What if We're Already in Hell?

The first step of climbing out is admitting we're in it

Welcome back to The Workaround. I’m Bob 👋

This is a post for paid subscribers, with a teaser for others that might want to follow me down the rabbit hole beyond business. Thank you for indulging me in some divergent thoughts…

Anyone who has driven through Ohio knows this.

A few weeks ago, I was with a group of friends whom I have known for a very long time. Once or twice a year, we drive to a remote home for the weekend. Somewhere around mile five, we drop into deep conversations about life.

Over hikes, bourbons, and brunches, each of us unpacks an extra duffel full of thoughts, feelings, questions, and concerns about our kids, parents, spouses, careers, health, and the meaning of life and death. We also bitch about the performance of our local sports franchise.

But a new topic has emerged frequently: What are we going to do when shit goes down?

You know, like, when whatever disaster we expect to happen finally hits.

My friends and I are far from preppers…so far. We have normal jobs with normal companies, vote middle-of-the-road, and don’t fall for conspiracy theories. Heck, most of us had never fired a gun—until we went to a firing range as a group last year.

But our conversations increasingly veer toward topics such as: Is it better to hole up in a city or far out of town? Which country offers the easiest path to dual citizenship? How much cash and crypto should we keep under our mattresses?

Last month, one member of our group purchased some land far away from civilization, in part to “have a place to escape to when everything breaks down.”

It hurts me to hear this…because I once felt this stress, and I know how insidious it is. And they are in good company. Many people in our country and in the world live daily in fear of disaster.

I feel for the pain that my friends and so many in our world today are going through. But I found a way to free myself. It starts by realizing we’re already in Hell. And it’s a Hell of our own design.

Hell is Here and Now

Growing up as a Gen-Xer, we only had one existential worry: Nuclear war. My mind sometimes pondered whether we would survive the initial blast or subsequent fallout. Movies like Wargames and The Day After further scared the crap out of us. But mostly we went on with our lives, knowing that either Mutual Assured Destruction would continue to work, or we’d all be instantly cooked. Then we won the Cold War, and all was well.

AIDS caused some panic for a few years, until we found ways to manage it. There was a hole in the ozone layer, but we banned the products that destroyed it, and it healed itself. The Y2K bug was a nothingburger. And we went back to everyday worries like whether that movie we wanted to watch would still be available at Blockbuster by the time we drove all the way there.

But today we’ve got all kinds of things to worry about!

You know the list: Climate change, escalating wars in Europe and Asia, constitutional crisis and civil war, new pandemics, nanotech gray goo, and AI that will first take all of our jobs and then turn us into paperclips.

And each new dawn brings more exotic threats to our doorsteps: Solar flares, asteroids, gamma-ray bursts, killer fungi, magnetic pole reversal, super volcanoes, chirality inversion, and Aliens.

It’s like we’ve spawned an industry around fear production. We’ve manufactured them to be bigger, scarier, nearer, ongoing, and unsolvable.

And it’s a profitable, high-growth business because we love this stuff!

We Make Misery

Recently, I read that eight of the top ten TV series in the 1958-59 season were Westerns. They just couldn’t get enough of Gunsmoke, Wagon Train, and Have Gun—Will Travel. How precious…

With cable and on-demand apps today, it’s hard to compare ratings, but touch any network button and you’ll find that dystopia and apocalypse rule our times: Black Mirror, The Handmaid’s Tale, Silo, The Last of Us, and many more.

The current most-talked-about TV show is Pluribus, in which an extraterrestrial virus sweeps through the population, removing our individual personalities and blending them into a single hive mind.

You can see what’s happening here, right? These trends reflect the shape of each era’s society.

Just as the Western expressed America’s post-war frontier optimism in the 1950s, today’s dystopias broadcast our collective fear that the systems holding civilization together are fragile. Hollywood supplies what we demand: Collapse, survival, fragile systems, failed institutions, and uncontrollable technology. A black mirror, indeed.

Meanwhile, two other massive overlapping media industries—News and Social—have weaponized their platforms for attention economics. We’re not the customer, we’re the livestock in their digital factory farms. And there’s no produce more reliably profitable than stoking and feeding on our fears.

Our politicians have figured this out, too. They’ve turned elections into never-ending trench warfare, with each square inch of bumper sticker space, and square foot of front yard declaring where we stand.

God help you if you contribute even $5 to a political campaign. You’ll get daily texts and emails from five-term senators eight states away—all with the same, shameless, dire fear-mongering phrases. Because of an email mix-up years ago, I now receive these messages from both major parties. Guess what? They use both of the same fonts, phrases, and clickbait tactics!

We’re paying to be more afraid and voting from fear. That’s their business model, now with personalized targeting, podcasts, and video memes. And now our favorite charities are stealing these tactics…

Welcome to Thunderdome

The economic model of stoking fears impacts us far beyond media consumption. Every business agreement comes with pages of legal documents. We install security systems and affix cameras to our doors. AirTags track every possession. Even trash cans are locked up—and not because of raccoons or bears.

And have you seen the size of pickup trucks lately? Hitting the highway today is like joining a chase scene from a Mad Max movie. Souped-up trucks that barely fit under overpasses tailgate so close you can’t see a driver. As we white-knuckle the wheel, they zoom past in the right lane, hell bent for leather, in a hurry for…what the actual fuck? Through the dark smoke of their rolling coal, you can barely make out a silver Punisher sticker.

The other day, I drove behind a truck like this with a large sticker filling its rear window, reading: “Make Money, Not Friends.”

I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Upon arriving home, I got on Google to discover this is a song, a meme…and maybe the saddest public declaration I’ve ever seen in my life. This person felt so strongly about this life strategy that they invested the time and money to buy and affix the sign. Even in The Wasteland, people had to form friendships to survive. Who hurt this person so badly? I don’t think there’s a devil, but if there is, I can’t think of a line more fitting to come from his lips.

We are losing trust in each other. We are losing common belief in anything.

Fear creates the living dead. Part of us is already living in a real dystopia. This is the tragedy, the apocalypse happening before us right here, right now.

We’re not fucked next year or in 2030. We’re fucked right now! But instead of collectively or individually doing something about it, we’re scrolling phones, whining, and worrying about how much worse it might get.

Hell is Fear

My new favorite app is called Doomsday Scoreboard.

It tracks humanity’s predictions of apocalypses going back 2,000 years. The record so far? 0-for-278.

So far, it has been much more accurate than the Doomsday Clock. Created by a group of atomic scientists in 1947, this fear machine is “a metaphor intended to warn the public and inspire action from leaders and citizens to reduce man-made existential threats.” The clock has never been more than 17 minutes before midnight—the end of times. Today, they say we’re at a “record close” 11:58:31pm.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day, but they’ve been wrong for 80 years. Also in the wrong column are anyone who has ever prepped—from bomb shelter builders in the ‘50s to Amazon food bucket buyers today¹. The food has gone bad, the guns are rusting, and the go-bags are gathering dust. All that precious time, money, and stress spent for nothing.

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself…because it is the mind killer”—F.D.Atreides

Fast forward 100 years or so…What will they say about the times we are living through now? Here’s what I predict:

Their best of times were their worst of times. They achieved many good things, including record-low poverty, high development, the eradication of diseases, no world wars, new freedoms, and low unemployment. They saved millions of lives through medical care and rising living standards in poor countries. They owned more of everything and worked fewer hours at safer jobs. Their technology unearthed new veins of natural resources whenever the threat of exhaustion rose, and they were on the brink of limitless clean energy.

But they invented new fears and suffered record depression and even suicide.

Their fears spawned a new economic concept: the Vibecession—when economic indicators were up, but consumer sentiment was down. Economists had to start tracking new data to better predict the impact of pessimism on sales and stock prices.

Perhaps the situation was best captured by this scholar at the time: “Americans are materially wealthy and unfulfilled, and the primary problem is cultural—we’ve sacrificed community and meaning to emphasize an archetype built on acquiring as much stuff as possible, but then we have made that unnecessarily hard to do…The dismissive response by pundits to a good economy with frustrated citizens is to say, “the vibes are off”, but the vibes really really matter! Bad vibes are the people saying, I’m playing the game I’m supposed to play, yet it’s not rewarding in the way I’ve been told it would be.”

Future scholars will refer to these times as cultural rock bottom. They’ll recall that Carl Jung said every culture periodically loses its myth so that individuals can forge new ones from within.

This post isn’t about facts, figures, culture, and society—it’s about me and you as individuals and what we can do to take control of our own lives and rebuild them for the better.

Hell is Waiting…

Today’s hell is waiting for one of the many disaster scenarios to come true. Planning, prepping, and fretting. We willingly ignore the good life all around us and invent infinite new forms of awfulness that might happen someday. There’s no worse curse than fear itself.

Hell is here and now, and here’s what scares me: Millions of lives will be lost this year—as people choose to live in stress, end their very existence, and choose not to bring children into this world, all because of fear, distraction, and depression.

In actual war, plague, or the arrival of alien overlords, at least you know your enemy and can rally together to move forward. In the apocalypse, you have a clear job to do: Survive for tomorrow.

This is what happens in natural disasters. Survivors poke their heads out, bury their dead, pick up the pieces, and help each other get by. There is no time for worrying, and they happy to be alive—which seems to be missing today.

And what’s the worst-case scenario here? We die. That’s it? Well, we’re going to anyway! No one gets out alive! If life is so precious, why are we creating our own suffering instead of enjoying each moment we’re still here?

If there is a devil, this is the world he would design: People making their own, internal, infinite hell. He’d want to torture us in our living time, not during the infinite afterlife. After all, simple supply-and-demand calculations prove that life time is more valuable.

Is it because we’re bored? Because we don’t have enough regular stress in our lives? Maybe it’s like how a surge in allergies in the developed world is caused by a lack of germs for our immune systems to fight. People living on $1 per day in developing countries rarely have allergies, and they usually don’t worry about the end of the world.

Maybe we secretly prefer to trust the devil we know.

The real problem of our times is the Meaning Crisis. We have a record amount of stuff, entertainment, and freedom, yet lack meaningful direction. And instead of looking internally to find it, we keep looking externally for a fear to hold or an enemy to hate.

What if our worries about the outside world are just a distraction from not addressing the changes we need to make in our own minds? Like an awful addiction that occupies us. Alcohol or drugs hide our problems by making us happy for a few moments. Anger and fear of the outside world give us a different kind of self-righteous pleasure.

Have you experienced that “ugh” feeling after scrolling news or social feeds for too long? This is the crash. The hangover. The body knows the score. It’s trying to wake your ass up!

This is where I was. For years, I projected my inner anger and loss of identity and direction onto other people and events. It’s so much easier, and deep down, somehow satisfying to point the finger at others for everything that’s wrong.

Eventually, I hit a wall. Weary of being unhappy despite lots of external measures of success, I got a message from something higher: “You’ve got your own shit to figure out!”

The only true existential disaster humanity is facing is an opportunity—that unending suffering finally triggers our own personal existential crisis. And in our crisis lies the potential turning point ripening within us.

At some point, you’ll see that both collectively and individually, every challenge is designed for your development. When seen and addressed, they become steps in your ladder to a higher perspective and bliss.

Today, humanity has called forth the ultimate unsolvable challenge: threats of disaster that we can do nothing about. With AI, we see that even technology—that got us out of historic challenges—is now one of the horsemen of the apocalypse.

One at a time, we hit rock bottom, fall onto our knees, and yell: “I can’t change the world!”

Then we ask: “What can I change?”

And we know: “I must change.”

This realization is the first day of our second life.

Apocalypse Now!

Say it with me: The apocalypse is now. The meteor hit. Skynet took over. And we’re survivors!

This is the point where, one by one, we dust ourselves off, be thankful we’re still alive today, and start rebuilding ourselves and the world around us.

Can you step outside yourself and see what’s happening? See this spell that you’re under? See how they have you trapped in their business model? Trapped in their political talking points? They are laughing at you while they cash the checks your mind writes. And behind the scenes, they are all in business together. They need each other to exist, to power the misery machine milking your money and attention. They don’t even need secret society meetings; they’re playing us in plain sight!

Can you see how people in your life need you to fear, too, so they can confirm their own fear-based mindsets? See how you’re spreading the fear virus by passing your fears forward to others?

See how fear of death lies behind all of this? Can you accept that your death will come someday, whether at the pincers of AI nanobots or surrounded by people you love at a grand old age?

The future is not real. It’s always got a negative predictive bias, and overwhelmingly lies outside our control anyway. So let the future go do its own thing, and mind your own business.

Here’s what’s real: At this moment, you are a human who is alive, safe, responsible, resourceful, and surrounded by natural wonders and other humans who mostly mean well.

Look up. See that beautiful blue sky, utterly devoid of cruise missile contrails?

Can you hear that? It’s the sound of your child playing in the other room, not the din of air raid sirens.

As I write and you read, we have peace at this moment. Oh, wait, there it is again…and again. Suddenly, a streak of happy moments is stretching out. Pretty soon, you’ve got Presence, the best habit you’ve ever found.

We can snap out of Hell in a flash by seeing this and waking up from the spell. Stand up straight and shrug off the weight of the world. Be bigger than your programming. Break free of the Matrix.

See you in Heaven

Look a little closer, and you’ll see humans have always been fighting this pull toward hell on earth, and ancient thinkers already laid out the path long ago.

In his wonderful new book, Conscious Accomplishment, Scott Britton, an entrepreneur who escaped his self-made hell, writes:

“The ancient hermetic texts talk about the universal principle of “As Above, So Below.” The main idea is that your outer world is a reflection of your inner world. As one understands themself, they can understand the universe, and vice versa.”

“Mahayana Buddhists believe that at the most fundamental level, the external world is a projection of the mind. Similarly, the Zen tradition culminates in an understanding that all you experience is mind. From these perspectives, life emanates from us instead of happening to us.”

Plato wrote about escaping the cave of shadow tricks our minds play with us. And if you look closely at the Bible, you’ll find that Jesus wanted us to find paradise in this life by mastering our own minds.

Even science increasingly proves that our mindset can change our life experience. The Placebo Effect proves we can heal ourselves through belief alone. Meditation has been proven to calm our racing thoughts and help us create distance from them. Professional athletes agree that the power of positive thinking beats hours of additional physical practice.

If you don’t believe all them, believe me. I shared my story of waking up from the nightmare a few months ago, and I gotta say, every single day feels like Heaven on earth now. My bliss is expanding despite shutting down two of my companies recently and having no impressive title or regular paycheck for five years.

Or believe my friend who bought that land far out in the country I mentioned above. He’s also been doing some soul-searching up there. The other day, he told me about how much pleasure he got from chopping firewood—not to quell fear by prepping, but to enjoy nature and the fruits of his hands-on effort.

I promise, once you get a little bit down the self-awareness path, you’ll look back and laugh at the time when you used to read news feeds with fear. And you won’t get fooled again.

Then we get to help others along in their journeys. This is the other reason I’m feeling so damn good right now: By freeing my mind, I’ve made myself available to help people who find me when they are stuck.

It’s not a career, it’s a calling. I don’t charge for this work, but I’m rewarded by watching people change. And I know scale is achieved through the far-reaching ripples through the rest of our lives.

Hell is real and here, but so is Heaven. I hope to see you there soon.

Feel free to schedule a chat during my Office Hours to discuss questions, feedback, networking, or any other topic. Seriously, any topic! You can also reach me on LinkedIn or by email.

1. Props to the marketing team at Augason Farms for their SNL-quality tagline: “Prepare for Delicious (TM).”