The tiny hells we’ve made for ourselves

I used to give my students an assignment while studying The Inferno, asking them to mimic Dante’s style and make up punishments to fit various sins. 

I’ll never forget the kid who decided the punishment for lust should be getting all the beautiful women you wanted for all of eternity. Of course, the class laughed.  I nearly brushed it off as teenage sarcasm, but thankfully, I asked him to explain first.

His answer is now burned permanently into my heart. He said, “So, the first, what, 2,000 years would be amazing.” (Class full of adolescents giggle.) “But then, you’re eventually going to wake up one morning in hell and feel a little restless. Then you’ll feel empty. Then irritated. Then—and maybe it will take 1,000 more years—but eventually you’re going to start to despise this paradise you’ve chosen for yourself. You’re going to think, ‘This is it. This is all there is and ever will be’—and the limitation of having everything you have always wanted, but never anything more—that limitation will drive you to madness.’”

The whole class went silent after he stopped talking. And it was one of those magical silences that falls when you realize an everyday soul who has shared a bag of Doritos with you on a soccer field has somehow kicked his toe against the gong of a fundamental truth.

I was thinking about that today as I was mulling over our phone-addicted, commentary-addicted, rage-addicted, pride-addicted world. 

Here and there I’m sensing exasperation not just with others—but with ourselves. 

We have the leaders we needed to propel our hate.

We have the news we wanted to confirm our favorite fears and furies.

We have hours, and hours, and hours to sink into our phones being cynics, or referees, or reformers, or patriots, or deconstructionists.

Social media has become life.

We have calcified in our favorite opinions, 

hardened in our suspicions, 

beaten our chests,

sunk deeply into the groups we love,

vilified and severed all voices that irritate us.

We’ve hammered the most accurate, objective, evidence-based corrections into the skulls of people who seem to have no concern for error.

We’re quite sure of ourselves. And we’re also quite sick of ourselves, sitting in these bunkers going bonkers, breathing through filters underground, beginning eternity in the tiny little indulgent hells we’ve made for ourselves.