You know how it feels like the world is specifically designed to torture people and cause as much suffering as possible, i.e., hellworld?
That's because it is.
Assume for the sake of argument that we live in a simulation within a simulation with in a simulation, etc. because a sufficiently advanced civilization will eventually produce a simulation of civilization, which will produce its own simulations, and so on. Basically, we are Sims in somebody's hyper-advanced computer.
The particular simulation we're in was designed as a torture world, exactly like season 1 of The Good Place. In the same way that some people who play the actual Sims game kill their Sims by making them swim in a pool and then deleting the ladder out of the pool, this world we live in is literally designed to cause suffering. Some of the people in it -- the ghouls, the most powerful people -- literally aren't real and are part of the simulation (just like the demons in The Good Place), but most of the people are real and their suffering is real (insofar as anything that's nested within layers of simulation can be "real").
The challenge is not to kill yourself. If you die of natural causes, maybe that's how you get out and finally can rest. But if you kill yourself -- which the world is designed to make you want to do -- you get entered back into the simulation and you live again, over and over and over, in a flat circle.
On the Green Beautiful, a utopian planet much smaller than Earth, during the yearly planetary meeting, Mila, a rather young woman – by the reckoning of her people, at any rate – volunteers to go as a messenger to planet Earth. It has been two hundred years since the old sage Osam was there, along with Mila's father. At the time of his visit, he recounts, the people of Earth lived in bad conditions. It was the time of Napoleon and the people of earth were still using money – a notion that baffles even the wisest folk of the Green Beautiful. In time, we find out that important historical figures such as Jesus and Johann Sebastian Bach had come from this very planet.
No one on the Green Beautiful wishes to go to Earth; their opinion of Earth actually isn't all that flattering. They see the people of Earth as un-evolved, and unwilling to change. Mila, however, who knows that her mother was from Earth, is the only one to volunteer, and so is sent to Earth for the purpose of bringing back news of how things have worked out since the nineteenth century. She also wishes to find out more about her parents, although this thread seems to be abandoned quite early on in the story.
Before she departs, she is given so-called "disconnection" programs – mental devices that allow her to induce life-changing epiphanies in the people she converses with, and even more radical changes, when she uses a version of it with a stronger dosage. She will remain in touch with her home planet via telepathy.
https://youtu.be/xB1HHt-gfa8
SUPPRESSED IN THE EU