When a murderor chooses not to follow God and kills someone, that is hell. When a drunk gets in a car and drives down the road, that is hell. When a person comes home from 40 years of work and is left empty because it never filled the God shaped vacuum in their soul, it is hell. Whenever people choose not to have God in their life it is hell because hell is where God is absent. We can even say that the cancer patient is going through hell because God seems so far away to many.
Some people wonder why there is suffering on earth.
It is because people have chosen not to follow God and that turns this world that God has said is good into a hell as we ever-increasingly cast Him out of our life. And good people suffer because they live in this world where we all make choices. I accept and truly believe the description of Hell in God's Word and my thoughts of what is suffered by those who will go there, personally I find truly Hellish. Separated from God forever, I imagine being fully aware of the true horror of my sins, tormented by them, with no hope left. Separated from God, you cannot pray to Him, there is no release from the anguish of sin, perhaps still hopelessly craving for the sins that bound you up.