Your Worst Hell
Giving the devil his due
Growing up, I was told hell is a pit of fire. If you were in the pit, you would burn forever. You would not sleep, eat, drink, or really do anything other than just scream in pain for all eternity. But that isn’t even close to the worst hell.
If you met the devil on the street and shared a vision of hell as a pit of fire, he’d be rightfully offended. “You don’t think I know you?” He’d ask. Then, he’d storm off muttering incredulously about how stupid and uncreative you must think he is. He’s the devil! Making people suffer is his vocation.
A pit of fire is a child’s hell because children do not understand the difference between pain and suffering. Suffering is resisted pain. The more you resist pain, the more you suffer. The opposite of resisted pain is purposeful pain. The opposite of suffering is sacrifice.
When you work out at the gym and feel “the burn” during a hard exercise, you are experiencing purposeful pain. It’s painful, but you aren’t suffering because you embrace the pain. You understand that the pain has value because it gets you closer to something you desire. You do not resist it because it is purposeful to you.
Doctors jab the needle in your arm before they finish counting to three because your resistance kicks in at three. “See, was that so bad?” It wasn’t so bad because you weren’t resisting it. Having a solid cry about a tragedy after holding it in for a while is painful, but it’s cathartic precisely because resistance is decreased in vulnerable moments.
The devil gets all this. His job isn’t to inflict pain. Even the stupidest demons can do that. He specializes in suffering, which is far more sophisticated. To make you suffer, he builds up your resistance to pain.
He toys with those outside of hell by inflicting suffering in small ways. He has a bug buzz by your ear while you’re trying to concentrate on something important. You try to kill it, but it seems to vanish. It buzzes again, this time louder and closer. Your second attempt at murder fails. Now, you’re distracted by anticipation of the obnoxious buzz. When it finally buzzes again, you violently fling your arms around to stop it. The devil smirks. If you weren’t trying to concentrate, the buzz would not have been nearly as resisted. The anticipation of it made it so much worse. The devil understands how contextual resistance turns pain into suffering.
To grasp how the devil creates your worst hell, you must examine what motivates your resistance. The devil manipulates the conditions of your existence to maximize these motivations. He then throws stimuli your way to be strongly resisted and therefore severely suffered. Since the greatest suffering is pain that is maximally resisted, he maximally increases your resistance.
Why do you resist pain? The devil can answer this for you immediately for he knows you better than you know yourself.
You resist pain to realize your goals, but you often do not recognize what your goals are. You resist the fly’s buzzing because it gets in the way of a project that requires deep concentration to complete. If the fly didn’t block your path to your goal, if it didn’t distract you from anything important, then you would not rebuff it and perhaps you might even welcome the little creature’s company.
You often get confused about why you are doing what you are doing, but the devil always knows. When your goals become foggy, you lose sight of your mission. This is the beginning of the descent into your worst hell. In the fog, you lose confidence that you know which pains are worth embracing because nothing can clearly stand in the way of an obscured path. No pain can be obviously purposeful if you are losing track of your purpose.
You approach hell as the fog densifies and your goals become fuzzier. After you unwittingly enter the foggy state of aimlessness, you anxiously resist more and more pains. You do this because you cannot tell the difference between pains worth resisting and pains worth sacrificing for a purpose, but you still believe in yourself. You still have hope that you will be able to find your path. You fight everything to find it.
If you do not quickly escape this descent by finding a path up and away from hell, your resistance compounds more and more until the fog overtakes you completely. When this happens, everything goes dark. In the blackness, every little thing is maximally resisted and therefore maximally suffered because you have lost all sense of proportionality. At least when it was foggy you had some clue what things were, even if their relationship to your goals was unclear. But now that the light is extinguished, every stimulus could be the worst monster. It is here that you maximally suffer everything. What used to only provoke slight suffering torments you. This place is your worst hell.
A pit of fire is a childish hell because most children are unaware of the connection between suffering and purpose since they have not faced purposelessness. Fortunately, most children are protected from this nightmare to such an extent that they can’t imagine it at all. They have not met the devil.
In a pit of fire, you are clearly stuck where you are. There’s no hope of going anywhere (else) or accomplishing anything (else). There is no potential contrast in experience, no possible paths out there to find. Such a hell is short-lived because it is so obviously purposeless and therefore obviously hopeless. A much worse hell is one with hope for its suffering is far deeper and longer. You must believe in the possibility of heaven to enter your worst hell. There must be a potential contrast in experience, something worth hoping for to strive for, a path for you out there somewhere, a life worth living, a mission worth sacrificing for.
In your worst hell, your purpose eats itself. Since you cannot see your path, your purpose is to find a purpose. But, if you do not escape, the suffering gets so severe that your purposefulness inverts and becomes the avoidance of the search for purpose. You can’t live in hell for long before you give up hope about finding your path. You eventually stop trying to find what is worth persisting through in life. You lose faith. You go numb, apathetic, and lifeless. You fall out of existence. You crave nothing but to feel and be nothing. Since you’ve stopped resisting, you no longer suffer. You no longer feel anything at all because you’ve lost yourself. You do not crave death because you do not crave anything, but you’d accept it. Death is as good as anything else in this place because nothing exceeds the apathetic baseline. The devil cannot make you suffer in this place because you are lifeless. You are a zombie incapable of suffering, you are walking death. This place is not hell, but the void. It is the nothingness beyond despair. It is anomie. It is the worst death, not the worst hell. You must be alive to be in hell.
The baseline effect explains why some depressed people cut themselves. The cuts are painful, but they are not suffering because the pain is welcomed for its contrast. Your experience is individuated and therefore created by contrast. If all feeling is the same, there is no differentiation and therefore nothing in particular to experience. Apathy is the experience of the same thing over and over, which is indistinguishable from the experience of nothing. Anomic people do self-destructive things to feel something. These behaviors create experience by creating contrast, a necessary ingredient for purposeful living. Self-destructive behaviors like cutting only make sense if pain is categorically different from suffering.
Give the devil his due. Recognize that he is not childish or stupid. He knows you and he knows the difference between pain and suffering. He doesn’t want you to die to purposelessness, he wants you to live with hope so that he can make you suffer your worst hell.