Sonya Bateson: Don't hold your breath if you're trying to reach The Good Place

Netflix's The Good Place. Photo / File

OPINION

Revelations aren't reserved for pivotal life moments.

Sure, sometimes they're the result of a death-bed confession, or a serious illness, or the birth of a child.

But usually, they're far less drastic – a pamphlet in the mailbox, a chance encounter on the street, a lesson in the schoolroom.

Or even a television show.

The series The Good Place kindled one such revelation for me.

If you haven't seen the show, be warned: Many spoilers abound.

The show's premise explores a fictional, comedic afterlife that is divided into the Good Place and the Bad Place.

Where you end up is determined by points that you accumulate or lose along every step of your life's path – everything from whether you allowed a car to merge into traffic on Monday to that time you saved a child during a flash flood.

Each person is judged on the individual choices they made during their lifetimes, big and small.

Then comes the big reveal – no human has made it to the Good Place in more than 500 years.

And that's not because humanity has grown any better or worse in the last few centuries. Rather, points balances are all well into overdraft because so many of our small choices have unintended negative consequences for large numbers of people.

The concept works like this: Let's say you buy a T-shirt from a shop. You might get one point for self-care, one point for saying thank you to the cashier, and two points for helping a local businesswoman pay her staff.

Four points towards the Good Place, yay.

But then come the deductions. The T-shirt you bought cost $20. It was cheap because it was made by children earning six cents an hour. Minus 20 points.

That one simple little purchase – a very normal, mundane, forgettable action – contributed to bad outcomes for other people and tipped your points balance in favour of the Bad Place.

Even the kindest, most caring and thoughtful humans were ending up in the Bad Place because of the wide-reaching unintended consequences of each and every action.

Take another example: Maybe you decide to become a vegan. Five points.

But you begin bringing it up in every discussion and irritating the people around you.

Minus two points. You convince someone else to become a vegan. One point.

But they stop eating animal products with no knowledge about how to eat a vegan diet safely and become ill with malnourishment. Minus five points.

They share a photo of them on social media tagged #vegan.

More young people start crash dieting and harming their health. Minus 5598 points.

You get the idea.

What it comes down to is this: Even the simplest, most innocent of our actions can cause ripples of bad consequences that harm others.

That there is the little nugget that blew my mind.

Revelation.

It struck me, particularly with the things we buy. It is darn near impossible to track down the origins of what goes into the things we purchase.

Take, for example, a packaged food item like a chocolate bar.

Some companies that produce chocolate bars admit they often have no idea which farms their cocoa comes from and whether child labour was used.

The Washington Post reported in 2019 that Mars could trace only 24 per cent of its cocoa back to farms; Hershey less than half; Nestlé 49 per cent.

Okay, so cocoa can be bad. What about chocolate's other ingredients? They all came from somewhere too, and the resources used to grow, refine and harvest those ingredients also came from somewhere.

And that's without taking into consideration how well the company that made these fictional chocolates treat their own employees, the resources they use in producing the bar, and the waste they create in their factories.

That one chocolate bar is a minefield. Rinse and repeat with anything you didn't grow in your backyard – and even then, the tools you use had to come from somewhere.

It's disturbing to dwell on.

Tearfund, in collaboration with Baptist World Aid, has a go at analysing how ethical certain fashion companies are every year.

This year, the organisations focused their research on footwear companies from around the world. That research gave the six analysed New Zealand brands (owned by three different companies) low scores.

The NZ Herald this week reported that two of the companies acknowledged they were making further progress towards sustainability and the other did not comment.

Of the 25 companies around the world that were researched, only 10 could say where their factories were.

A quarter did not know where their leather tanneries or fabric mills were, and 56 per cent didn't know where their raw materials such as cotton or animal hides came from.

No company could show they paid workers a living wage.

"We hope this research becomes a catalyst for meaningful change in the New Zealand footwear industry," the report read.

Wouldn't that be nice? It shouldn't just stop at footwear and apparel though.

I'd really, truly, appreciate being able to eat a bar of chocolate or buy a T-shirt certain in the knowledge that children weren't harmed along the way.

That's the revelation we all need.

Sonya Bateson is a writer, reader, and crafter raising her family in Tauranga. She is a Millennial who enjoys eating avocado on toast, drinking lattes and defying stereotypes. As a sceptic, she reserves the right to change her mind when presented with new evidence.