"And I'm immortal and don't need to move out on any particular schedule and really want to see what happens. I didn't say we could do that this century."

"True, true."

"You know, your Upper Planes seem a lot less horrible than being an angel in my world."

"That's a low-sounding bar but I'm glad my world meets it nonetheless."

"I don't think it's that low. I think a lot of angels were happy, or are happy now. If I'd even been younger I'm not sure I'd have been very unhappy."

"Oh?"

"We had a problem with infinite recursion on altruism before there were selfish people. Your Upper Planes don't seem to have that problem. But it was really only a few of us who actually minded, you have to have come into being a little flawed to begin with or it's basically fine."

"My Upper Planes once warned a friend of mine specifically against that problem. And I don't quite have a model of what you mean by 'flawed', here."

"What did they advise your friend to do to avoid it?"

"They advised my friend to consider the question and find an answer, not to pick a specific one, but the conclusion the friend seems to have reached is that personally having pleasant experiences is worthwhile and can be an anchor against some failure modes?"

"And how did your friend achieve that?"

"Well, the specific question he was posed was 'why do you want to be alive, and remember that saying 'to help others' just pushes things back a step' or so, and … being a mortal … he presumably had personal experience with some asocial or otherwise non-altruistic stimuli being pleasant for him and also a thing other people had and valued having? I'm not sure this properly answers your question."

"Yeah, I think the problem with that solution is that mortals are already not perfect creatures with no selfish motives."

"An entity who in an environment without other moral patients is incapable of enjoying oneself seems flawed, not perfect. …I mean, if this is the language you're used to using I'm not saying stop talking, but I want to register this objection."

"Well. Yes. Like I said, you have to be a little flawed to begin with to have this problem. Works fine if you feel fine as long as nothing is actively wrong."

"So by 'flawed' you refer to, what, not enjoying oneself at baseline?"

"Yeah. If that happens you can start dragging everyone down, and they want to fix it but there's no lever for them to do that because the only thing you can care about is that now you're making them unhappy, and now they're in the same boat and... in hindsight this is why a group of angels once declared they were going into total information quarantine and were never heard from again."

"That's worse than I expected. Wow."

"It was awful! What were you expecting?"

"I think a sort of paralysis or lost-ness was around my median, but I didn't have a single well-defined prediction."

"That's fair. It does take a while to get to that point and there are some adequately selfless mental architectures that aren't vulnerable at all, but... anyway, the Upper Planes are better. In at least that way and possibly more. Probably more. The dutch booking is creepy, though."

"If a lot of people are creeped out by the inconsistency I would guess there's a lot of space without it. They try to accommodate people's preferences. …they actually have some 'streets of gold' for new arrivals who were told that if they got into a nice afterlife it'd have streets of gold, so that they don't panic, even though there are some pretty good reasons to not actually do streets like that in most areas."

"That's awful, I love it. Pure gold or some remotely reasonable gold alloy?"

"Something that visually approximates what people expect from 'streets of gold'. Not sure if it really contains any of the relevant metal. If you're highly informed about how metals work you probably don't come to the conclusion that a good afterlife has streets of gold, even if you hear someone mention it in a folktale, probably? …also, Hell will sometimes drop new arrivals in streets 'paved' with something like molten gold, which might amuse you."

"It does! That's horrible. Are there other rumors like that or just the streets?"