punching-bags
Explanation
This comic imagines what Heaven's "punching bags" are like, drawing a comparison to video game mechanics.
In the first panel, a figure (likely Saint Peter or an angel) welcomes someone to Heaven and says: "Welcome to Heaven! Over here are your four punching bags." The newcomer asks: "What do they do?"
The angel explains: "There are lots of things that matter to humans in earthly life. In Heaven, you get to hit these four bags in satisfying, repetitive physical actions."
In the next panel, the angel continues: "This is your High Status bag, this is the Morality bag, this is the Love bag, this is the Meaning bag. The harder you punch them, the more you get."
The angel elaborates further: "Everything is measured with perfect precision and you can look up your ranking on an infinite leaderboard. Your total amount of meaning relative to effort invested is displayed as a function required to make it visually satisfying and interesting."
In the final panel, the newcomer observes: "So... weird. Yet so compelling." The angel responds: "We basically stole it from video games."
The comic draws a parallel between what humans claim to want from life (status, morality, love, meaning) and the dopamine-driven feedback loops of video games (hitting things, getting points, checking leaderboards, optimizing stats). The joke suggests that if you stripped away all the complexity and ambiguity of real human experience and reduced it to clear, measurable, satisfying feedback -- which is exactly what games do -- you'd essentially have Heaven.
The deeper humor is in the implication that video games have already figured out what makes humans feel fulfilled: clear goals, measurable progress, satisfying physical feedback, and competitive rankings. Heaven, supposedly the ultimate reward, turns out to just be a well-designed game. This satirizes both the simplistic nature of what humans actually find rewarding and the addictive design of modern video games, which have effectively reverse-engineered human motivation into a set of punching bags with leaderboards.