The Bad Place

We are rewatching The Good Place, a sitcom that ran during the first Trump administration, this time with our tweens. It’s a show about moral philsophy and what it means to be a good person, but it’s also a show about the absurdity of quantification and scoring systems. It’s made me want to re-read my notes from C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, show creator Michael Schur’s book, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question, and maybe Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost. [Spoiler alert] The other thing the show is about is the unique Hell of thinking you’re in The Good Place when you’re really in The Bad Place. I see this a lot in life, but I see it all the time on social media. Pretty much all social media is The Bad Place, but some social media thinks it’s The Good Place, and that somehow makes it even worse. For example: Bluesky — literally blue sky, a.k.a. the heavens — thinks of itself as The Good Place, an alternative to…