Art by Alena Aenami on Artstation.

My friends say "Oh you know, keeping busy." This means they are having a hard time but making themselves survive it. I ask them to help me walk me dog; this is me telling them it's okay sometimes to just be present and talk about young adult fiction. When I cancel again because I can't get out of bed, she tells me she's on her way with cookies.

I point out the sunset. She shares her fork before I ask for it. He calls me at 1 AM just because I'm on the road alone, we talk about stupid shit. She waits for me to get indoors safely before driving away. He says - nah, forget it, I'm happy to do it for free.

“I mean, where I’m from, most things blow up eventually, so I learned that when something dope comes along, you gotta lock it down. If you’re always frozen in fear and taking too long to think about what to do, you’ll miss your opportunity. And maybe get sucked into the propeller of a swamp boat.”

“Why choose to be good every day if there is no guaranteed reward we can count on, now or in the afterlife? I argue that we choose to be good because of our bonds with other people and our innate desire to treat them with dignity. Simply put, we are not in this alone.”

“The more human I become, the less things make sense. But that’s part of the fun, right? If there were an answer I could give you to how the universe works, it wouldn’t be special. It would just be machinery fulfilling its cosmic design. It would just be a big, dumb, food processor. But, since nothing seems to make sense, when you find something or someone that does, it’s euphoria.”

“Maybe the reason Michael can’t latch onto the ideas is because he’s immortal. Look, if you live forever, then ethics don’t matter to you because basically, there’s no consequences for your actions. You tell a lie, who cares? Wait a few trillion years, the guilt will fade. Before I can teach Michael to be good, I have to force him to think about what we used to think about: that life has an end, and therefore, our actions have meaning.”

“Remember the thought experiment where you’re driving a trolley and you can either plough into a group of people or turn and hit one person? I solved it. See, the trolley problem forces you to choose between two versions of letting other people die. The actual solution is very simple: sacrifice yourself.”

“Turns out life isn’t a puzzle that can just be solved one time and it’s done. You wake up every day, and you solve it again.”

“I guess that’s what the Good Place really is. It’s not even a ‘place’, really. It’s just having enough time with the people you love.”

“Picture a wave in the ocean. You can see it, measure it, its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through, and it’s there, and you can see it, you know what it is. It’s a wave. And then it crashes on the shore, and it’s gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be for a little while.”

the moon asks a question by dirgewithoutmusic