Tahani Made the Right Choice in The Good Place

Note: This post contains major spoilers for the end of The Good Place. Yes, the very end.

The last season of The Good Place takes the cast to the real Good Place, where they can live out eternity… except it turns eternal life turns you into a happiness zombie who can’t appreciate all the stuff you want to do because you have forever to do it. (Sound familiar?) So the characters decide to give Good Place residents a chance to opt out, believing that putting an expiration date of your choice on your time in The Good Place will make residents appreciate their time more.

And it worked. People are more satisfied, find themselves languishing less, and finally get a chance to seek out that real satisfaction they never got when they were alive. But with all the people on Earth dying, they needed tests to evaluate humans and determine when (or if) they would be eligible to enter the Good Place. Cue the architects. See, the entire process of getting into the Good Place was revamped over the course of season four, with people experiencing afterlife tests similar to the Season One Good Place, where you get psychologically tortured but have to use it to grow as a person in order to gain acceptance to The (Real) Good Place.

The characters lived out their afterlife in the Good Place, doing everything they wanted, making peace with others, and spending time with the people they loved while they were alive. One by one, the humans chose to end their time in the Good Place.

Except Tahani, the name-dropping philanthropist who raised millions of dollars for charity but was still never good enough in her parents’ eyes. Who was always compared to her superstar sister Kamilah, but was actually pitted against her sister by her parents, causing both sisters to resent this. Tahani’s actions on Earth were good but her motivations were not, which is something we can all do some soul searching for.

Tahani made the right choice in deciding to become an afterlife architect. Her motivations were finally pure.

You know what? It’s what I would have done too, if I ever found myself in the Good Place. I would have a ludicrously long list of things to master, just like Tahani did. After all, if I have forever to master everything, why NOT master everything? This has been in the back of my mind lately; if I suddenly found myself not needing to work, sure, I would write, but I would also take classes in random things just because they sounded neat. I would start making things just because I could and not think about the finite time I had to do all the things because hey, I would have theoretically infinite time in the afterlife. Like Tahani, I wouldn’t want to waste all that knowledge gained. And like Chidi, I would eventually start reading trashy literature.

If Tahani ever finds herself feeling unfulfilled by doing the same thing all the time, she can come up with another list of things to learn… or she can choose to peacefully end her existence, just like the rest of the cast. Who knows, maybe she’ll get to design Michael’s test when he finally makes it there.