The Best Philosophical Lessons from The Good Place

This article contains spoilers for all four seasons of The Good Place.

Across four seasons, The Good Place made us laugh, cry, and ponder the very nature of our existence. This NBC comedy asks what it means to be a good person in this world and gives a variety of answers over the course of its run. With individualism rising, especially in the United States, now is as good a time as any to look back on The Good Place and what it had to teach us about what we owe to each other as people sharing life on a spinning rock in the cosmos.

With Love and Support, Most People Will Choose to Do Good

One of The Good Place’s most profound observations lies in a quote from Michael (Ted Danson). He says “People improve when they get external love and support. How can we hold it against them when they don’t?” 

Over the course of his Bad Place experiments, Michael learns that no matter what he throws at Chidi (William Jackson Harper), Tahani (Jameela Jamil), Eleanor (Kristen Bell), and Jason (Manny Jacinto), that they always seem to find each other and learn how to be better people because of each other. Despite everything they went through before their deaths that led them to The Bad Place, they finally find the support they need to become better people in the afterlife.

It’s why Michael interferes when the four get sent back to Earth for a second chance to prove themselves in life. He knows that without support, they’ll eventually end up right where they started. This lesson isn’t about excusing a person’s abhorrent behavior because they didn’t grow up with enough care to make them good, it’s about encouraging those of us who did to put that same love and care we received back out into the world as much as we can. You never know when an act of kindness could change someone’s life and set them on a better path.

It Doesn’t Matter if People Are “Good” or “Bad,” What Matters Is Trying to Be a Better Person Than You Were Yesterday

Another quote from Michael that holds a really valuable lesson is from the episode “A Chip Driver Mystery.” He says “What matters isn’t if people are good or bad. What matters is if they’re trying to be better today than they were yesterday.”

As Eleanor so eloquently says early on in the series “Pobody’s Nerfect.” We can’t expect every person to be a bastion of moral superiority at all times. It’s just not feasible, especially in the world we live in where every choice we make often has unintended consequences. But rather than giving up and resigning to the fact that being a good person isn’t always easy, we can at least try to be a better person that we were yesterday. Being a better person isn’t about making one grand gesture and hoping it erases all of the bad you’ve done, it’s about taking smaller steps every day until being “good” becomes second nature.

Failure Isn’t inherently Bad, It Means You’re Trying

As people, we tend to get discouraged when we aren’t automatically good at something. Oftentimes failure is even considered to be a moral negative that reflects badly on someone’s character. Sometimes this encourages people to always try their best, but more often than not it discourages someone from even trying in the first place. If someone is trying to be a better person, but is struggling with it, we shouldn’t belittle them for their efforts. Once again, a quote from Michael perfectly exemplifies this. He says “You fail, and then you try something else, and you fail again and again. And you fail a thousand times, and you keep trying. Because maybe the 1,001st idea might work.”

Just as failure isn’t inherently bad, perfection isn’t inherently good, as we see with Chidi. He spends his entire life studying philosophy and agonizing over being a good person and making the best choices, but it’s his fear of failing at that and his fear of making the “wrong” choice that ultimately lead to him ending up in the bad place. Instead of learning through experience and failure, he stays paralyzed in indecision. We never know for sure if we’re good at something or if it’s the right choice until we try.

Don’t Fight Your Own Sadness at the State of the World, It’ll Just End Up “Leaking Out of You Anyway”

When Michael is having his existential crisis in season 2, Eleanor tells him “All humans are aware of death. So we’re all a little bit sad all the time. That’s just the deal…but we don’t get offered any other ones. And if you try and ignore your sadness, it just ends up leaking out of you anyway. I’ve been there. And everybody’s been there. So don’t fight it.”

This is a lesson that I think we can all learn from. In times like these, it’s easy to feel like you have to fight against your sadness at the state of the world. As though there’s too much heaviness to process at once. But as Eleanor says, ignoring your sadness is just postponing it. Your body and mind will find other ways to deal with it if you don’t.

Being sad isn’t a sign of weakness – it means you care enough about something to elicit an emotional response. It’s important to not only hold space for our own sadness, but to help others feel more comfortable in theirs. When things feel heavy it’s hard to know the “right” way to react, but it’s always better to acknowledge what you’re feeling than to pretend you don’t feel anything at all.

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