The slowly-unfolding premise of the Good Place is that everyone is damned. They are damned because they participate in the modern world; they buy from sweatshops, they eat chocolate, they fly in airplanes while the poorest people in the world see their harvests fail thanks to climate change. It's much easier to earn demerits than merits. No one has gone to the Good Place in a very long time. My post about why I think cheap goods make peoples' lives better attracted a lot of discussion of what I should do instead of buy inexpensive things. You can roll dice on your phone, one person said; you don't need to buy them. (Someone objected that phones were expensive, and the first person said that you could finance them.) Another explained to me that I should really be sewing my five year old's Viking tunics myself. Surely my family of 10 can borrow enough camping gear from friends? Have I joined my local buy-nothing group? I don't own a car. The six adults who live in my house in total own one, and it's electric. I walk to work, and to the grocery store, and to the microschool, and to almost everywhere else. From an environmental perspective this matters a whole lot more than purchasing a five dollar set of dice, but I did not choose to write the post with a defensive accounting of all of the ways in which I've chosen a low-environmental-footprint modern life in order to earn the internet's approval for my dice. The thing I'm trying to say is not that by sufficient virtue you can beg the luxury of owning a set of real dice, or that if you walk to the grocery store then you have a good enough excuse not to hand-sew your kids' halloween costumes. I am in my local buy-nothing group, but I do not think it's okay that I bought wallpaper only because I did scour the buy-nothing group first. The thing I'm trying to say is that I do not agree with the Good Place that we are all damned; I am not pleading that I meet the standard but objecting to it. ---- People are really bad at grappling with moral obligations that are large, diffuse, and unbounded. Lots of people reject them entirely - why should that be my problem? Why shouldn't it be someone else's problem, who isn't me? (The answer is that we're not negotiating whether you are damned, we're just determining what happens in the real world where things either happen or don't; things will only get better if you fix them, and you have to decide whether you want to, not whether you have an airtight argument that it isn't your job to.) No one has a satisfactory answer to this, of course, but I think the Good Place captured one implicit answer offered in modern liberal society, and I think it's a dumb one, and I don't think it's doing us any favors. It's a thesis of abnegation: don't do harmful things. It barely admits the existence of helpful things. Most of why we have escaped from under the threat of the worst climate impacts is better green energy; most of the places that will suffer the most will suffer the most because they are very poor. Those things matter a lot, yet far more energy is expended on things that matter very very little. My own thesis is that you should make things better where it is cheap, and not try to do so where it is extraordinarily costly. You should save lives where it's cost-effective. You should demand more humane policy when your politicians might listen. You should invent better batteries and better solar panels. Almost everything that you do that matters will be located in where you actively make things better, not in your purchasing decisions. (I'm writing here about the environmental angle, not about the labor-conditions angle, which I also think is very important but which I approach differently; I'll write about that later.) But surely every little bit still helps, right? Well, kind of, but some things are bad bargains; they are a little bit of improvement purchased at fairly extraordinary costs to you. You are a limited resource, and should not spend yourself down for the most minimal of gains. And a movement that demands that you do so will be recognized by lots of people as unhealthy and destructive; they will move away from it. Christians often recommend that you preach the word of God by living the word of God, by having a life so abundant with meaning and joy that people start wondering what your secret is. I think this is good tactical advice, and I don't think it is only good because it's good tactical advice. Human flourishing is good. Peoples' lives should be rich and joyous and abundant. The reason that your movement will be more compelling if it embraces joy and flourishing and abundance is that those are objectively good things and people are correct to be on the lookout for them. And so the defense of my dice purchases and my not hand-sewing my kids' Halloween costumes is not that I walked four miles with the baby on errands today (though I did) or that I donate tens of thousands of dollars every year to trying to build a safer richer better world (though I do) or that we have solar panels on the roof (though we do). It's that rolling real physical dice is good, and forgoing the dice does not buy anything of comparable value. It is that joy and meaning belong on the scales, and not only are you not required to sacrifice them on the alter of fixing the world, but sacrificing them isn't even a very good way to fix the world. Enjoy the good things, enjoy them without guilt, enjoy them with the conviction that everyone should have them. Figure out where a better world is cheaply purchased, and purchase it there. Don't lose sight of how much is at stake, but keep in mind that making your life worse to purchase very little benefit to the world is also a way of losing sight of what is at stake. We're not damned. We just have a big to-do list.