Jake Jackson

In The Good Place, the characters’ attempts to find “marginal comforts” worsen their suffering by lulling them into a false sense of security and keeping them from fully resisting or rebelling against their situation. People will justify the worst and most hellish marriages, jobs, and living situations, if they can find small marginal comforts that keep them stable. Being comfortable is not a “why” in life, and it's really just a good way to hurt oneself all the more. But as much as marginal comforts provide for complacency, too much comfort and guaranteed pleasure can undermine what it means to be human. Suffering, to some extent, appears to give and shape meaning in our lives. The lack of suffering and the lack of the absurdity of death keep the residents of The Good Place from being able to do new and interesting things.

In this article, I examine stigmatizing and especially patronizing attitudes towards others’ depression that people who are well-intentioned produce. The strategy of the article is to consider the social experience of depression through two separate subfields of philosophy: epistemic injustice and phenomenology. The solution that I propose is a phenomenological account of empathy. The empathetic attitude that I argue for involves actively listening to the depressed individual and taking their depression testimony as direct evidence. The article has been written both for those who seek to better support neurodiverse people in their lives and for depressives (and other neurodivergents) themselves in order to provide them with a better account for advocating for themselves against social stigma.