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.
In her book Medicine Stories, Aurora Morales speaks of the impact our participatory existence in an unjust world has on us.
We have to harden our hearts in order to walk by the unhoused, harden our hearts to buy stuff me know is produced by slavery, pretend we don’t see the extortionist, your-money-or-your-life nature of industrialized health services, harden our hearts to the slaughter of billions of animals for the meat industry, pretend we don’t witness the ongoing ecocide and destruction of our only biosphere.
That’s before the daily servings of doom via our doom-monetizing, amygdala-destroying media outlets.
Such levels of ongoing denial and desentization impact us to the point that we live in an increasingly unhealthy state of mass psychosis. We are all freaking out internally, pretending that all is OK externally.
Thanks for bringing this up, sums up how I feel about life.
And underlines one of my biggest realisations of recent times: depression is a valid/natural response to helplessness and a world of injustice...
I guess that show has been over for nearly 5 years, but it might still be a good idea to spoiler this reveal for folks who haven't gotten around to it so you don't lose 3 points.
Seriously though, I was super-embarrassed a year or two ago, when I received a phone call and quickly became convinced that some scammer had a hold of me.
I began questioning the poor lady on the phone and she gamely answered all my questions: location, company, including spelling her name and pronouncing it entirely differently. Many answers were quite vague and not satisfying to me at the time. But cold callers will absolutely hang up on that type of treatment!
My ultimate question was asking if she was safe or being trafficked or captive or something, because I noticed there was a dog barking in the background. And she must've been WFH.
Only after I wrote up a detailed play by play of the call and frantically reported it to several of my colleagues,
It turned out to be a totally legitimate call and somebody had authorized the marketing campaign. She just had so little information, she was unable to answer me adequately. I was so embarrassed I can't even tell you.
I wouldn't be embarrassed. I'd be embarrassed on their behalf, maybe, for half-assing it so badly.
I don't owe anybody who calls me out of the blue my time, especially when their shit isn't together. My mom answers the phone and actually talks to these people, and politely says "no thank you", whereas I don't even pick up the phone for certain area codes, and certainly don't engage in conversation if it's clear it's some bullshit I do not care about.
> 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.