Earl is a small-time thief who hasn’t much considered the effects of his actions on others, until one day he wins $100,000 on a scratch-off lottery ticket. Ten seconds later, he’s hit by a car, the ticket blows away, and he ends up in the hospital, in a neck brace, with nothing. As he watches some late-night television there, he catches a talk-show exchange between host Carson Daly and his guest, country star Trace Adkins.
Adkins asks Daly how he got so lucky, with his own show and a long history of beautiful and famous girlfriends. After joking that he is, in fact, Satan, Daly turns earnest: “I’ve been blessed. I also believe that what goes around comes around, and that’s how I try and live my life. You do good things and good things happen to you. You do bad things and it’ll come back to haunt you. Karma.”
Earl proceeds to make a list of everything bad he’s done in his life, and vows to make up for each one. This is the concept of My Name Is Earl, a hit NBC sitcom that ran from 2005-09, with each episode featuring one of Earl’s make-good schemes.
I started thinking about My Name Is Earl again recently when my friend Sara Eckel posted about a fundamental misunderstanding of karma in the mainstream: We all wait for what goes around to come around (say, when it comes to a certain president), and are outraged when this mystical comeuppance refuses to happen. I responded that I felt like this confusion stemmed from karma’s portrayal in pop culture.
Karma is big in a number of religions, including Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, and my spiritual practice, Buddhism. In some sects, karma plays a major role in reincarnation; you might be reincarnated as a “lesser” being, a nonhuman entity that therefore cannot achieve enlightenment, if you don’t do things right in this life. This concept aligns with many religions’ ideas that good behavior equals good consequences, which equates to good conditions all around for some, or maybe just eventual heaven for others.
It's also a handy conceit in pop culture, whether it’s on TV shows like My Name Is Earl or in pop songs such as Taylor Swift’s “Karma” and Chappell Roan’s “My Kink Is Karma.” But these works don’t necessarily aim to express karma in all of its spiritual complexity as much as they use karma as a shorthand for reward and revenge, which is where the confusion comes in. And maybe that’s okay, but it can lead to the kind of spiritual confusion that Sara was writing about. She writes about Trump’s re-election:
The first time we went through this, I breathlessly followed the Mueller investigation, the two impeachment trials and the many other scandals that Rachel Maddow painstakingly laid out at 9 p.m. each night. I told myself I was staying informed, and I was. But I was also munching popcorn, awaiting the victorious moment when the foe was vanquished. I was waiting for someone else’s karma to kick in.
Karma has, in essence, been boiled down to the idea that “what goes around comes around,” an aphorism bandied about by the likes of title character Daniel in The Karate Kid and Justin Timberlake (which is … interesting, given how things have gone for him recently). It is, after all, a comforting and convenient narrative: The wicked will be punished, and we’ll get to see it. Another common way of saying this in pop culture is the phrase “Karma is a bitch,” and its variations. On Gossip Girl, for instance, the unknown narrator quips, “Ain’t karma a bitch?” when the ne’er-do-well Chuck Bass shows up too late with a grand gesture for love interest Blair Waldorf.
Interestingly, variations on this phrase took off in the late 2000s, just as My Name Is Earl peaked and then ended. In its mere four years on the air, the series began with a solid morality, but ended in a convoluted mess of philosophy. But it seems to have either picked up on something in the cultural ether or pushed it forward for more to pick up on it.
Karma, in at least the “what goes around comes around” variety, has shown up prominently in pop music in the last few years. Taylor Swift’s “Karma,” from her 2022 album Midnights, is a catchy ode to a karma that is “my boyfriend,” “a god,” “the breeze in my hair on the weekend,” “a relaxing thought,” and, most memorably “a cat, purring in my lap ‘cause it loves me, flexing like a goddamn acrobat.”
Perhaps because of Swift’s omnipresence in pop culture, this touched off a debate among Buddhist thinkers. Sarwang Parikh, who grew up Hindu and has practiced Raja Yoga and Theravada Buddhism for more than 20 years, took issue with Swift’s characterization in a piece published on LionsRoar.com. “Buddhism emphasizes the power of choice and the cultivation of personal responsibility in relation to karma,” Parikh writes. He then quotes the Buddha from the Upajjhatthana Sutta: “I am the owner of my actions, heir of my actions, actions are the womb (from which I have sprung), actions are my relations, actions are my protection. Whatever actions I do, good or bad, of these I shall become the heir.” Flexing like a goddamn acrobat … me and karma vibe like that. Sorry, that just really reminded me of the cadence of “Karma.”
Further, Parikh says, “In contrast to simplified pop cultural ideas on karma, the Buddhist view of karma is an intricate and multidimensional set of interactions that span multiple lifetimes to locate us in the present moment. The Dalai Lama said that of all the Buddhist concepts, karma is the most complex to understand. This universal law of cause and effect pushes us along the wheel of samsara.” (“Samsara” refers, roughly, to the cycles of change that are the natural course of life.)
The mistake here, philosophically speaking, is the attachment to getting good stuff when we’re good and, maybe even more so, waiting for bad things to happen to people we deem “bad.” Attachment and expectation aren’t the way, according to Buddhism; if you’re involved in either you’ve already lost. Technically, in fact, the enlightened accumulate no karma. No attachments, no good, no bad, just being in the moment and reacting as necessary.
And the bad stuff happening to bad people? Very much none of your business. Wishing bad things will happen to people we hate is, actually, bad karma for ourselves. Buddhism teaches us to take life as it comes to us. Some of it will match up with our desires, and some of it will not. Our actions do have consequences, for ourselves and for others, and that is part of karma. But karma is not a system of “supernatural justice,” as one academic paper put it.
Buddhist studies professor Dr. Sarah Jacoby, who teaches at Northwestern University, had a more forgiving view of Swift’s “Karma,” telling Vulture that “Taylor Swift has definitely been thinking about what karma really means.” Jacoby elaborates, particularly on the lyric, “I keep my side of the street clean.” “And that also makes sense if you pair it with the other lyric, ‘Karma’s a relaxing thought,’” she says. “Karma is actually not at all a relaxing thought as it’s discussed in South Asian religion, because it means that negative acts, in that they’re harmful to others, will cause you pain and suffering in return. The only way you could think that karma is a relaxing thought is if you know you haven’t done anything wrong and you haven’t treated anyone badly and you’ve been ethical and virtuous in your dealings with people.”
I appreciate this because my own teacher has actually advised me to “keep my side of the street clean,” and there’s absolutely no downside to this, besides the fact that you keep getting this song stuck in your head. You’ll be less stressed if you do good, rather than bad, things. That is Buddhist. I also think Jacoby offers a particularly clarifying explanation of karma: “Here’s how you can think about karma: If you want to know what you’ve done in distant past lives, or even just how you’ve been as a person last week or ten years ago, look at your present conditions. Because your reality, both internally and the external world that you’re living in, is a product of karma. Karma just means action—it’s a Sanskrit word. And in Buddhism, it comes to mean intentional, ethical action.”
When it comes to Chappell Roan’s “My Kink Is Karma,” there’s not much debate. Here, after a nasty breakup, Roan addresses her former lover: “People say I’m jealous but my kink is watching you …” “ruin your life,” “losing your mind,” “dying your hair,” “crashing your car.” She concludes: “People say I’m jealous but my kink is karma.” This is about schadenfreude, not karma. It's also one of my favorite recent songs, and a badass video, so I’m not complaining too much. But it’s worth underlining that this is not karma in any spiritually helpful sense.
I practice Zen Buddhism, and we have a chant called “The Verse of Atonement.” It goes: “All evil karma, ever committed by me, since of old, on account of my beginningless greed, anger, and ignorance, born of my body, mouth, and thought, now I atone for it all.” I love the way this takes personal responsibility for shortcomings and mistakes while also nodding to a much wider arc of history with “since of old” and “beginningless.” This, to me, is what karma is really about: accepting all of the consequences of our actions, particularly the not-so-great ones, and the ways that they reverberate through time. It’s not so much the pop cultural view that karma is about material punishment for bad behavior and material reward for good behavior. In the specific case of Trump, he may also be a manifestation of our collective karma as a nation and world, a reflection of our inescapable interdependence, which is something else altogether.
In the end, I don’t want to get too attached to the “right” and “wrong” way to talk about karma—the Taylor Swift and Chappell Roan songs are much catchier than “The Verse of Atonement,” and I think it’s okay to let language evolve with the times or loosen to serve an artistic or even entertaining purpose. But when it comes to thinking about karma in my own life, I find that focusing on my own behavior and its consequences is simply wiser than waiting for rewards or comeuppance for my enemies or once-and-future presidents.
But I will not stop thinking of karma as a cat flexing like a goddamn acrobat, either.
It certainly can’t hurt your karma to check out our fifth annual Authors for Voices of Color online auction, where you can bid on super-cool literary prizes, including an annotated and personalized copy of my book Seinfeldia, with all of the proceeds going to We Need Diverse Books’ crucial efforts to help diversify publishing from within and fight book bans!
Other juicy prizes include:
a signed book and chat with Lessons in Chemistry author Bonnie Garmus
a signed special edition of Station Eleven from Emily St. John Mandel and (!) a Zoom conversation about writing with her
a signed copy of Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy’s life-changing (in my opinion) book How to Write One Song, with a special Wilco swag package
Please check them all out, and bid early and often!
Innnnteresting, I love this! I very much try to live by the “keep my side of the street clean” motto - it’s a good one (esp. b/c Taylor said so)
But can't we wish for the worst for our enemies anyway? Asking for a friend.