While The Good Place has no shortage of death, there is none we’ll be mourning as much as the ending of the show itself. After an hour-long finale, released on Friday on Netflix, the fourth season of the comedy was complete and each of the main characters met their final fate. And, yes, this article contains spoilers (but not of the finale).
We were taught so many things by the soul squad: like Kant’s moral philosophy theories, the trolley problem and that cargo pants don’t look good on anyone. The Good Place also poses some interesting theories of its own. In the penultimate episode, the gang finally arrive in the Good Place, and Chidi gets to meet one of his idols, Hypatia of Alexandria, only to find that she has lost all discernable intelligence after centuries of living in heaven.
“On paper, this is paradise: all of your desires and needs are met,” says Hypatia, Lisa Kudrow’s character. “But it’s infinite and when perfection goes on forever you become this glassy-eyed, mush person.”
If you want a fizzy drink, a cat, a spaceship, or literally anything else, Janet, the not-a-robot servant of the afterlife can get it for you. If you want to continuously pee yourself, it will instantly evaporate leaving no trace. Just like in the first season, paradise turns out to be hell. And this is exactly what would happen if we were put in the same situation. In fact, it already happens now.
When someone is repeatedly exposed to a stimulus, they get used to it and so no longer feel the emotion attached to it. This is called habituation. For example if you were to move into a house filled with rotting pigs vomit, eventually you will just stop smelling it. If you’re surrounded by the beauty and pleasures of the Good Place, eventually you stop noticing how good it is.
“It’s like how you can forget whether you're wearing socks or not,” says Tom Stafford, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Sheffield and a fellow of the British Psychological Society. “They're there but the sensation is not because it's not new. The information is not reported to your awareness.”
When you get a reward, like if Janet summoned you a puppy, your brain receives a boost. Eventually over time, it stops responding in the same way. Even with any joy that puppy brings, it’s likely that you’ll overestimate the amount of happiness it will bring. We believe we will be happy if we get that promotion, go on holiday or win the lottery. But that happiness never comes. It’s called the hedonic treadmill.
“You think, ‘I'll get the puppy, I'll be happy’,” says Stafford. “But what happens is you focus on the thing and you neglect that happiness is made up of all the other daily stuff of life and that's not going to change.”
In heaven, you would lose the motivation to do things. With no reason to work or even keep yourself alive, it’s harder to experience desire. It’s comparable to having a search engine at your disposal at all times – Janet could tell you any secrets of the universe, but you lose the motivation to know them as they no longer serve a purpose.
Being stuck in the Good Place for eternity could produce similar effects to solitary confinement, says John Leach, a senior research fellow at University of Portsmouth. “We get on in life through exploration and exploitation,” he says. “If you're going to take those away, then you're going to be in a sort of psychological limbo.”
In situations such as solitary confinement, people tend to try to survive by instilling a degree of control. If you can find elements of control, it will give you a boost, however if you can’t find this control, or if it goes on for long enough, you will go through a process of psychological disintegration – effectively going mad.
If you were stuck in an eternal paradise, you could find control by doing the things you enjoy, such as how Jason fulfils his dream of racing go-kart with monkeys – after all they’re the ideal go-kart opponents, funny enough to give the finger but not smart enough to win. He then begins to get bored of that, so switches to hippos with go-karts, then Draculas with jet-packs. He exerts control but after multiple iterations, it ends in the same result.
The fact that the residents of the Good Place have turned into “glassy-eyed, mush people” is accurate, according to Leach, and is called disintegration of personality. Effectively they lose the concept of themselves as an independent person, like how Hypatia has lost her mathematical and philosophical skills, and has become a stardust milkshake-drinking shell of her former self.
Though it may be accurate from a psychological aspect, the revelation that the Good Place isn’t all that good causes an issue from a philosophical point of view. Justin Snedegar, a senior lecturer at the University of St Andrews says that this is a well discussed issue regarding the existence of evil on Earth – if there’s a benevolent god, why do they allow cruelty to happen.
“If it really was the Good Place, all those feelings of boredom and sadness, wouldn’t those go away?” says Snedegar. He says that surely if the Good Place was truly good, you wouldn’t feel these emotions of pain and suffering. “Though the counter argument to that is that it’s impossible to get rid of all the evil in the world unless you get rid of free will,” he says.
One could argue that you have to feel the bad things in order to feel the good things. Though the Good Place isn’t 100 per cent perfect, as its residents are unhappy, if they weren’t allowed to feel unhappy at all then they couldn’t truly experience joy.
Though there’s no way of knowing what an actual afterlife might be like, its creators could do with taking a page out of The Good Place’s playbook. At the end of the episode, Eleanor comes up with a solution: that there will be a door people can choose to pass through when they are done with paradise. “The way to restore meaning to the people in the Good Place is to let them leave,” Eleanor tells the soul squad. Not only does this give back control to the Good Place residents, but it also allows for motivation to keep exploring and keep experiencing the things you want. Then when the Good Place starts to drive you mad, you can walk through the door and be at peace.
Updated 03.02.20, 10:15 GMT: It’s likely that you’ll overestimate the amount of happiness a puppy would bring, not underestimate.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
