If we’re seduced by our desires, we often follow devil in disguise

By David McElroy · March 11, 2026

The devil doesn’t have horns and a pointed red tail. He doesn’t wear a red suit. The devil looks exactly like whatever it is you want the most.

The devil is a shapeshifter. In every moment, he becomes something which seems too good to be true. To me, he appears as the object of my deepest desires. To you, he appears as whatever you believe will finally make your life complete. But when we follow where this shapeshifting demon leads us, the heaven on earth we expected often turns out to be a living hell.

The devil is one of the most enduring archetypes of human history. For some people, he’s been a literal creature roaming the earth. In Christian theology, he’s seen as a spirit who’s the chief of the fallen angels. But however the devil has been conceived in theology or mythology or psychology, the real demon is in your head. It’s the lying trickster promising whatever it is you want and need the most.

The things that destroy us are typically the things we eagerly accept and even pursue. When evil and heartbreak arrive in our lives, these things don’t typically force their way in. They come in disguise — and we eagerly welcome them in.

The things which destroy us rarely appear as enemies. They arrive looking like opportunity, romance, success or fulfillment. Even when others warn us, we resent the intrusion and push their advice aside.

By the time we realize what we’ve invited into our lives, it’s often too late. The devil in disguise hands us a roadmap that promises heaven — but when we arrive, we discover we’ve been traveling toward hell all along.

Even when we see along the way that something isn’t right, we are prone to continue following the devil we’ve trusted, right into the place that is most destructive for us. We refuse to turn away and follow a different path, because we believe we have invested too much time and energy and ego in the path we are on — and so we blindly push ahead to the place of our own damnation.

We blame others for the unhappiness in our lives. We say we couldn’t help what’s happened. We say there’s no way we could have foreseen what this person or that person has become. But most of us are fooling ourselves.

Yes, there are some people who have disasters and diseases befall them which they didn’t choose. We all have a bit of that, and some people have far too much of their share. That’s true. But most of us have control of our lives and choose the paths which take us where we don’t want to go.

I’ve been watching people for years and observing which things take them off course — which things make them miserable and even destroy their lives. Sometimes it’s money. Sometimes it’s ego. Sometimes it’s the desperate need to be loved. This is the pattern I see over and over. And I’ve seen it in my own life, too.

The devil in disguise can beckon us to follow and we come running. We’re not on the path to destruction. No, we’re just about to reach what we’ve already wanted and needed most — the desires of our hearts. And then we find that the reality is almost never what we thought was being promised.

I know that this life can give us joy and happiness and beauty and love. I’ve seen those things at times. I’ve touched them. But too often, we mindlessly pursue substitutes which can never be what we hope they can be. Over and over, we waste out time on those empty promises — and as we look back at the wasted years, the shapeshifting devil chuckles at the demonic trick he’s played on us.

Maybe we sometimes can’t tell the difference between the path to heaven and the path to hell. Maybe we can’t avoid falling for the tricks of this shapeshifter from time to time. But some of us — including me — are prone to keep falling for the trick long after we should have known better. I definitely do this. Maybe you do, too.

I just know that the time comes in every pursuit when we know we’ve wasted our time on a failed dream or failed promise of something great. And I know it’s easy to stubbornly refuse to accept what we know is true.

When we reach that point, we can no longer blame the father of lies. There’s a point at which we know what we’re doing — and we’re continuing on the path to a metaphorical hell all of our own making.

I’ve wasted too much time looking back over my shoulder. I’ve wasted far too much time longing for empty dreams which were never coming true.

At some point, we have to stop blaming the devil and admit the harder truth — that we recognized the deception long ago and kept blindly following anyway.

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