The Good Place took the concepts of time and space and twisted them all up in knots, so it's difficult to tell precisely how much time passed for Eleanor and her friends while they were in the afterlife. The series was only four short seasons, but with the time jumps, dips, and reboots, it spanned far more time than it appeared at first glance. This is vaguely explained in The Good Place with the strange way of seeing time in Jeremy Bearimys instead of years—an idea that did little to clarify how long the Soul Squad was really dead.
After Eleanor, Chidi, Jason, and Tahani died on Earth, their souls were sent to the afterlife in what they believed to be the titular Good Place. Of course, they would eventually discover that they had actually been sentenced to the Bad Place, They had to fight to prove that humanity deserved better, and establish a new afterlife system that allowed souls to keep trying until they got morality right. This was easier said than done, and many lifetimes came and went in relation to Earth years. The Good Place wasn't immediately clear about how much time had passed from Eleanor's death to her ascension—but there are clues.
The Good Place's Timeline Is Deliberately Confusing (But There Are Clues)
The Good Place season 1 was the longest the series went without much time jumping. In the very first test of Michael's fake Good Place, Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason were tortured for almost a year before they found out that they were in the Bad Place. This started the Good Place season 2 reboots. Again and again, the evil Michael tried to make his experiment work, and the four humans were rebooted 802 times. Eventually, Michael revealed that this spanned over 300 Earth years.
From there, the timeline of the Good Place got even more complicated. Through a series of events including the Judge of the universe, the humans were sent back to Earth and brought back to life, and this was made possibly by the repetitive measurement of time called a Jeremy Bearimy. This unit was used to discuss the passing years from this point onward. So, combined with the three centuries in Michael's fake Good Place, the Soul Squad looped and turned again and again. Ultimately, this timeline was never meant to make sense—but there are still clues that make it work.
Eleanor Ascended From The Good Place After About 3,000 Jeremy Bearimys
After proving to the Judge that the current method of determining a dead human's morality was broken, the Soul Squad was given one Earth year to conduct an experiment that would prove that their new method would work. This took up a good deal of The Good Place season 4 but was again only a fraction of Eleanor's life (good thing, too, since Chidi couldn't remember her during it). When the experiment was successful, the four humans were sent to the real Good Place to live out their days for as long as they wanted.
This looked different for each of the four humans. The Good Place season 4 finale jumped from character to character to show what each person's afterlife experience looked like, and the intervals between each character's ascension were measured in Jeremy Bearimys (the unit of time in the afterlife). It took Jason 2,242 JBs to finally play the perfect game of Madden and Tahani 323.6 JBs more to complete her list and head out to become an afterlife architect. Then, another 661.7 JBs went by before Chidi finally felt complete, and a short 3.22 JBs before it was Eleanor's turn— 3,230.52 Jeremy Bearimys total.
How Many Earth Years Are In The Good Place’s Jeremy Bearimy?
Knowing that Eleanor lived in paradise for a little over 3,000 Jeremy Bearimy's means little if audiences don't know how this equates to Earth years, and The Good Place TV series was never forthcoming about this. However, fans have gotten creative in their ways of estimating. Redditor FlyingDutchman9977 pointed out that it took 2,242 JBs for Jason to play a perfect game of Madden, something his father mentioned took 400,000 tries. According to How Long To Beat, beating Madden takes an average of 45 hours. Using these details (and a few more), this Redditor worked out a Jeremy Bearimy to be about 99.34 years.
This would mean that from the time Eleanor died and appeared in Michael's fake Good Place office and her decision to walk through that final doorway, approximately 298,320 years had passed. Of course, the show creators never intended a Jeremy Bearimy to make complete sense, so there are several other ways that fans have found to calculate the value of a JB (which comes out with vastly different results). Regardless, it's clear that Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason all had a hell of an afterlife in The Good Place.