#the good place

Me, Thanksgiving, 1L year, studying for finals:

Me, Thanksgiving, a 7th year lawyer, working:

diapordias:

jadagul:

sigmaleph:

jadagul:

kurloz38:

annabellioncourt:

daddynietzsche:

throwback to that time in my existentialism class where the professor asked ‘who thinks hell is other people’ and half the class slowly and meekly put their hand up

then the prof was like ‘…i mean who originally said it’

there are some posts that sound utterly made up for the joke or for the notes, but this one I whole heartedly believe 

Sounds right to me…

That quote is amazing to me in that it’s quoted completely accurately and yet in a way that means something completely different from what it meant in context.

(Sartre was claiming that Hell was other people. He was not claiming that other people were hell.)

…I can’t actually tell what distinction you’re drawing there. Can you expand?

The line comes from No Exit, which is set in Hell. Spoilers for No Exit follow

In particular, three people who have been condemned to hell are trapped eternally in a room together. And at first they think they got off easy without any pitchforks or fiery lakes or anything. But over the course of the play they discover that they have been chosen very specifically to have neuroses and character flaws that interact with and torment each other.

Each one needs the approval of a second in an unstable RPS cycle so that any time one of them might be satisfied by a second, the third swoops in and ruins it.

And when they figure this out, one of the characters expresses his understanding, that hell isn’t physical torture. “Hell is just—other people.”

So the point isn’t that other people, generically, are hellish; it’s rather that you can build a hell out of other people.

But when I hear people quote it, it’s usually sort of an introvert-pride thing. “Other people are hell; you should spend time alone.” And that’s not the point at all. It’s a statement about how bad unhealthy relationships can be, not a statement about how all relationships are unhealthy!

See also Sartre’s own comment here:

“hell is other people” has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell.

Reblogging for the original post which was hilarious and also for that explanation which is beautiful

roach-works:

the-real-numbers:

there is no ethical ethics under ethics

All of this is true

Lizzy when Darcy runs into her at his house:

franbamm:

[tahani al-jamil voice] that reminds me of something my good friend Jonathan Harker told me in one of his emails once,

mxduki:

I like Mike Schur shows (Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn 99, The Good Place). They are probably the best comedies of the moment and they are about good people, people trying to help each other, or people trying to become better people. It is such a welcome change from the Seinfeld syndrome that has afflicted most tv comedies for the last thirty years.