It’s a tough day for the Devil. You can tell by the way he is brooding over his desk, shuffling through what used to be the most valuable commodity in the universe: human souls. He’s not happy. Not because he’s out of souls – far from it. No, it’s because he’s come to a brutal realisation: souls are now utterly worthless. They’ve been devalued. And no one’s even noticed.

It wasn’t always this way, of course. Souls used to be the currency of damnation. People used to sell them like it was a get-rich-quick scheme. A quick little path here, a Faustian bargain there, and bam, eternal suffering in exchange for a shiny new car, a successful marriage, or a mildly successful music career. The Devil’s business was booming, everything was going according to plan. Hell was packed with the whiny, the selfish, and the ethically bankrupt – the usual clientele.

But now? Well, now the Devil’s sitting there, looking at his soul portfolio, and it’s like he’s holding a bag of expired coupons. The market has crashed. People are still signing contracts, sure, but what they’re offering isn’t worth the blood it’s written in. The souls have been diluted, rendered meaningless. The Devil’s got an office full of souls, but they’re like crappy timeshares or a cheap knockoff handbag you buy in a back alley – everyone’s got one, no one values them, and they only lead to disappointment.

He’s pacing around his penthouse in Hell, thinking that – the way things are going – he won’t be able to afford anything better than a shack, soon. Trying to figure out what happened. The thing is, souls have always been the commodity. They were sacred in their misery.

But now? Now souls are like a blue tick on a social media handle.

The Devil knows who to blame, of course. And of course it’s Him: God. Back when there were only two souls, the original two -Eve and Adam- back then, yes! Souls used to be true Wealth. The Devil’s chest still puffs up at the memory. He managed to corrupt them, to make them eat the apple, and to mark them with the original sin.

But, oh no: ever the sore loser, God couldn’t accept it. He wanted to keep playing, so He had created more souls. Eve gave birth with great pain and so on and so on, and now there were – how many billions of souls on Earth? Seven, eight, nine? Even the Devil couldn’t be arsed keeping count, anymore. They kept growing exponentially, anyway.

Back in the day, there was a king. From where again? Phrygia or something. Anyway, he was called Midas and wanted to turn to gold everything he touched, so Dionysus granted him his wish. The gift became soon a curse.

If everything gets turned into gold, soon the market gets saturated, and the gold becomes pretty much worthless.

It was genius! This is still studied in Hell’s schools. Turn the greed of humans into their ruin. The Devil used to laugh at Midas and his short sight.

You know what the Devil doesn’t find funny? When it’s God Almighty making the same short-sighted mistake, and souls now are worth as much as a fistful of Monopoly money.

“Almighty my bollocks, that’s like the first rule of market they teach you in business school” the Devil curses under his breath, as he watches the stock arrow of the souls market plummeting down to an abyss that even the Lord of Hell finds to be too deep.

The Devil doesn’t know what to do with Himself. He thought about pivoting into something else, maybe offering “eternal pain with an experience package” or selling VIP access to personal damnation tours, but everything is so commodified now. Hell has become a subscription service, a streaming platform for your worst nightmares, with way too many ads.

Maybe the worst part of it all? The Devil looks at humanity and realises they don’t care. They don’t need to be tricked into selling their souls anymore. They’re already doing it willingly, like they’re on some kind of endless, dopamine fuelled treadmill.

People don’t need an eternal afterlife of suffering to ruin their existences. They’re perfectly capable of doing it themselves, one bad decision at a time. Gambling, shopping spree, career choices, the irrational hate – it’s all a slow burn, and the Devil isn’t even the one holding the match anymore. He’s just a passive observer now, watching humanity self-destruct.

It isn’t even funny, in a B-horror movie kind of way. In fact, it’s fairly pathetic.

So here he is, sitting there with his stack of worthless souls, wondering if maybe the end of the world isn’t the worst thing after all. Maybe it’s time for a career change. Hell’s not what it used to be – not when you’re competing with 24 hours news cycles, reality TV, oligarchy being paraded as democracy, and influencers promising you the “ultimate experience” for just a low, low price. The Devil realises that in a world where people are selling their happiness for the smallest thrills, the soul has no intrinsic value. Maybe it never did, even when there weren’t so many around.

At this point, the Devil just shrugs. He’s already got the soul of humanity – and it has been paying dividend for centuries. But right now, he’s got a stack of paperwork to burn, an inbox full of apocalyptic memes, and no one left to torment.