I recently devoured the Brazilian Netflix series “3%” which tells of a dystopia where, every year, 20-year-olds take a battery of tests that will determine if they are “deserving” enough to go live on a paradise island, without ever returning to the impoverished continent from which they came. In addition to the tests, you should know that only 3% of these young people will have the right to a place on the island.

The series motivated me to (finally) study Portuguese… I use duo Lin since January and Busuu for a few weeks and it is paying off! Use my links to sign up and get the Premium version for free 🙂

[Warning ! This article has some spoilers… But that shouldn’t stop you from enjoying the series if you decide to watch it :)]

An impoverished continent

To describe the continent as impoverished is not hyperbole, it is redundancy. From the first episode, we see that everyone wears worn, torn, patched clothes.

We live in half-ruined, faded houses, a sort of shanty town in a city that has been abandoned for centuries. There is no leisure space, no school, no business, no technology such as the Internet, electricity, transport, telecommunications. Everyone walks, barters to get food and drink. I’m not sure where their food comes from elsewhere, as they don’t have agriculture or a farm – maybe old pre-apocalypse supermarket stock, mixed with fresh rats/bugs here and the. Everyone seems to be constantly on edge.

The promise of paradise island

In comparison, the few people who come to visit from the paradise island are always very well dressed, clean, straight, sure of themselves, confident. Everyone on the continent envies them.

More exactly, many scenes show that all the energy of the people seems to be directed towards this promise of an island paradise : when they are small, we see children playing games that replicate these test batteries – or at least what we think they are. We see a priest who praises the superiority of the people who have been selected to live on the island-paradise and who makes an equivalent of masses where people sing, dance, and give thanks to their “superiors” of the island-paradise . We see parents who are deeply disappointed in their young adults who failed to pass the tests. We see a man who cheats to retake the tests the following year, unashamedly stealing his brother’s identity to get there – thus leaving his brother robbed of the paradise island opportunity forever.

When you see this, you quickly notice that something is not clear in the story. It’s as if happiness was only accessible from the paradise island. I have also called it “island-paradise” in this article for a good reason: the priests speak of it as an ultimate goal of life and praise the virtues of the people who go there… like paradise in fact.

This promise regulates all the dynamics of this world. As a child, you play at passing the tests. As a teenager, you prepare to take the tests. Some make a baby in their early adulthood. At 20, you pass the tests. If you’re one of the 3% of successful people, so much the better, you go to the island, leaving your loved ones behind. If they want to join you (even the baby you conceived before you left), they’ll have to pass the tests too. Otherwise, you stay on the mainland, and you survive as best you can. You make children and you take care of them more or less, and you hope that they will manage to pass the tests when they turn 20, for your personal pride.

And this is the cycle of this world.

Of course, it’s a fiction, but don’t we have the same problem in our own world?

How many people in our real world spend their lives trying to live their parents’ dream, instead of living their own life?

How many parents push their children towards a notion of “success” that does not correspond to them?

A blind promise

Here is the interesting thing: it is only at the end of the third season that we understand that this idea of ​​an island paradise is distorted. Indeed, there exists other ways for the continent to be self-sufficient in resources! But people have been so persuaded and brainwashed that only paradise island can save them and bring them a good life, let them reject all other ideas, and all hope.

It marked me a lot. So much pain for nothing! It would be enough for them to organize themselves differently to maximize the available resources and no longer depend so much on the regency of the island-paradise (like having their own internal government), that they stop considering the island-paradise as the only worthwhile purpose in this life, that they find other reasons to live (why not explore outside the city?), and everyone would be happier. If after all, we have a 97% chance of not going to the paradise island, why base our entire existence on it?

So I asked myself: What are the “heavens” in our lives that we stress about as much as these people? In other words, what are the goals that we set for ourselves and we say to ourselves “If I don’t succeed, my life will have no meaning”? While there are alternative, simpler solutions, which we sometimes refuse to consider… out of stupid stubbornness!

What are your paradises? Or what were your paradises?

I’ll share mine in a future article 🙂