The old man, Barnaby, sat on the edge of a fiery chaise lounge, a look of utter defeat on his face. He’d been condemned to spend 80 years in hell, a sentence that, for him, was a unique kind of torment. His sin? The endless, secret pleasure of watching daytime television. Now, for eternity—or at least the next eight decades—he was forced to binge-watch every single episode of every single soap opera ever made. The room, a surprisingly comfortable temperature for hell, was filled with the dramatic swell of organ music and the sound of characters declaring their undying love, only to betray each other in the very next scene.
A few yards away, a woman named Mildred was enduring her own special punishment. Mildred, a woman whose life had been a series of tasteful beige sweaters and polite garden parties, had a dark secret: she loved to listen to terrible pop music from the early 2000s. Now, she was trapped in a room with a single, looping track of a boy band’s greatest hits, the chorus repeating with maddening cheerfulness. She longed for the silence of her beige life, the gentle rustle of a teacup on a saucer.
Barnaby and Mildred, along with countless others, were trapped in a bureaucracy of eternal damnation. It wasn’t the fire and brimstone they’d feared, but something far more insidious. It was the endless, soul-crushing repetition of their own self-indulgence. As Barnaby watched a character miraculously return from the dead for the third time, he sighed, thinking, “At least it’s not as bad as a boy band.” At that very moment, a new character entered his soap opera—the long-lost twin brother of the main character, who just happened to be a famous pop star. The boy band music from Mildred’s room faded in, perfectly timed for his grand entrance. Barnaby groaned. This was going to be a very, very long 80 years.