WE ALL DIED IN 2020 AND THIS IS HELL

By SSEGAWA HUZAIRU IBRAHIM / Tuesday, 11th August, 2026

I have a theory: we all died in 2020. Not literally, obviously. There were no angels waiting at the gates, no dramatic white light, no booming voice announcing that our earthly subscription had expired. There was just “Breaking News: COVID-19.” And somehow, we woke up here. Hell.

Think about it. What kind of paradise makes you click “I’m not a robot” to prove you’re human? What kind of peaceful afterlife makes you reset your password because your password is “too old”? Too old. Even our passwords have birthdays now. Maybe Hell isn’t fire and brimstone. Maybe Hell is an online class with seventeen people in it, where somehow you’re the only person whose microphone works. “Can you hear me?” “Can you hear me?” “Can you” Oh. I’ve been talking to myself. Honestly, that pretty much sums up how many of us have been socializing since 2020.

Then came lockdown. “Stay home.” And we celebrated. Because apparently humanity’s greatest fantasy was permission to stop going outside. For a while, staying home felt like freedom. We learned how to bake bread, watched entire television series in a weekend, discovered hobbies we abandoned two weeks later, and convinced ourselves that lockdown would be temporary. Then we came back, and something was different. Eye contact became a skill. Small talk became mathematics. Leaving the house became an event. And every conversation started with, “So… how was lockdown?” as if we had all returned from the same war. Maybe we had.

Because 2020 didn’t really end. It evolved. AI became smarter. Wars became longer. Politicians became louder. Food became more expensive. Social media became more exhausting. And somehow, everyone became an expert on God. The internet gave humanity access to more information than any generation before us could have imagined, and somehow, we became less certain about what was real. Fake voices. Fake faces. Fake news. Real wars. Real grief. Real people dying. And we’re scrolling past all of it because someone just posted a recipe for creamy pasta.

Breaking News. Swipe. New video. Swipe. Another war. Swipe. Someone dancing. Swipe. A celebrity apology. Swipe. Maybe that is what Hell looks like now. Not flames. Notifications. Maybe Hell is opening your phone and seeing, “Your screen time was up 47% this week.” Maybe Hell is having hundreds of followers and nobody you actually want to call. Maybe Hell is being connected to everyone and understood by no one. Maybe Hell is having artificial intelligence capable of writing poems, creating images, answering questions and imitating human conversation while humanity is still trying to develop basic empathy.

Maybe Hell is inflation. Because nothing says eternal suffering quite like remembering what things used to cost. A meal that used to feel cheap now requires financial planning. A simple trip to the supermarket can feel like a negotiation with your bank account. Even the things that once made life feel ordinary have become reminders that the world changed while we were busy trying to catch up with it.

And then there’s religion. We began fighting over who God loves, who God hates, who belongs, who doesn’t, who is worthy, who is sinful and who deserves punishment. As if Heaven handed us an attendance register. As if God appointed us all deputy managers of morality. Maybe Hell isn’t where God is absent. Maybe Hell is where everyone thinks they speak for Him. We became so obsessed with deciding who deserved to be accepted that sometimes we forgot the people standing right in front of us were human beings.

And yet, somehow, we kept going. School. Work. Birthdays. Weddings. Graduations. Bills. Exams. Family gatherings. New Year’s celebrations. We kept taking pictures and posting captions saying, “Life is good,” accompanied by a photograph where the smile looks slightly more convincing than the person behind it. We learned how to continue functioning even when functioning wasn’t the same thing as feeling okay.

Because maybe something really did die in 2020. Maybe it was innocence. Maybe it was hope. Maybe it was our assumption that tomorrow would automatically be better than today. Before 2020, the future felt like somewhere we were going. After 2020, the future started feeling like something we had to survive. The difference is subtle, but enormous. Before, we imagined the future. After, we started preparing for it.

That might be the strangest part. The world continued. The sun still rose. Schools reopened. Airports filled again. Concerts returned. People went back to work. We celebrated birthdays we weren’t sure we’d reach. We made plans. We fell in love. We graduated. We grew older. We laughed. We posted. We carried on.

But carrying on isn’t always the same thing as recovering.

Maybe that’s why 2020 still feels strangely close. We can measure the years since it happened, but emotionally, sometimes it feels like we’re still standing in the doorway of that year, waiting for someone to tell us that everything is normal again. Nobody did. Maybe because there is no “normal” to return to. Maybe we changed. Maybe the world changed. Maybe both happened at the same time.

So perhaps my theory is wrong. Perhaps we didn’t all die in 2020. Perhaps we simply lost something there and never figured out how to name it. But if we did die, the afterlife is remarkably mundane. There are passwords. There are bills. There is homework. There are advertisements. There is Wi-Fi. There is political discourse. There is group-chat drama. There is a notification telling me that someone I don’t know has gone live. And there is, apparently, no escape from the phrase, “Please select all squares containing traffic lights.”

So if this is Heaven, I have questions. But if this is Hell? Honestly, the evidence is overwhelming. Because maybe—just maybewe all died in 2020. And this isn’t the afterlife we were promised. It’s simply the world that came after. And perhaps that is the most terrifying part of all.