The Good Place

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Recently, I've been watching a show called The Good Place. It's a fun, intelligent, and well-writen show about a few people that got into The Good Place - a modern rendition of heaven. The key diea of the show is that all people are judged when they die by the things they did while on Earth. There is a "point system", where every single action one does is accounted as good or bad. Very good actions bring you a lot of points - very bad ones take away from your point total. There is a specific thershold one needs to reach to get into The Good Place. Everyobody else goes to The Bad Place - which is pretty similar to hell.

I won't talk about the show's story - although I highly recommend you watch it in your spare time - it's great.

This idea of everything being either good or bad is pretty common in our culture. Of course, I hope that most people understand that most things are mixed; they lie in the grey area between absolute good and absolute bad. Still, it got me thinking about ethics.

What if there actually was such a system? What if every single action you'd do would be judged as good or bad?

If we knew that, our motivations to do good things would be corrupt. Most of us would good things just to get into heaven. Not for the sake of making the world a better place.

So, I've been asking myself this question; what am I doing good things for?. Is it because I want to feel better? Or maybe because I want to be seen as a better person by others?

I've been trying to shift my motivation to just doing good for good itself. And that's how, I think, we can create a Good Place here on Earth.