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Explanation
This comic presents a fake academic lecture about rating every aspect of human experience on two axes, creating a mathematical model of life satisfaction.
The lecturer proposes rating everything on two dimensions: "goodness" (how great something is) and "importance" (how much it matters). She draws a chart with these axes, identifying a "zone of impossibility" (things can't be maximally great and maximally important simultaneously) and a "greatest art" region. The idea is to compute a total "life score" by summing up everything.
She then makes a key observation: "This evening, all human experience -- why are so many of you reporting high importance with mediocre goodness?" The answer: "Because if you're transactionally tallying all of existence, your best way to max your D-score is to run right down the Y-axis" -- meaning people game the system by claiming everything is "very important" but only "okay" in quality, which technically maximizes their total score.
The comic satirizes several things at once: the modern obsession with quantifying and optimizing everything (especially in self-help and productivity culture), the tendency for any metric to be gamed once people know it exists (Goodhart's Law -- "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"), and the absurdity of trying to reduce the richness of human experience to a single numerical score. The final panel mentions adding "more axes" to create a "17-dimensional hypercube," escalating the mathematical absurdity, with someone in the audience calling it a "TED talk" -- the ultimate venue for oversimplified frameworks presented with false profundity.