Architects in hell
Those that delight in their suffering
I wouldn't consider myself a Christian, or someone religious in general, though I have found again and again that there are many helpful principles in religion to live a more conscious and authentic life. That being said, the idea of Hell as a way to punish those who were immoral in their human life never appealed to me since I don't find punishment to be a healthy source of improving one's life. It's likely that this version of Hell is a cartoonish one - especially the associated images of flames and a red devil with horns and a pitchfork - which has gone through the many filters of the modern worldview, though I cannot say for sure.
Whatever the Christian Hell really is, it needn't matter here since what I'm going to write about is hell with a lower case 'h', which I define to be both a psychological state and a life situation which work together to create suffering as well as an unconscious delight in said suffering. Everyone suffers, but only some people truly love their suffering, to the point of building their identity around it, or even entire houses in hell, making themselves comfortable and building defenses against anything that could knock them out of their habitual misery. The latter are the architects found in hell.
For example, you have the intellectuals who have an incredibly elaborate philosophy so as to justify why Life is awful, inherently meaningless and only consists in suffering. They are so clever that you'd be hard pressed to find any inconsistency in their system, if you do decide to engage with it - in many ways interacting with them is also a form of hell. But the basic premises and conclusions just don't make sense to people who don't live in hell, which is why conversations between the former and the latter don't lead to anything. The architects in hell will walk away feeling that they are simply 'too smart to be understood', while the others will just go back to their life and pursue what they find meaningful.
The more mundane inhabitants of hell are those who love complaining about basically everything, gossiping about other people, distracting themselves and wallowing in apathy in misery, but spend no time whatsoever on changing their life, or appreciating anything around them. This describes a surprising number of people, which is why finding positive influences to surround oneself with is one of the first piece of advice given to anyone who wishes to live fully, and rightfully so. They say that we are the average of the people closest to us, and this shouldn't come as a surprise: if all you hear every day is how awful the world is but you see nothing being changed in any meaningful way, then yeah life will seem really awful over time, and this view will keep getting reinforced by others and yourself.
Even though my writing is largely focused on critiquing the technological system, I am not interested in delighting in my suffering - and the critique is simply the thing that comes most easily to me when I write from the office.
First of all, there is more to life than suffering or not suffering. There is curiosity, connection, laughter, learning, beauty, focus and relaxation, just to list a few. I do not subscribe to worldviews that define the goal of life as simply the removal of suffering, because in my experience, that's a sure-fire way to obsess over every problem you have, which is its own form of hell.
Second of all, as much as I don't like my job and the society that surrounds it, my life situation is incredibly comfortable in many ways: I have plenty of time to read and write at work or simply slow down, I can work from home and overall, the system is great at providing for the necessities of Life if you don't get pulled into the consumer bullshit it promotes. It's obviously an absurd situation that ‘work’ requires so little involvement from me, which is why I'm moving towards more fulfilling work, but again, if you're constantly looking for problems in your life, you will find them, and I'm not too interested in that.
In many ways, hell is made from this tendency of the mind to only perceive problems and to get stuck in them, which is why I've developed a general disinterest with anything that is too intellectual or mind-based over the past years. I come from a background in mathematics, which is as mind-based as you can get, and although I can see some of the advantages of being able to reason well, I think there are huge fundamental blind spots that the mind alone cannot address, which is why it's a great tool but a terrible master.
To begin with, the mind doesn't know truth, it only deals with consistency with regards to certain beliefs, and making statements and predictions that are in line with those. So the mind can tell you that a statement follows from certain axioms or not, but not whether the axioms are well chosen.
This distinction between consistency and truth can be seen in the experience of understanding. In maths, you often run into situations where you agree with every step of a proof, but the proof itself hasn't clicked: you simply don't understand it in its entirety and have merely digested it so to speak.
I do not know what the precise nature of understanding is, but it could be roughly described as the ability to connect pieces of your experience together. This means that you don't simply understand with your mind, you understand with your whole being: memories, experiences, visualization, other things you've studied, etc.
This inability of the mind to deal with truth but only consistency leaves us with 2 huge problems
What beliefs do you hold and why those in particular? You cannot use the mind to examine beliefs, so what do you use?
How do you know that the mind doesn't distort your perception so as to keep its own worldview intact, and thus consistent? In other words, how do you know you don't live in a bubble?
My answer to the 2nd question is that, unless you do something about it, the mind will absolutely create a bubble of reality which you will keep living inside, and this is precisely what the architects in hell experience with their suffering. Bubbles seem to arise from 2 important constraints: survival and resolving cognitive dissonance as easily as possible.
The beliefs you hold result from a combination of your upbringing, the ideas of society that you inherit consciously or unconsciously, your own personal experiences and the process of discarding those that don't turn out to be useful or ones you agree with (this process happens more or less for different people).
But the fundamental problem is that beliefs are not merely ideas floating in space, detached from your life, they are deeply important for your survival within society. If your beliefs are fundamentally against those of the people around you, you will come into conflict with them. As an adult, you can afford that to some extent - even then, most adults are incredibly conformable - but as a child you absolutely can't. Going along with your parents or your school is literally a matter of life and death.
And this problem - the constraint of survival - is why I find the isolated mind to be so problematic. Changing your worldview creates a lot of cognitive dissonance, which the mind would rather not deal with, even if it has to use denial, distortions, distraction, amongst many other mechanisms. In an important way, deep change is a form of death and it makes sense that the mind would try to preserve whatever it builds as much as possible.
These major problems with the mind are what create hell's architects: their mind has solidified in such a way as to create a worldview that doesn't leave any opposing evidence inside, and to shut down any action that could expose them to that evidence. "Go outside? Why should I do that when everything is pointless bro?"
As a result, one of the most common piece of advice for people who are stuck in their mind is to go back to the body: walking outside, taking in the sunlight, stretching and releasing the tension in your body, etc. Whereas the dissociated mind is hell, the body is more like Earth - very grounded and in touch with reality, and rather beautiful in its own way. I do not know what Heaven would correspond to, but one thing for sure is that Earth is much better than hell. And when you think about it, the neglect of Earth, and thus our bodies in this analogy, is itself an aspect of the hellish technological system which has ravaged the very ground it has sprung from.
Another direction could be to surround yourself with people who are willing to call you out on your bullshit. It's unbelievable how a single person can point out things in you from a few minutes of interaction that you might have never noticed in years or even decades. For example, they might notice that you constantly apologize for no reason. Or they might notice that you're great at initial contacts but not so good at maintaining a friendship. Or they might point out that you tend to complain a lot about your parents, yet you never seem to talk directly to them about those issues. Or they notice that you're chronically tired and you don't seem to allow yourself to rest.
All of those are great entry points into the uncomfortable inquiry with oneself. We are not who we imagine ourselves to be, and often the best way to cut through that delusion is to have another point of view. Unsurprisingly, the architects in hell do not have close contacts with other people. In fact, that is probably one of their core self-reinforcing beliefs: the idea that others are far too dumb to be worth spending time with. And while it might be true that the majority of people are deeply unconscious and not particularly smart, ultimately human beings only need a couple of close friends in their life. If only one person in 10.000 is a good match for you, then that still leaves you with 800.000 possible friendships in the world. Pretty high number if you ask me.