Not as I Do

Sunday, April 6, 2025 at 10:00am

The below essay will appear as the afterword to my upcoming novel When the Gods Wish to Punish. As such, it contains minor plot spoilers.

One of my favorite television shows of the last decade was Michael Schur’s The Good Place. The main character, Eleanor, is dropped into an idyllic, pastoral world and informed that she has died. However, not to worry, Eleanor has ended up in “the good afterlife” as opposed to the bad one. She’s shown around paradise, introduced to her soulmate, and then the good-spirited angel in charge of everything (played brilliantly by Ted Danson) leaves her to experience bliss. Once the angel is gone, Eleanor admits to her soulmate that in life she was a terrible person, and her arriving here was clearly some kind of mistake. But, not wanting to end up sent to the bad place, Eleanor begs him to teach her how to pretend to be a good person.

This brilliant set up highlights two major points about ethics and morality. The first is that, while it’s easy to talk about being good, it’s much more difficult to actually behave that way, even for those of us who study philosophy, or, just by way of example, encode ethics and morality into the themes and metaphors of multi-hundred-page novels. The second is that Aristotle was essentially right when he observed that behaving morally was a learned skill, not a state of being. No humans are born saints. We’re all actually born quite selfish. Being good takes practice, and like every other skill in the world (software development, powerlifting, etc.), no matter how good you get, every person still has their off days, their slip ups. Similarly, even the most morally astute, self-reflective person has their gaffs, their foibles, the things that cause them to fume or lose their temper.

At some future point, I will release a memoir, and, if my works are paid any attention at all in the future, I imagine it will befuddle future generations to discover that I penned this novel immediately before, rather than immediately after, certain devastating life decisions. Indeed, in hind sight, it’s almost as if, having used When the Gods Wish to Punish to finally and thoroughly close the door on a particular traumatic mid-twenties relationship, I proceeded to hurl myself willingly into yet another equally predictable trauma.

And while it would be easy, like Ash, to sink into despair, to hide this novel from sight and continue wallowing in self-recrimination, returning to this novel has offered something else, a reminder that there are not one, but two important lessons offered up here, and while I may have failed at following my own advice on the first, it’s still up to me to make good on the second.

Ashley Amund is easily the most emotionally volatile character I have ever written, but, I also wanted him to be the most emotionally open, to show both aspects of that character trait fairly. Readers of my other works will notice how this is my only novel where characters (particularly and mostly Ashley) swear, and where there are explicit sexual details. But with Ash as my lead, it could not have been otherwise. Everything with him is visceral. Every sting feels like a gut punch. Every win is an ecstatic high. Every loss is a reason to sink into despair.

But the most important feature about Ash is that he cares, deeply and truly, about his friends. He even cares too much about people who shouldn’t be his friends. He hasn’t found Aristotle’s balance. And, clearly, neither have I.

This is not When the Gods’s only message, however. Up until Kal’s ship arrives to rescue the UMI citizens from Amrita, what Ash “should have done” was to have truly let go of Erik, boarded the escape shuttle, and not ended up in Amrita at all. However, the narrative ends up implying, in multiple ways, that this would have ended up worse for both Ash and the nearly 2,000 UMI citizens who do eventually get saved.

First off, there’s the case of the escape shuttle. No one ever discovers what happened to it, but it seems unlikely that the shuttle made it to Isallna and that no one on board, including the woman Ash talked to, told anyone about Amrita. Since Amrita went forgotten, it seems likely that most or all of the Intersection Twenty-Four escape shuttles were destroyed by the Intersection Thirteen military. Getting on that shuttle would probably have in fact been a death sentence in disguise.

Secondly, there’s Ash’s initial escape from Amrita, made possible only by dint of the fact that Kal’s contact pulled Ash out of his reverie enough to be repulsed by the truth of what he’d created. If Ash had created something truly innocuous, such as a powerlifting competition or a video game binge, Kal’s communication efforts would likely have been as unsuccessful on him as they were on the dozens of individuals that he tried prior to Ash.

Ash is only able to be the novel’s hero because of his faults, his misapprehension, his mistakes. Amrita gives him the chance to channel all his pain and regret into something positive, to make amends to the people for whom it matters.

I find myself now, nearly one year on at the time of this writing, coming out of yet another trauma, more pain, more regret. A younger version of myself probably would have responded to When the Gods as an embarrassment, something to hide away, to pretend had never happened, lest the whole world know that the guy trying to teach them about restraint, about compassion, about appropriate boundaries, about attentive respect, can’t even follow his own (narrative) advice.

But, a more adult Matt knows that such an act would merely compound the error and make me complicit in violating both of the novel’s messages. It’s now up to me to take my experiences and do something productive with them. Rather than hiding When the Gods, I give it to the world. I stand by it proudly.

The saying, “do as I say, not as I do,” is generally used as a kind of standard for hypocrisy, the catch phrase of the corrupt or sarcastic authority, who instructs others in behaviors that they themselves do not adhere to. There is, however, a difference between purposely flouting a principle you espouse and failing to live up to it. Don’t do what Ashley did. Don’t do what I did. Regardless, the lessons of When the Gods are still worth doing. Worth trying to do. Practice might not ever make perfect, but it can make us better. And achieving, every day, a little bit of “better” seems preferable to me than forever failing to be perfect.