How to Build Your Own Hell

Someone checks their phone and sees a friend's vacation photos. Nothing dramatic—just standard social media fare. Beach, sunset, cocktail with a tiny umbrella. But instead of scrolling past, they stop. They start calculating. How much did that trip cost? How did they get the time off? Why do they always seem so carefree?

What started as a thirty-second phone check turns into a twenty-minute mental audit of comparative life satisfaction. The beach photos aren't even that impressive. But there they are, sitting in their perfectly adequate living room, consumed by the kind of social comparison that turns a random Tuesday evening into a mental prosecution of their own choices.

Hell is not a place you go to later. It's the state you create right now, today, this afternoon, in the space between your ears.

The problem with most spiritual advice is that it treats inner demons like distant theology. The problem with most psychological advice is that it treats them like clinical conditions. The problem with most self-help advice is that it treats them like problems to be solved rather than fires we keep lighting ourselves.

But watch someone actually spiral into their own private hell, and you'll see something more practical and immediate. You'll see someone who's become their own worst enemy, their own most creative torturer, their own most dedicated jailer.

Take the greed spiral. Not the cartoon villain kind—the subtle, sophisticated version that lives in perfectly reasonable people. It starts innocent enough: you want financial security. Then you want a buffer. Then you want options. Then you want to feel safe from ever having to worry about money again. Which becomes needing enough money to feel safe from ever having to think about money again. Which becomes needing enough money to feel safe from ever having to think about anyone who might threaten your money again.

Each step makes perfect sense. Each step follows logically from the last. Until you realize you've spent the past decade working sixteen-hour days to afford a lifestyle that requires you to work sixteen-hour days to maintain a financial position that theoretically should have freed you from working sixteen-hour days.

The person trapped in this cycle isn't enjoying their money. They're not even enjoying earning it. They're living in a state of constant, low-level panic about losing what they've gained, missing what they might gain, and managing what they have gained. The greed isn't making them happy. It's making them miserable in an expensive way.

Then there's self-righteousness and it feels so good going down.

You see someone make a choice you'd never make. You see someone believe something you'd never believe. You see someone succeed in a way that clearly violates your principles. And there it is—that warm, satisfying feeling of being right, being better, being on the correct side of things.

The first hit is free. The second one costs a little more. By the tenth hit, you're the person who can't watch a movie without finding fault, can't read a news article without feeling superior to everyone involved, can't have a conversation without correcting someone else's perspective.

You've become the person who's technically right about everything and mysteriously unhappy about most things. You've turned your own mind into a courtroom where you're simultaneously the judge, the prosecutor, and the only witness who matters. The verdict is always the same: guilty as charged of not being you.

Most people recognize the obvious hells—the addictions, the rages, the obsessions that make headlines. But the sophisticated hells are more dangerous precisely because they look like virtues from the outside.

The pursuit of perfection that turns every accomplishment into evidence of inadequacy. The dedication to helping others that becomes a compulsive need to be needed. The commitment to fairness that becomes an exhausting mental scoreboard of who owes what to whom.

The person driven by these forces isn't choosing to be miserable. They're following what seems like reasonable logic, making what appear to be sound decisions, pursuing what look like worthwhile goals. But they're creating internal experiences that would qualify as torture if someone else were imposing them.

Here's what I've learned from my own experiences about escaping these self-created hells: you don't think your way out. You don't reason your way out. You don't discipline your way out.

You notice your way out.

You start paying attention to the moment when the wanting begins. Not the wanting itself—that's already in motion. The moment when you first feel the pull toward the thing that will make you feel better, safer, more important, more right.

That moment, right there, is your choice point. Not later when you're already spinning. Not earlier when you're making grand resolutions. Right there, in the first few seconds when you feel your mind reaching for its favorite form of self-torture.

The person who figures this out doesn't become a saint. They become someone who catches themselves sooner, recovers faster, and spends less time in states that feel like hell because they literally are hell.

Hell isn't a place you might go to someday. It's the state you create when you let your mind run its favorite programs unchecked. The good news is that once you see the programs running, you can choose not to run them.

Most days, anyway.