I'm surprised this thread doesn't get more traffic, it's one of the first that comes up on a Google search for "you're actually in hell". Most of the rest are blog articles that make assumptive conjecture. I think it's a terribly important question, one that actually brings some obscure level of comfort to mind because it finally puts to rest the questions that have plagued me since birth.
A side thought, sort of...
I wanted to buy an extra piece of gym equipment today, a single 75lb dumbbell for doing overhead dumbbell pullovers, which is on sale $24 lower ($75-$51) up until today when the sale ends at a local sporting goods store. I thought, I wonder if I can attain the funds purely from junk in the house I want to get rid of, or things I've already done.
So I looked out online, and it turned out that I had $40 in unpaid monies in a Turbosquid account for some 3D models I made from over 6 years ago, and about $19 in Ad Revenues from UnityAds from some video games I made, but that is... of course... unpaid until your UnityAds account reaches $100 in Ad Revenues.
So there's a $40 boost if I want it, just not quite that $51 that I would "need" TODAY before the sale ends.
Isn't that kind of just like "life?"
I remember at the times I did those things people gave me ideas like... Oh yeah be a 3D modeler it'll get you extra cash, be a mobile game developer just look at all these mobile game devs who make millions. I learned both, it took quite a while btw, on the order of years on the side of my regular work as a business app programmer.
The "word of mouth" marketing works great, in favor of those more experienced in marketing, not so much for me a gamedev/gfx artist. Notice how it also took years long after the sense of "need" for anything to develop. Now I don't really care.
That's kind of the whole point I'm making. In hell, you get the things you need when you don't care anymore, when they don't really benefit you like they would have when there was SO MUCH emotional enthusiasm wrapped up in the ideals that were brought to mind of everything happening so wonderfully at the right time.
It's kind of all designed to get you excited, and then dash your hopes. Then when you're not expecting it, you get a minor reward for that thing you wanted, way after the fact when it's unimportant, but you have to be thankful for the "reward" anyway, because you're an ungrateful prick otherwise, even if that reward is having your long since dead severed penis reattached long after you've adapted to living without one and chosen a life of celibacy.
Do this kind of dance enough times, and you realize that it has become SYSTEMIC in nature, just expressed in different scenarios and ways. That's important to seeing PATTERNS emerging in both events and people.
When you're doing creative hobby work artistically, you'll be lambasted by people calling you a sellout for wanting any monetary compensation for your efforts, you should do it according to them because you're "naturally motivated to", but then you get older and realize that the clock is ticking, people depend on you for survival, you depend on you for survival, you can't simply expend copious amounts of time doing things that aren't monetarily fruitful, and yet, in doing things that ARE considered monetarily fruitful by the mass of society you'll find yourself either bored out of your skull and ready to jump off a bridge (i.e. reading reports and creating TPS reports), or you'll be forced into doing smarmy things for cash that may make you want to take 20 showers a day (i.e. being a maker of cringy Youtube videos for profit for things like "how to's" and "reviews" / opinions).
Crickets...
For the sake of anticipating a possible response. Yes, of course I realize I'm privileged to even be in a place where sales inconveniently happen when I'm not monetarily prepared for them, and that I'm not starving in a third world country like Haiti. Sure, we're talking about relative levels of abuse here though, not absolute. Hell finds a way to abuse you at EVERY level. I'm not complaining necessarily about my particular level of hell, though it may seem that way, I'm simply adapted and accustomed to my level of hell, within a certain means of paradoxical uncertainty.
(to quote Samuel Jackson on Jackie Brown, "I can't rely on Melanie, but I can rely on Melanie to be Melanie.")
I can envision myself "enjoying" a radioactive day on the beach in a hazmat suit as the last survivor on a hellish earth, still pining over love and friendships lost, things I wish I'd done or not done. I can't get out of the hazmat suit to enjoy the waves of the ocean, but there it is, in plain view, on sandy beaches full of dangerous shards of glass that you can cut your feet on while you're dying of radiation poisoning if you take that sweaty hazmat suit off.
That my "friends" is an illustration of the "tight rope" of hell. I don't think I can artistically express it in words much clearer than that. The tight rope is analogous to so many situations in life. There's some leftover noodles with chicken and beef in the fridge, but you don't have an ounce of soy sauce in the whole house. It tastes absolutely horrible without the soy, but you're supposed to feel shame for not already being happily content to enjoy your bland soy-less noodles.
I've been doing this dance for a very long time, and I'm tired, obviously, or I wouldn't be able to observe and convey such things.
The thing that sets me apart from the rest, is of course also the very thing that will set you to inherently hate me.
I was born with extrasensory perception, and not in a good way. (awkward moment, to be fair)
I have a keen sense of knowing when I'm being hunted by something outside of our "realm" of existence. When you feel the presence of something purely evil staring at you, when you feel colors start to fade into a depressing haze, like something out of a lifeless modern art museum, you get the first inklings of an idea that you're not purely alone in the world. I'm expressing my childhood up through 10 years old. Then it "went away."
It went away for a good 20 years, and now it's back on a daily basis. The doctors tried pills/therapy, none of those actually did anything positive at all. I don't see hallucinations, but I experience body takeovers, in my same conscious mind, I even have conversations with this spiritual entity. It's written messages to me that are uniquely confusing in nature. It may at one time use my head to write in cursive, "Jesus Loves You", and then 2 seconds later write, "God Hates You (my full name) False Prophet." This goes on usually on a nightly basis, usually when I'm driving, but sometimes in other isolated situations. It also took the woman of my dreams away (that's your cue to use that as a means to attack me because attachments run deep, which of course exposes a thing or two about you), that's a whole story in itself, and made my life hell in many other ways. Tons of nasty things, and instead of feeling horribly emotionally driven, most of the time now I just see it as "same ol' same ol'" in this environment.
I have no real attachments to people, or anything much going on here, except for that small fact that I can't seem to die.
I'm quite sure at this point that one of a few possibilities exist:
1) I'm in hell, I must have done something horribly bad to get here. It's even more stressful to not know what that thing was.
2) Perhaps I'm in a computer simulation of some sort, maybe I was captured before this life and put into it.
3) Heaven and hell are some kind of fluid state.
4) V2K/Electromagnetic blah blah, I don't have enough faith in the competency of our government to believe in their technological capability to do such things, and why I would even be a candidate for selection in such a program (which defaults among conspiracy theorist crowds to: "they don't need a reason to select you")
5) I'm part of a spiritual war.
My views usually toggle somewhere in the mix of these major viewpoints, among others that don't come to mind currently, on a continuing basis.
Btw, yes of course capitalism is flawed. That's the whole thing. You're in a world where EVERY system of government is inherently flawed in some extreme use case. Even a technocracy that utilizes some adaptive government control system that tailors to the strengths of every governmental system would likely have some potentially harsh outcomes at times that would be barely adaptable for human beings to survive.
That's kind of the point. You're constantly DISTRACTED here by the thinking of ontology, systems of government, and so on. You'll run in circles, doing things that seem to matter for a time, and you'll be just out of reach of the proverbial mountains you want to climb.
I don't even post things like this to get agreement out of people. I do it just to see what your psychological reaction is to my stating the "truth", whatever that is, from my viewpoint. Obviously, it makes the militant atheists pissed when I say things like yes I've had spiritual encounters since I was born, and I have yet to see one that I've truly deemed as friendly, I go through the same "up and down" cycles as everyone else. Maybe I'm brought to having $0.02 in my checking account, about to die, and then suddenly an influx of money comes in, I should be thankful, but I also just had the daylights scared out of me (this has happened multiple times, as well as almost been killed in other ways many times).
Nonetheless, atheists will hate me when their lack of beliefs become in question. I'm not here to tell you the "good news", I'm here to tell you a horrifying story of life. I'm not "preaching" that "God is good", that may even be insulting to God, if he is both the good and evil force of the universe. He created evil did he not? He killed the firstborn of the Egyptians, and punished the Israelites over and over did he not? You'll laugh and say, "I can't worship a God I don't love." He can make you love or hate him. He can do anything he wants.
It's time to succumb to actual truth, you're in hell, on some level, but which level, and is it perpetual?
Maybe.
That's the thing, you're in a perpetual state of unknowing, and because you're in a perpetual state of unknowing, you're perpetually tortured with questioning.
Sometimes I post a literary abomination like this to see if you'll react in standard formulaic ways, using the same pseudorandom number generator to pull a string response from an array of responses (assuming you're akin to an agent in the Matrix and nothing more than computer code). Once in a while I like to mess with the "agents" (and everyone in the "Matrix" is an "agent" to me), and see if I can get your response algorithms to adapt and change in response to mine, or if you'll respond with the same identifiable things as before.
What else are you supposed to do when you're in hell and you're bored?
Maybe I'll wake up after I die as a brain in a vat and something that looks like the final boss from Contra 3 will be standing over me.
That would kind of suck. The spirit thing was true, regardless of whether you want to believe or not. Who really knows what's coming for this universe, or if it's just more of the same.
"I don't know" is the answer. My meta-meta-point of course, is that the state of unknowing is that which derives a series of illogical and irrational responses to a world in which we believe things should happen quite reasonably and logically. When it's one isolated synchronicity that occurs, you say "well that's weird." When there are literally hundreds of synchronicities going on all around you and directly related to you at all moments of the day you're led to believe that you know one thing further than anyone else, when in reality, we all exist on the same playing field of unknowing, and that unknowing keeps us in a state of chaos.
