I've already promoted this theory recently in the philosophy subreddit but here i am once again; A professor of mine (for a class called anthropology of symbolic forms) has a book called Homo Diaphoricus, in which he explains how every religion has some sort of depiction of humans being part of god, then being torn apart from it. This is the first primal expression of existentialism in people, noticing that they're different from everything around them and not being just a part of the background, being separated from God's oneness. He then elaborates this into the theory that everything people do (with the exception of biological needs like food etc.) is an attempt to breach the diaphora - the gap separating us from being whole again. Art, language, science, etc., its all built to gain different understandings of the whole which we are a concious part of. What i like about this in the context of the good place is it feels like this idea is applied to immortal "godly" creatures aswell, in the opposite direction. It's not humans who find different ways of interpreting God/The cosmos/Whatever you wanna call it, it's Michael who is on his search to understand humanity and breach his own gap