What if hell is real?

There is a hell that I believe in, not designed by any mind and not a punishment from any judge, but instead a problematic paradigm which we are in denial of every day - life is suffering.

I don’t believe, of course, that life is hell - not exactly, anyway - but there is a sense in which life can be hellish and, in combination with the way that I conceptualise time and the consequent implications of that model on the notion of death, I believe that there is a way that we can indeed be tortured eternally - by ourselves.

You see, as far as I can tell, despite the fact that our physical universe has a timeline of transformations going all the way back to what we call the ‘big bang’ which we can empirically verify, it seems short sighted to conclude thus that this represented the start of existence itself, rather than merely the ‘beginning’ of spacetime, as it were.

The linearity which is inherent to the way we perceive time is a property of the limitations of subjectivity, and it can be thought of as analogous to the timeline of a video file on a computer; the events move linearly from the point of view of the characters in the film as it is played back, and the story has developments and changes, but when we watch it a second time the changes are the same.

A peculiar thing really, change which is not change… time which is not time. What does reality look like to someone trapped inside a video file, or the most precise version of ‘video’, some simulation codex? Coming to terms with the true nature of your ego can be confronting and takes many attempts but there are myriad routes to the realization that you are not what you might think you are according to the shallow and superficial analyses you might like to make in the moment.

The thing about thinking about time in this way is that it shows that our experiences of life, although they end with death in the sense that going forward in the timeline we are no longer aware, nonetheless persist in the sense that the file still exists, the timeline is eternal, and every moment of our life is preserved in the sense that it happened, is happening and must always happen, forever.

The perception that this moment right now is the only one that is happening is a simple consequence of the fact that this is the only moment you have access to, given that such is the formula for your existential scope.

Of course, it seems that I’ve gone on a tangent when one considers the original focus of the query, but I assure you, I intend to bring this all to bear on the point in question.

I think that the point of life is to realize your developmental potential, and that many people waste their life without thinking carefully enough before they decide how they want to spend a huge chunk of it, and they end up with many regrets.

Furthermore, life is inherently filled with suffering - the universe is indiscriminately cruel, and there is no-one to blame for that fact; that which torments you is the source of your very being, and you are virtually inconsolable at times that it is apathetic towards your suffering, and that life is indeed unfair - and why would it be “fair”, of all things; why is it in your nature to expect ‘fairness’ of something which will never be that way? It can be extremely frustrating.

Life is hard, we all have to struggle just to survive and it can be over in an instant or it can slowly be taken from us, as we are dragged from our podium kicking and screaming. At the end of a long life, I would suspect we all hope to be happy and content with what we have achieved, seen and experienced, and who we have filled our lives with, cared for and loved. We all want to be happy/content and to avoid regrets, in short, and aren’t we all striving towards that, in one guise or another?

Why is it then that when I look around me, even the successful seem to experience the inevitable mid-life crises, and the famous have affairs and die of drug overdoses, and become recluses and alcoholics. Why is it that no matter how well you do, you find a reason to be unhappy - what drives the discontent within the human heart, and how can one cure themselves of such a proclivity?

For when I see these things around me, I see my potential future hell - I see a life in which I die without having achieved my goals, where my life is difficult and I suffer as I try so hard but, tragically, I fail. When I see that, I cringe away from the idea because I see the pain that I decided to struggle through and I see that it has no conclusion which appropriately justifies how hard it was.

I see the potential I squandered in my sadness and depression, in my endless issues with motivation and self esteem, and all I can think is that I would have failed myself and that I would never have managed to make it worth it, and the thought kills me. That is hell, for me. Dying before you feel, on a personal level, like you have managed to justify the struggle and suffering of your existence.

I don’t want to regret my life because as far as I can tell, I’m stuck with it, in every moment, for eternity. I’m stuck with every broken heart, caught in every hurt feeling and trapped in every lonely moment. All I can do is try to make the most of this life so that I can justify those moments with an appropriate amount of eternally preserved joy, and I think that my method to that end is the best I’ve ever heard.

Life is about realizing¹ your authentic identity and realizing² your transcendent potential, and what you do with it does matter, because there are no re-dos and your answers are final. I want to be happy with the outcome of my life, considering I’m stuck with it forever.

I hope you feel the same way. It’s easier when we work together.