The Good Place - Reflections on life and death
"Every human is a little bit sad all the time because you know you're going to die. But that knowledge is what gives life meaning." - The Good Place, Season 4, episode 12
Death is perhaps the greatest problem we encounter in life and the one that we are often least able to cope with. The death of a loved one is almost certainly among life's greatest challenges. With death comes a relief from the suffering of life - no more physical pain, depression, anxiety, or heartbreak. But it also brings an end to all we consider good in life - knowledge, relationships, pleasure and happiness. The thought that death could be the ultimate final answer to what happens at the end of our life can be terrifying to reflect upon.
Enter religion. Religion, especially Christianity, presents a neat, tidy solution to this problem. What happens when you die? Simple, you don't actually die! You get to live forever! Christian religions diverge in their theology of what happens in the afterlife (and really none have a lot of actual details) but the basic outline is that if you were a "good person" in your short existence on Earth and follow your respective religion's view of God's rules, you will eternally go to the "Good Place" and if you were a "bad person" or didn't follow the right set of rules, you either go to a "Lesser Good Place" or even the "Bad Place," and are left with an eternity to ponder why you should have been more of a good person on Earth. (Part of what got me on this topic was watching the show "The Good Place" on NBC)
As a side note, I think there is a lot of room for great discussion on the ethics of a system that rewards or punishes people for eternity based on their actions in a limited, less-than-100-year time period where their memories are wiped clean and they are given extremely limited to no knowledge of the test itself (like my three-year old declaring himself the winner in a race I didn't know I was participating in, except losing this race results in eternal damnation). There also could be a lot of great discussion on the proposed evolutionary benefits of common narratives in religious systems (see Sapiens by Yuval Harari or God: a Human History by Reza Aslan). But perhaps those will be topics for another day.
So, you manage to live a great life and believe in the right God, and you go to the Good Place. Congratulations! You successfully conquered death, get to see all your loved ones again, and live forever in eternal bliss with all the gelato you can eat.
Which sounds AWESOME, until you read that again and really consider what that word "forever" means - as in, it NEVER ends.
Sure, it sounds wonderful for the first few trillion years. (To put a trillion years in perspective, the Earth is proposed to be 4.5 billion years old - so one trillion years is 222x the age of the Earth. One trillion is the equivalent of living 100 years 10 billion times) In Mormon theology, which seems to be one of the more interactive and exciting afterlife views from my limited perspective, the ultimate "Good Place" means you will be a God - creating worlds together with your heavenly husband or wife/wives. There's probably a lot that goes into learning how to make a world. So, perhaps the first trillion years are just spent in a classroom setting learning the intricacies and pitfalls to watch out for in how to make a world and create life - and in the mean time, you get an infinite supply of gelato to share with loved ones. The second trillion years is spent designing and making your own world and creating spiritual children to inhabit it. The third trillion years consists of executing this plan - setting off your own "big bang" and organizing matter and life. Pretty cool stuff.
But by the trillionth trillion years (one septillion years), the gelato may have lost much of its appeal and you might be thinking you need a break from creating worlds and watching them destroy themselves in an endless, repetitive, and by this point mundane, banal process. Assuming you average only one world every billion years, by the septillionth year, you will have created about a quadrillion worlds. And the first septillion years are only an infinitely small fraction of "forever." And so, we're left with the rationalization that God's view of time is not ours and that it will all resolve itself and make sense later even if we can't understand it now. But really that seems to leave us with the fact that we are incapable of comprehending the finality of our own death but also equally incapable of comprehending a story of life without end. Personally, neither one sounds comforting to me.
Perhaps one of the great paradoxes in this life is that we both suffer and thrive from scarcity or at least the perception of scarcity. On the one hand, we constantly struggle with the notion that we do not have enough time, money, or gelato in our lives. On the other hand, many of the joys we experience in life are a result of, and a direct contrast to the scarcity mindset. Vacations are exciting because they provide a short escape from the mundane aspects of life where - hopefully - for a brief period have an abundance of time, money already set aside, and all the gelato one can eat (and calories obviously don't count on vacation). But if life were a vacation all of the time - we would then need a vacation from the vacation. Gelato would lose its appeal if it were available to consume for breakfast, lunch and dinner each and every day (with no impact on our waist line).
So rather than being terrified of the scarcity we face in mortality, perhaps we should embrace it as an essential aspect. Perhaps we should allow ourselves to feel more comfortable in uncertainty, more willing to embrace the "negative" emotions that we all experience - the sadness and sorrow which allows us the more fully experience happiness and joy, the anxiety that allows us to more fully experience peace, the grief from loss that allows us to more fully experience love. And ultimately, perhaps in embracing death, we can actually more fully live.
I don't personally know anymore what, if anything, comes after this life. If there is something, then hopefully it will be good in ways I cannot currently comprehend. But what I do know is that I am here now and I do have this life to live. The thought that there may only be one life to live may not be a pleasant thought to dwell on and the prospect of not seeing loved ones again is a harsh aspect of life to consider, particularly when their life was cut unfairly short due to accident or illness. But the shortness and frailty of life also encourages me to make the most of every precious moment I have and to cherish the memories of those that went before me. The best way to honor someone who we have lost is to remember the best from what they taught, live accordingly, and pass on the collective wisdom to others.
I don't hold onto as much certainty about a better world after this life, but I still have a hope of being a part of creating a better world in the here and now. As Kristen Bell's character on The Good Place puts it, "Every human is a little bit sad all the time because you know you're going to die. But that knowledge is what gives life meaning."
Death is perhaps the greatest problem we encounter in life and the one that we are often least able to cope with. The death of a loved one is almost certainly among life's greatest challenges. With death comes a relief from the suffering of life - no more physical pain, depression, anxiety, or heartbreak. But it also brings an end to all we consider good in life - knowledge, relationships, pleasure and happiness. The thought that death could be the ultimate final answer to what happens at the end of our life can be terrifying to reflect upon.
Enter religion. Religion, especially Christianity, presents a neat, tidy solution to this problem. What happens when you die? Simple, you don't actually die! You get to live forever! Christian religions diverge in their theology of what happens in the afterlife (and really none have a lot of actual details) but the basic outline is that if you were a "good person" in your short existence on Earth and follow your respective religion's view of God's rules, you will eternally go to the "Good Place" and if you were a "bad person" or didn't follow the right set of rules, you either go to a "Lesser Good Place" or even the "Bad Place," and are left with an eternity to ponder why you should have been more of a good person on Earth. (Part of what got me on this topic was watching the show "The Good Place" on NBC)
As a side note, I think there is a lot of room for great discussion on the ethics of a system that rewards or punishes people for eternity based on their actions in a limited, less-than-100-year time period where their memories are wiped clean and they are given extremely limited to no knowledge of the test itself (like my three-year old declaring himself the winner in a race I didn't know I was participating in, except losing this race results in eternal damnation). There also could be a lot of great discussion on the proposed evolutionary benefits of common narratives in religious systems (see Sapiens by Yuval Harari or God: a Human History by Reza Aslan). But perhaps those will be topics for another day.
So, you manage to live a great life and believe in the right God, and you go to the Good Place. Congratulations! You successfully conquered death, get to see all your loved ones again, and live forever in eternal bliss with all the gelato you can eat.
Which sounds AWESOME, until you read that again and really consider what that word "forever" means - as in, it NEVER ends.
Sure, it sounds wonderful for the first few trillion years. (To put a trillion years in perspective, the Earth is proposed to be 4.5 billion years old - so one trillion years is 222x the age of the Earth. One trillion is the equivalent of living 100 years 10 billion times) In Mormon theology, which seems to be one of the more interactive and exciting afterlife views from my limited perspective, the ultimate "Good Place" means you will be a God - creating worlds together with your heavenly husband or wife/wives. There's probably a lot that goes into learning how to make a world. So, perhaps the first trillion years are just spent in a classroom setting learning the intricacies and pitfalls to watch out for in how to make a world and create life - and in the mean time, you get an infinite supply of gelato to share with loved ones. The second trillion years is spent designing and making your own world and creating spiritual children to inhabit it. The third trillion years consists of executing this plan - setting off your own "big bang" and organizing matter and life. Pretty cool stuff.
But by the trillionth trillion years (one septillion years), the gelato may have lost much of its appeal and you might be thinking you need a break from creating worlds and watching them destroy themselves in an endless, repetitive, and by this point mundane, banal process. Assuming you average only one world every billion years, by the septillionth year, you will have created about a quadrillion worlds. And the first septillion years are only an infinitely small fraction of "forever." And so, we're left with the rationalization that God's view of time is not ours and that it will all resolve itself and make sense later even if we can't understand it now. But really that seems to leave us with the fact that we are incapable of comprehending the finality of our own death but also equally incapable of comprehending a story of life without end. Personally, neither one sounds comforting to me.
Perhaps one of the great paradoxes in this life is that we both suffer and thrive from scarcity or at least the perception of scarcity. On the one hand, we constantly struggle with the notion that we do not have enough time, money, or gelato in our lives. On the other hand, many of the joys we experience in life are a result of, and a direct contrast to the scarcity mindset. Vacations are exciting because they provide a short escape from the mundane aspects of life where - hopefully - for a brief period have an abundance of time, money already set aside, and all the gelato one can eat (and calories obviously don't count on vacation). But if life were a vacation all of the time - we would then need a vacation from the vacation. Gelato would lose its appeal if it were available to consume for breakfast, lunch and dinner each and every day (with no impact on our waist line).
So rather than being terrified of the scarcity we face in mortality, perhaps we should embrace it as an essential aspect. Perhaps we should allow ourselves to feel more comfortable in uncertainty, more willing to embrace the "negative" emotions that we all experience - the sadness and sorrow which allows us the more fully experience happiness and joy, the anxiety that allows us to more fully experience peace, the grief from loss that allows us to more fully experience love. And ultimately, perhaps in embracing death, we can actually more fully live.
I don't personally know anymore what, if anything, comes after this life. If there is something, then hopefully it will be good in ways I cannot currently comprehend. But what I do know is that I am here now and I do have this life to live. The thought that there may only be one life to live may not be a pleasant thought to dwell on and the prospect of not seeing loved ones again is a harsh aspect of life to consider, particularly when their life was cut unfairly short due to accident or illness. But the shortness and frailty of life also encourages me to make the most of every precious moment I have and to cherish the memories of those that went before me. The best way to honor someone who we have lost is to remember the best from what they taught, live accordingly, and pass on the collective wisdom to others.
I don't hold onto as much certainty about a better world after this life, but I still have a hope of being a part of creating a better world in the here and now. As Kristen Bell's character on The Good Place puts it, "Every human is a little bit sad all the time because you know you're going to die. But that knowledge is what gives life meaning."
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