate what you have.

Also, the best lesson to The Good Place was that Froyo is the best way to exemplify the bad place it's taking something great and ruining it just a little so you can have more of it. No one likes froyo. Fuck that shit. Give me ice cream any day. Ice cream is pure heaven. Frozen yogurt is just everything bad in the world when it comes to compromise.