The Hell of Getting Everything You Want

The Brave new world

We’re getting close to a world where we can summon almost anything we want on a screen—images, stories, even “companions”—on demand. The strange thing is how often that kind of power ends up feeling more like hell than heaven.

That thought came to me while watching an advert for an AI tool called Base 44, promising:

“What if you could build whatever you want just by thinking about it?”

If you’ve read C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, you might recognise how eerily that echoes his vision of hell.

The Grey Town - Lewis’s vision of hell

In Lewis’s story, the afterlife begins at a bus stop in a place called “Grey Town” on a dull, drizzly British day (trust the Oxford professor to make a very specific kind of rain a key plot point). A bus is waiting that will take anyone who wants to go up to heaven. But when some passengers realise who else has been let in, they decide they’d rather stay where they are.

Grey Town itself has one fascinating, disturbing trick.

In Lewis’s hell, you can build almost whatever you want just by thinking about it.

Don’t like your neighbours? Imagine a new house further away, and there it is. Don’t like that one either? Move again. The town keeps spreading out as everyone retreats from everyone else. What sounds like a dream—instant building, total control—slowly becomes a nightmare of endless distance and isolation.

Lewis imagines Napoleon at the very edge of this ever-expanding non-city, pacing in a vast, self-made palace, muttering through his grievances from earthly life. He has all the space in the world, but no real company. He has power, but no peace.

What looked like a superpower turns to ash in the mouth. Unending but purposeless power is completely unsatisfying.

Heaven, by contrast, is surprisingly hard to bear. It requires saying a painful goodbye to things we cling to but that can’t survive in paradise: power over others, status, privilege, the comfort of looking down on “them.” The solid, weighty joy of heaven can only be received by people willing to let go.

That’s where AI comes in.

AI and hollow power

Generative AI gives us extraordinary power over the world of images, words, and experiences. With a few prompts we can conjure beautiful pictures, plausible stories, clever summaries, or the illusion of a sympathetic voice that never argues back.

But as Lewis warned in his own way: unending but purposeless power is inherently hollow.

You can already feel a hint of that in the endless stream of perfect-but-empty AI images, or in the pitch for digital “friends” who can’t offer a real, challenging relationship. Everything bends to our preferences, but nothing truly meets us, resists us, or loves us.

The power to create anything we can imagine can become the power to isolate ourselves in a world of one.

Reality is a Gift

We were not made to live inside our heads or our screens. Ultimately, reality exists in the present—in our bodies and in the world that God has created: now fallen, but destined for redemption. AI offers a more powerful way than ever to fool ourselves into thinking the worlds we create are legitimate replacements for the one we can only receive as a gift.

So don’t let the aim of your life be to play in the manmade playground of digital space and thought. Reunite your mind, body, and soul. Meet God in the tangible and immediate: in prayer and contemplation, your family and friends, your church and community, the natural world, and the neighbour right in front of you.

Words may create worlds, but the real world was created by, through, and for the Word —Jesus Christ. Let’s keep being creative with our tools, AI included. But let’s not turn Lewis’s allegorical Grey Town into our literal reality.

For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him … For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

• Colossians 1:16, 19–20