Before you read any further, please know that this essay is not written as an indictment, nor is it meant to feel like a lecture. I have no interest in policed behavior or handing out moral instructions. My hope, as someone who spends a lot of time observing the culture, is simply to offer a space for reflection. I write this with the quiet wish that these words might help form a clearer, more systematic picture in your mind, so that as you navigate these spaces, you do so with your eyes open to what lies behind the curtain.

For a long time, I found myself watching the quiet rhythms of hookup culture and casual sex, sensing that something was off, but never quite having the language to name it. I kept witnessing a familiar pattern: a system aggressively promoting destructive consumption under the banner of personal freedom, individualizing the consequences when it left people hollowed out, and convincing the victim that their suffering was entirely their own fault. It was a dynamic I deeply disliked, yet I lacked the words to break it down.

Then I came across an article by Erin Williams on Substack titled The Cost of Casual Sex, and everything suddenly clicked into place.

She opened with a scene that hits with quiet, recognizable precision: standing in a stranger’s kitchen at three in the afternoon, holding a glass of tap water like a moral alibi. She had sex with this person, enjoyed it, and consented to every part of it. Yet, driving home, she was left with the distinct sensation that while nothing bad had happened, something had gone fundamentally wrong.

If you have ever stood in a stranger’s kitchen trying to figure out why you feel hollow after a supposedly liberating afternoon, you know that exact sensation. Our culture takes that quiet discomfort, wraps it in glossy marketing, and labels it empowerment. We treat emotional detachment like the ultimate mark of maturity, then quietly offload the emotional bill onto whoever was foolish enough to care. Casual sex applies cold market logic to human intimacy

And spoiler alert: market logic always leaves someone holding the short end of the stick.

The Question of ‘Liberation'

This brings us to the question that I think we need to ask more seriously than we have been willing to do. Is casual sex truly freedom? Is it liberation? We have been told for decades that it is, that the sexual revolution freed us from the repressive morality of our ancestors and that we can now pursue pleasure without guilt or shame or consequence.

The modern sexual landscape did not break bad overnight, nor was every historical shift driven by pure malice. Distinguishing between genuine human agency and cultural deception requires clear eyes. Removing social coercion, allowing individuals to enter or exit relationships free from unjust economic dependence, and establishing basic legal protections are necessary developments. Nobody should desire a return to legalism or social hypocrisy.

However, the real issue lies deeper, in a layer modern culture actively avoids examining. The mainstream idea of “sexual freedom” was not designed to liberate image-bearers. It was quietly reshaped by an economic logic that redefined freedom as unlimited self-consumption and choice as market preference.

The Fallacy of ‘Liberation’

We consistently make the mistake of discussing sexual liberation in a vacuum, ignoring how market forces actively shape our desires and definitions of freedom. Sociologist Eva Illouz offers crucial insight here through her concept of “emotional capitalism.” She demonstrates that casual sex presents itself as radical freedom while quietly restructuring intimacy according to the logic of the market. Intimacy ceases to be a space for covenant and care, turning instead into a arena of calculation, trade, and risk management.

Modern sexuality is not simply the removal of outdated social repressions. It aligns perfectly with late capitalism’s demand for unattached, self-managing, and hyper-autonomous individuals. Economic systems no longer rely on stable families to ground society. Instead, the market thrives on isolated individuals who function as perpetual consumers and self-branded units of desire. For this system to operate smoothly, intimacy must be stripped of relational friction. Attachments become optional, sex becomes a portable commodity, and deep emotional longings are reclassified as design flaws. This is a intentional feature of the architecture.

Within this framework, casual sex is an encounter without claims. It demands no accountability, no investment of time, and no shared future. The ideal transaction yields physical sensation while generating zero expectations, succeeding precisely because nothing meaningful follows. Sensation becomes an abstract unit of value, bodies become interchangeable tools for pleasure, and human beings treat one another as temporary utility functions.

The culture markets this dynamic as ultimate autonomy, but market transactions depend on a fundamental lie: that all participants arrive with equal power, equal risk, and equal protection from harm. They do not. The market is never neutral, and applying its logic to human intimacy inevitably reproduces power imbalances in our most private lives. Women in particular bear the brunt of this setup, as they are asked to simulate total emotional neutrality inside a culture that still expects them to carry the heavy lifting of care, relationship maintenance, and emotional labor.

The Marketing Strategy

The culture of casual sex operates like a masterclass in predatory marketing. Like any corporate ad campaign, it sells a fantasy that profits a few while concealing the true cost to the consumer. It insists that detachment is strength and attachment is backwardness, yet it never asks who actually gains from this arrangement. It promises absolute individual autonomy while requiring people to suppress their basic capacities for human connection, shaping their choices to ensure they remain accessible as unattached consumers.

Consider how this plays out in practice. Women are socialized from an early age to pay attention to relational dynamics, read rooms, soothe conflict, and handle emotional friction. Casual sex demands that they suddenly switch off these capacities. Yet those traits do not simply vanish; they are redirected inward as self-suppression. The work of relational management still occurs, but it happens quietly, in private, and entirely at the woman’s expense, without the culture acknowledging it as actual labor.

This creates an unavoidable double bind. Expressing a desire for clarity makes a woman seem needy, while pretending to be entirely unbothered makes her appear cold. This dynamic is precisely why the dreading of “The Talk” and the endless “What are we?” memes dominate the internet. For something to become a viral meme, it has to happen so routinely that the majority instantly relate to it. The collective panic over asking a basic question about relationship status proves that our dating culture is fundamentally broken. A meme is just a punchline built on a shared pain point, and the fact that asking for clarity is treated like launching a nuclear missile shows how absurd the rules have become.

Hookup culture demands that participants pretend attachment does not exist, setting people up for frustration. As Williams observes, women end up paying a double penalty when things break down. First, they do the invisible work of suppressing their expectations while pretending to be completely unattached. Second, they absorb the cultural lie that wanting depth, commitment, and recognition is a personal failure to modernize. The script blames the individual for having basic human needs rather than questioning the structure that reliably exploits them. A culture that manufactures emotional exhaustion and then shifts the blame onto the individual has built a very convenient model for itself.

The Gendered Burden

This is where the real fallout becomes visible and where the cultural illusion completely breaks down. Women are routinely asked to navigate a sexual economy designed around male fantasies of frictionless access while still expected to shoulder the actual work of care. They are told that true freedom means total detachment, yet they live in a world that simultaneously demands they remain empathetic, responsive, and emotionally aware.

This environment produces a relentless background noise of overthinking. It is a constant, low-grade hum of mental exhaustion where every gesture has to be decoded. Did that mean something, or was it just polite post-coital etiquette? Is texting first a normal response, or does it reveal an illegal amount of interiority? Am I accurately reading the room, or am I overcomplicating things? Casual sex makes basic emotional clarity almost unspeakable. When wanting connection is framed as an inconvenience, the person who experiences those feelings is made to feel defective, as if they simply lack the modern machinery required to “handle” casual hookups.

For women navigating heterosexual dating, the cost is not just a awkward Sunday morning; it is systemic burnout. It shows up as chronic anxiety, emotional fatigue, and a quiet form of self-alienation. The real damage is the slow erosion of the truth that wanting to be known, respected, and chosen over time is a healthy human design, rather than a humiliating personal failure to be “liberated.” Modern dating culture has somehow managed to normalize a system that treats relational depth as a flaw and emotional emptiness as an achievement.

Dropping One Yoke and Picking Up Another

We like to tell ourselves that we are far more enlightened than past generations because we threw off the weight of old social expectations. But swapping community accountability for the cold rules of market utility is not true progress. We simply dropped one heavy yoke and picked up another.

We moved away from traditional moral boundaries only to hand the keys to dating apps, algorithms, and tech platforms that profit directly from our restless loneliness. We stopped taking cues from time-tested human wisdom and started taking them from an economic engine that thrives on our willingness to view other people as interchangeable, disposable units of convenience.

Casual sex, in its modern form, is not liberation. It is an unpaid form of emotional labor disguised as personal empowerment. The real costs fall on those who are expected to maintain human warmth and connection while simultaneously pretending to be completely unattached.

This is not a call for rigid legalism or returning to past social pressures, as replacing one prison with another changes nothing. Rather, it is a challenge to look at the culture with open eyes. We ought to be deeply suspicious of any concept of “freedom” that asks us to suppress our basic design for lasting commitment, mutual responsibility, and deep relational trust. True human dignity requires rejecting a system that treats real covenant as backward, emotional emptiness as progress, and quietly offloads the fallout onto the people least positioned to afford it.

Consent Is Not Care

The fundamental flaw in modern sexual ethics is that we have turned “consent” into the absolute ceiling of human morality, rather than the bare minimum baseline.

Standing in a stranger’s kitchen at three in the afternoon, holding a glass of tap water, a sobering reality sets in: consenting to an event does not mean you were cared for. We use the fact of our consent like a moral alibi, convincing ourselves that nothing is wrong even when something clearly is. We consented, so we cannot complain. We consented, so any hollow feeling must be our own fault. We are told to be grateful for this freedom, even when it leaves us feeling confused and vaguely ashamed of our own desire for depth.

A single thread runs through modern culture that poses as liberation while producing something entirely predatory. It tells us we are free while quietly exploiting our emotional labor. It tells us our pain is a personal defect while running a system that generates that pain with mechanical regularity.

I saw this exact same trick when writing about youth alcoholism in The Pride of Africa. It is the same cultural magic trick: a system aggressively promotes destructive consumption under the banner of personal freedom, individualizes the consequences when it leaves people hollowed out, and convinces the victim that their suffering is entirely their own fault. It is the same thread and the same lie.

The cost of casual sex is not just a personal bummer; it is an economic and structural scam. Until we have the intellectual courage to look past the marketing and call it what it is, we will keep standing in strangers’ kitchens, holding our glasses of water, and wondering why the “freedom” we were promised tastes so much like loss.

“Men are logical thinkers and women are emotional.”

The statement is almost always delivered as though it is a settled scientific fact, a tidy explanation for all the observable differences between men and women. And look, I am not here to pretend those differences do not exist. To deny that men and women process the world differently would be foolish, and I have never been interested in foolish arguments. In many cases, yes, men tend to prioritize analytical detachment. In many cases, yes, women tend to process experiences through emotional awareness and relational context. These patterns exist. I see them. You see them.

The problem is not the observation itself. The problem is what people think it means.

Somehow, this observation got stretched into an insult. The implication became this: if women are emotional, they must therefore be irrational. They must be illogical. They must be intellectually inferior to men. As though feeling deeply is evidence of defective thinking. As though intelligence naturally belongs to men in a way it does not belong to women. I have heard the word “emotional” used as a weapon, a way to shut down a woman’s argument without ever engaging with its actual content.

And I am here to tell you that conclusion is not only lazy, It misunderstands both emotion and intelligence.

Difference Is Not a Design Flaw

Let us start where all honest conversations about men and women should start: at the beginning.

The opening chapters of Genesis do not present humanity as a collection of interchangeable parts. They present two distinct expressions of the same image.

“Male and female He created them.” (Genesis 1:27)

I believe this matters. I believe God meant what He said and made what He meant. The differences between men and women are not accidents of evolution or cultural inventions we could educate ourselves out of. They are part of the design.

Denying these differences in the name of equality is not wisdom. It is simply refusing to observe what is plainly visible. Men and women differ biologically. We differ hormonally. We differ physically. These realities shape how each of us experiences the world. It would be intellectually dishonest to assume that our thinking patterns alone would somehow be exempt from the design God built into the rest of our bodies.

But here is where people get tripped up. Difference is not the same thing as hierarchy. Distinction does not automatically imply superiority. A hammer and a saw are different tools, designed for different purposes, but no reasonable person looks at a hammer and declares it superior because a saw cannot drive a nail. The question is not which is better. The question is whether each does what it was made to do.

What It Actually Means to Be Emotional

I want to spend some time on this word emotional, because I think we have allowed it to be corrupted.

When people say women are emotional, they usually mean it as shorthand for instability. They mean irrational. They mean prone to fits of feeling that cloud judgment and prevent clear thinking. That is the cultural meaning the word has accumulated.

I remember my friend Braxton telling me something her mother once told her. Her mother said that to be a successful lawyer as a woman, you can never be hysterical. You can never let your emotions seep through. Because the moment you do, you have lost. Not just the case but also your credibility.

Think about that for a moment. A courtroom is one of the most emotionally charged environments there is. Lives get changed. Families get torn apart. Justice hangs in the balance. But a woman has to sit there like a stone, because if she shows she actually cares, if her voice shakes, if her eyes water, if her passion breaks through, she is suddenly "too emotional." Not passionate. Not committed. Just emotional. And that word, in that moment, means she no longer gets to be taken seriously. Such cruelty is it not? To be forced to never show emotion in a field that is so emotion packed? Only because it disqualifies you as a woman!

So what does it mean to be emotional?

In my own life, I have learned that emotion is a form of perception. It is one of the ways human beings register meaning and significance in the world around them. It is how we recognize injustice when we see it, how we sense relational tension before anyone speaks, how we feel compassion for suffering, how we know when something matters even before we can explain why.

Women, generally speaking, tend to experience this emotional register with greater intensity and depth than men do. I am not saying this to flatter women or to make men feel inadequate. I am saying it because I believe it is true and because pretending otherwise helps no one. This depth is tied to biological design, to things like the hormonal cycles (I know hormones is also misunderstood), to neurological wiring, to the social roles women have historically occupied in nurturing and relational environments. It is not accidental. It is not a bug in the system.

Because of this design, many women cannot simply detach from their emotional awareness in the way men sometimes can. And I say this as a woman who has watched and envies men who benefit from that ability to detach. They can compartmentalize. They can set feelings aside and focus on the task in front of them in ways I sometimes struggle to. But I have also come to understand that what they experience as detachment, women often experience as integration. Our emotions are not a background noise that can be muted at will. They are part of the information being processed.

This does not make a woman incapable of logic. It simply means her thinking often integrates more variables at once: facts, relational impact, moral implications, emotional realities. What some people dismiss as “emotional thinking” is often holistic thinking. It is thinking that refuses to ignore the full complexity of a situation.

Emotion Does Not Cancel Logic

The real issue arises when emotions are mistaken for intellectual weakness. When the ability to feel deeply gets treated as evidence that someone cannot think clearly.

I reject that premise entirely!

Intelligence is not the absence of feeling. Intelligence is the ability to reason, to learn, to analyze, to synthesize information, to recognize patterns, and to arrive at sound conclusions. None of those abilities are biologically reserved for men. None of them are compromised by the presence of emotion.

In fact, intelligence is not purely innate to begin with. It grows through exposure like reading, through conversation, through study, through sustained engagement with ideas. A mind becomes sharper through use. I have seen this in my own life. The more I read, the more I wrestle with difficult questions, the more I listen to people who think differently than I do, the better my thinking becomes. That process is available to anyone willing to engage in it.

Anyone who has spent enough time in the world knows this. There are men whose thinking is disciplined and thoughtful, and there are men who have never seriously engaged with ideas beyond their immediate experience. One does not need to look far to encounter a man in conversation and quietly wonder whether he has ever picked up a book. I have had that experience more times than I can count.

The same range exists among women. I have known women whose intellectual rigor shames my own, women who think more clearly and reason more soundly than most men I have ever met. I have also known women who have not developed their minds in those directions. Intellectual development is not distributed along gender lines. It is shaped by curiosity, by education, by the willingness to wrestle with difficult ideas.

My Real Frustration

It is not that people notice a difference between men and women. It is that they have used that difference to decide that women are less than. Less capable. Less intelligent.

I have seen it play out too many times to count. A woman makes a valid point, but because she cares about it, because her voice rises or her eyes get wet or she refuses to back down, someone calls her emotional and the conversation ends. Her point does not get addressed. Her argument does not get answered and she just gets dismissed.

And that is why the phrase bothers me so much. Not because it observes a difference. Because it is used as a weapon to silence women and protect the idea that men are naturally better thinkers. I am such a passionate speaker, I can only hope you can hear it through my writing and more times than I can count, my emotions seeped out but my argument remained the same. I was discredited and I remember feeling like I would combust. It was unfair.

So What Needs to Change?

I have spent a lot of words explaining why the phrase makes me angry. But anger alone does nothing. The real question is what we do moving forward.

First, we need to stop using “emotional” as an insult. When someone cares deeply about something, when they refuse to ignore the human cost of a decision, when they feel the weight of what is at stake, that is not a weakness. Let’s collectively do better!

Second, we need to accept that men and women are both emotional beings. The difference is not that one has emotions and the other does not. The difference is in degree and depth. Women generally feel with more intensity and process emotions more readily. Men feel too, but often with a shallower depth or through a narrower range. Neither way is wrong. But pretending that men are purely logical and women are purely emotional is false. We all operate with both. We just do it differently.

Third, we need to stop assuming that logic and emotion are enemies. They work together. The best thinkers are not the ones who feel nothing. They are the ones who can feel everything and still reason clearly. That takes practice. It takes self awareness. But it is available to anyone, man or woman, who is willing to do the work.

Finally, The phrase “men are logical and women are emotional” has done enough damage. It has been used to dismiss, to silence, and to exclude. It is time to stop repeating it and start rethink or even rewording it.

Not because men and women are the same. They are not. But because difference was never supposed to be a hierarchy. And emotion was never supposed to disqualify anyone from being taken seriously.

Once again thanks for sticking to the end! Nakulombotov!

I was on a roll with my writing. For months, every article felt like pulling a splinter out of my own skin. Painful but necessary, and deeply satisfying once it was out on the page. Struggles I had carried. Thoughts living rent free in my head. All of it finally expressed.

Then, about a month ago, the well became dry, woii! Now people are hungry and I can’t feed them, I felt very discouraged.

Not that my thoughts stopped. They are still there, and some of them are deep enough. But none of them are thoughts I want to share publicly. Not yet. Maybe not ever. So I have been staring at a blank Substack draft, waiting for something worth saying to show up.

What do you do when you have something to say but no words come? What do you do when the words that come are too deep, too raw, too private for strangers to read? Ni Mbaya guys!

The WhatsApp Question That Stopped Me

Then a conversation arose in one of the WhatsApp groups I am in. The topic was Consolata ‘Connie’ Githinji and her unfortunate passing.

You know the story. Twitter has been ablaze. Everyone has had a thing or two to say. I felt my own addition would be borderline unnecessary. What could I possibly add to that noise? When a thousand voices are already screaming, does the thousand and first help anyone?

But then someone posed a question. And the room went silent for a moment before exploding.

“Is this a situation of girl’s morals or the guy being a psych patient?”

I am sure you can hear the uproar that followed. How dare you ask about her morals? She is dead. He is alive. The question itself felt like an indictment dressed up as curiosity.

And honestly, I understood the anger. But something about that word “morality” stuck in my chest. Why does that word trigger us so much? Someone responded and said, “morality ni sideshow escapists hutumia tu escape accountability” and walahi I get it and I agree to an escape, calling for Connie’s morality and not the man’s is escapism but I digress

My Two Cents That Stayed in My Pocket

Here is what I wanted to say in that group but did not.

Morality is not a sideshow. It is the main event. Every conversation about justice, about accountability, about who is to blame for what, it all eventually collapses into one question. What is the good? Not what is legal. Not what is popular. Not what feels right in the moment. What is actually, objectively, truly good? And you cannot answer that question without eventually facing another one. Who decides what the good is?

If it is just me, then my good and your good will clash, and the only winner will be whoever has more power. If it is just the crowd, then the crowd can vote for evil and call it good, and who is to say they are wrong? If there is no Moral Lawgiver, then every moral argument is just opinion dressed up in fancy shoes.

But I stayed quiet. Because so many voices were already speaking. Another hot take from me would not help Connie. It would just be another voice in a room that was already too loud.

So I closed the chat. I went back to staring at my blank draft.

Scroll. Pause. Scroll.

Then something else started happening.Every day I log onto WhatsApp and watch statuses. Someone will post about a missing child.

Have you seen this child? Please share. Last seen wearing...

At first, each one stopped me cold. I would share it. I would pray over it. I would refresh for updates.Then, shamefully, I started scrolling past. Not every time. But enough times to notice. Enough times to feel the dull edge of desensitisation settling in. My heart was doing what hearts do when they cannot carry any more weight. It was hardening.

Have you felt it too? That moment when tragedy becomes background noise? When your thumb learns to swipe before your eyes can register the face? What does it say about us that we can only mourn so many times before we can no longer help others carry that grief?

Then one day, I saw a name I could not scroll past.

Travis Wanjohi. A little boy. Missing from his home. His mother’s voice in a video, cracking, begging. Please bring back my son.

I stopped. I stared at his face. And for the first time in weeks, I felt something other than numbness.

Then another name. Blessing. A girl, not yet a teenager, gone.

Then Luther Mwangi. Then Makena.

The statuses keep coming. The names keep piling up. And when some of them are found, not all of them, but some, horrific things have been done to them. Things I will not describe here because you already know. Because you have read the same headlines. Because you have felt the same sickness in your stomach.

How many names will it take before we stop scrolling? How many mothers begging before we admit that this is not a series of isolated tragedies but a pattern?

How It Started vs. How It Is Going

It started with autistic children. That was the first pattern we noticed. A child with special needs wanders off, and the searches begin, and too often they end in rivers or ravines or silence. We told ourselves it was tragedy, not design.

Then it became all children.

Now no child is safe. Not the ones who wander. Not the ones who stay close to home. Not the ones whose parents blink for one moment too long. When did we accept this as normal? Or have we not accepted it yet? Are we still in the stage of pretending this is shocking, even as our thumbs learn to scroll faster?

The Yeast That Has Leavened the Whole Lump

And suddenly, I could not stop thinking about what women have been saying for years.

When the femicide cases were breaking every other day, when women were disappearing, when their bodies were being found in mortuaries and thickets and bags, women said something. They said that when the weaker is being targeted with this much violence, it is a reflection of all of us. And if we do not stop it, it will grow like yeast and leaven the whole lump.

But who listens to women?

Now the leaven has risen. The lump is our children.

Tell me I am wrong. Tell me this is not connected. Tell me that a culture which learned to look away from dead women did not also learn to look away from missing children. I want you to tell me I am wrong. But first, ask yourself why you almost scrolled past the last missing child status you saw.

The Same Script, Different Victim

The same voices who blamed women for their own disappearances have simply updated the script. She was immoral. She was careless. She should have known better. Now it is, where were the parents? Why was the child alone? Why did not anyone notice sooner?

Blame. Always blame. Never a solution.

Is it possible that blame is easier than action? Is it possible that pointing fingers feels more satisfying than looking in the mirror? What are we so afraid of facing that we would rather condemn a dead woman or a grieving mother than change anything about ourselves?

Conspiracies Are Easier Than Answers

I have read every conspiracy article. I have heard every argument. Child sacrifice for elections. Organ harvesting networks. Trafficking rings connected to powerful people. Satiators who need fresh blood.

Some of it sounds like madness. Some of it sounds like madness that happens to explain the evidence. But here is what I noticed about every single theory, every article, every heated WhatsApp exchange.

None of them offer a solution.

They offer villains. They offer explanations. They offer someone to blame. But not one of them has told me what to do tomorrow morning when I open WhatsApp and see another missing child status. Another name. Another face. Another mother begging.

Why do we love conspiracies so much? Is it because they give us the illusion of understanding? Is it because a world with evil masterminds is less terrifying than a world where children simply vanish into random darkness? At least a mastermind can be caught. At least a conspiracy can be exposed. But random horror? Random horror has no handle to grab.

A Quick Detour Into Morality (Because This Is My Lane)

And this is where I keep coming back to morality. Not the word. The thing itself.

Morality, as I understand it, is simply the answer to one question. What is the good? Not what is legal. Not what is consensual. Not what is understandable given someone’s circumstances. But what is actually, objectively, truly good for a human being to do, to be, to become. Someone else said, ‘Morality is the wisdom to choose well.’ I haven’t explored that thought well, maybe you can flesh it out and tell me in the comments, nimekupea homework.

For a long time, we had a shared answer to that question. It came from Scripture, from tradition, from natural law, from the simple inherited wisdom that some things are right and some things are wrong. And that right and wrong are not decided by us. They are discovered. Like gravity. Like the fact that fire burns. You do not vote on it. You submit to it.

We have lost that.

In its place, we have put autonomy. The highest good now is choice. Not what you choose, but that you chose. A woman can sell her body. A man can buy it. A child can be left unattended. A predator can roam free. And as long as everyone chose, as long as there was consent, as long as no one broke a law, we have no language left to say this is wrong.

Not just illegal. Not just risky. Wrong.

Does that not terrify you? That we have built a world where the only sin is getting caught? Where the only evil is the evil we have a law against? What happens to the gaps between the laws? What happens to the darkness that the law does not reach?

This is not morality. This is its corpse, dressed up in the clothes of tolerance.

And here is what I have come to believe. A society that loses morality does not become free. It becomes hungry. Because the human heart needs to know what is good. It needs boundaries. It needs to hear someone say “this far and no further.” Not because of a law that can be changed by the next election, but because of something fixed. Something eternal. Something with a voice.

We chased the Moral Lawgiver out of the room. And now we are surprised that the room is dark, and things are crawling out of the corners. Is it a coincidence that as we lost shared morality, violence has risen? Is it a coincidence that as we told ourselves there is no good and no evil, evil has gotten bolder? Or is it cause and effect? And if it is cause and effect, why are we so afraid to say it?

Why They Are Missing

Travis. Blessing. Luther. Makena.

They are not missing because of one psych patient or one trafficking ring or one corrupt official. They are missing because the yeast has leavened the whole lump. Because when you tell a culture for fifty years that there is no good, no evil, no lawgiver, only choices and consequences, do not be shocked when people start making choices that would have once been unthinkable.

The solution to missing children is not a better conspiracy theory. It is not a new law. It is not even better policing, though we need all of those things.

The solution, the deep solution, the one no one wants to say because it sounds old and religious and unfashionable, is that we need to recover a shared understanding of what is good. And that recovery begins with admitting that we cannot define the good ourselves. We can only receive it. From Someone who has been speaking the whole time, even while we turned down the volume.

But I Am Still Stuck

But even that does not tell me what to do about missing children tomorrow morning.

I can preach about the Moral Lawgiver until I am blue in the face , and that is funny because I am South Sudanese and have a dark complexion, so If I turn, blue just know mambo imechemka, That does not find a missing child. That does not stop a predator. That does not answer the mother whose voice cracks on a WhatsApp video.

So I am stuck. Just like I have been stuck for a month with my blank draft. I believe morality is the root. But roots do not harvest the crop. I need the fruit. I need the solution. And I do not have it. What good is a diagnosis without a treatment? What good is saying “we have lost morality” if I cannot tell you how to get it back in time to save the next child?

So Here Is My Question to You

So I am joining the noisy crowd. But I am not bringing a conspiracy theory. I am not bringing a hot take on who is to blame. I am bringing my belief and my stuckness, and I am putting them both directly to you, my readers.

What is the solution?

Not who is responsible. Not which theory explains it all. Not even whether you agree with me about the Moral Lawgiver.

What is the solution?

Tell me what to do. Not what to think. Not what to share. Not what to condemn. What to DO.

The Small and Unglamorous Things

Maybe you have an answer. Maybe no one does. Maybe the answer is that there is no grand solution, only small unglamorous things. Neighborhood watches. Checking on vulnerable children. Teaching our kids their full names and our phone numbers. Paying attention instead of scrolling past.

That does not feel like enough. But it is something.

Or maybe it is not enough. Maybe that is just another way of feeling like we tried while the children keep vanishing. How do we tell the difference between genuine action and performative effort? How do we know if we are helping or just helping ourselves feel better?

The Last Thing I Will Say

So I will wait. And I will keep asking.

What is the solution? Say their names. Then tell me what comes next.

Monday to Thursday

There is something about Holy Week that has always drawn me in. For once, the Gospels let us track Jesus almost hour by hour. On Monday, he walked into Jerusalem on the colt, receiving shouts of Hosanna. On Tuesday, he flipped the tables of the money changers and drove people out of the temple with a whip. An easy day, if you are the Son of God with righteous anger to burn. On Wednesday, the Pharisees and Sadducees took their best shots at him. They asked four separate questions designed to trap him, covering taxes, marriage in heaven, and the greatest commandment. Jesus answered each one with extraordinary wisdom and left them speechless.

But Thursday is where I want to camp. Not the Last Supper, not yet. Thursday, according to Matthew and Mark, was spent at the house of Simon the leper in Bethany. And that is where we meet her. The woman with the alabaster jar.

Two Quotes That Stick

I have recently read a statement that has sat with me for a while. It is this: there is a certain extravagance in love. The more I turn that phrase over in my mind, the truer it becomes. Love does not stop to calculate how little it can respectfully give. Love does not ask, what is the minimum required here? Instead, love always tries to give everything it has. Love never counts the cost. Calculation is never any part of love.

Another point ties beautifully with that idea. The writer Mariama Ba once said that love knows how to seize opportunities to make their devotion known. These two truths fit together perfectly. Love is extravagant, and love is opportunistic. Not opportunistic in a grasping or selfish way, but in a way that sees a moment and refuses to let it pass. Love watches for the right time and then acts without hesitation.

The Act Itself

The woman who walks into Simon the leper’s house that night does both of these things. She loves extravagantly, and she seizes the moment. Matthew and Mark tell us that she came to Jesus while he was reclining at the table. She carried an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, made of pure nard. Then she did something shocking. She broke the jar open and poured the entire contents over Jesus’ head. (John identifies her as Mary of Bethany, sister of Lazarus, but Matthew and Mark leave her unnamed, which somehow makes her every one of us.)

Let me say that again. She poured it over his head. Not just his feet, as Luke’s account records, but his head. In the culture of that time, this was an act of profound honor and intimacy. In the Old Testament, anointing the head was the unmistakable gesture for setting apart kings and priests. Samuel poured oil on Saul’s head to make him king. Moses anointed Aaron’s head to make him high priest. This woman, perhaps without knowing it, was doing the same for Jesus. The perfume was worth a year’s wages. A year of labor, poured out in a single moment. The room filled with the smell of nard, and it also filled with scandal.

The Scandal of Calculation

The disciples were indignant. Mark says they rebuked her harshly. They did the math out loud. Why this waste? This perfume could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor. That is the calculation. That is love’s opposite. The disciples were counting, measuring, and deciding what was appropriate. They wanted devotion that was respectable and efficient. They wanted love on a budget.

But Jesus would not allow it. He said to them, “Why are you bothering this woman? She has done a beautiful thing to me. The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me. She poured this perfume on my body beforehand to prepare me for burial.”

Here is the astonishing part. I do not think she fully understood the gravity of what she was doing. She was not thinking about messianic prophecy or burial rituals. She was not trying to check a theological box. She was simply loving, extravagantly and opportunistically, with everything she had. And yet, in her simple love, she did something profoundly theological. She anointed the Messiah without fully knowing what that meant.

Prophet, Priest, and King

Let us explore the significance of anointing in the Hebrew Scriptures. In Israel’s story, anointing was never a casual thing. You did not anoint ordinary people. You anointed three specific kinds of people. First, you anointed prophets, who were set apart to speak God’s truth. Second, you anointed priests, who were set apart to mediate between God and the people through sacrifices and prayers. Third, you anointed kings, who were set apart to reign and rule over God’s people. When the oil ran down a person’s head, it meant that God had chosen them for a task they could not give themselves. It was a visible sign of a divine calling.

This woman, this unnamed sinner, this example of extravagant love, anointed Jesus on the head. And Jesus, the one who would die and rise three days later, fulfills all three of those roles perfectly.

First, Jesus is the Prophet. He is not just another prophet like those in the Old Testament. He is the final prophet, the one who speaks the Father’s last and complete word. Moses said that God would raise up a prophet like him, and Jesus is that one. He does not say, “Thus says the Lord.” He says, “I say to you.” His words carry the full authority of heaven.

Second, Jesus is the Priest. But he is not a priest from the line of Aaron who offers animals and goats. He is a priest in the order of Melchizedek, a higher and eternal priesthood. And his sacrifice is not a lamb or a bull. His sacrifice is himself. He offers his own body and blood for the forgiveness of sins. He mediates between God and humanity not by entering an earthly temple but by entering heaven itself.

Third, Jesus is the King. He is the son of David, the rightful heir to the throne of Israel. But his kingdom is not of this world. He does not rule from a palace in Jerusalem. He rules from a cross and then from an empty tomb. His crown is made of thorns, and his scepter is a reed. Yet by his death and resurrection, he defeats sin, death, and the devil. He reigns now at the right hand of the Father, and one day every knee will bow to him.

The woman with the alabaster jar did not plan to make that theological statement. She did not sit down and work out the implications of her action. She just loved. And love, when it is left to itself and not restrained by calculation, always ends up speaking theology. Love pours out more than it can afford. Love acts faster than the mind can object. Love breaks the jar and lets the perfume flow.

Pour It Out

So here is what I am carrying into Easter this year. Do not calculate your love. Do not wait until you understand everything before you act. Do not ask what the minimum acceptable gift is. Instead, seize the moment, even if it looks foolish to the accountants in the room. Even if the disciples clear their throats and mutter about waste. Break the jar. Pour it out on his head.

We may not have alabaster jars of pure nard. We may never find ourselves reclining at a dinner table in Bethany. But Jesus himself gave us the way to pour out our love for him today. He said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” That is the alabaster jar of our time. Not perfume, but obedience. Not a year’s wages spilled on the floor, but a life laid down in the small and large choices of every day.

Extravagant love becomes extravagant obedience. It is one thing to feel devotion in the heart. It is another thing to obey when it is costly, to obey when no one is watching, to obey when the command does not make sense to the calculating mind. The disciples calculated the worth of the perfume and called her act a waste. We calculate the cost of obedience and call it impractical. But love does not calculate. Love obeys. Love obeys extravagantly, without asking how little it can get away with.

So here is the call. Obey the command you have been avoiding. Forgive the person you have been holding a grudge against. Give the gift you have been hesitating to give. Speak the truth you have been swallowing. Turn from the sin you have been nursing. Do not do the minimum. Do not be respectable and efficient in your discipleship. Break the jar. Pour it out. Obey like the woman who loved too much and got it exactly right.

There is a certain extravagance in love. And the only appropriate response to a God who gave everything, who held nothing back, who poured out his own life on the cross, is to do the same. Love without calculation. Obedience without restraint. A beautiful thing done for Jesus.

He is risen. But first, he was anointed on the head by a woman who loved too much and got it exactly right. May we love the same way. May we obey the same way.

I think about God a great deal.

As I mentioned in my previous article, most of the books I read revolve around theology. They have shaped not only what I believe but how I think. They have given me language for things I once felt but could not articulate, and they have slowly rewired the way I understand both Scripture and my own heart.

Recently, I listened to a podcast featuring Jackie Hill Perry and Preston Perry discussing faith (Jackie and Preston's Episode). Their conversation stirred something in me that had been dormant for a while. It sent me into a day of reflection on the last decade of my life as a believer and the long, sometimes painful process of unlearning what I thought I knew about faith.

But I should be honest from the start: my relationship with that word did not begin well.

My History with a Loaded Word

In the Christian circles where I grew up, “faith” functioned as a kind of conversation stopper.

Whenever I asked the difficult questions that naturally arise when you take God seriously, questions about suffering, about unanswered prayer, about the hiddenness of God, I was met with variations of the same response:

“Mambo ya Mungu haitaki science mingi ama kufikiria mingi , unabelieve tu.” which translates tu The things of God do not require much science or much thinking, just believe. And then, almost inevitably, someone would quote Isaiah:

“For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
— Isaiah 55:9

The message was clear: thinking too much about God was unnecessary at best and dangerous at worst. Faith, according to this framework, stood opposed to intellectual effort. You could either believe or you could think, but you could not do both.

I found this deeply unsatisfying. In fact, I found it offensive. It was intellectual suicide. Then I became a believer myself. Not long after, I encountered another verse that troubled me even more:

“And without faith it is impossible to please Him”
— Hebrews 11:6

I confess that this verse provoked something close to anger in me.

Think about the logic. God created us with brains. He made us capable of abstract thought, logical deduction, and deep reflection. Why would He do that only to demand that we set those capacities aside as the very condition for relating to Him? If faith required the suspension of reason, then the brain might as well have been purely functional, like the heart, useful for pumping blood but irrelevant to the life of the mind.

But time has a way of softening our certainties and complicating our categories.

Over the last decade, through seasons of doubt and devotion, through slow and often tedious study, my understanding of faith has undergone a complete transformation.

Before I go further, I should introduce you to some conversation partners you will encounter often in my writing. Men like John Owen, C. S. Lewis, A. W. Tozer, John MacArthur, and J. C. Ryle have become, through their books, constant companions in my spiritual and intellectual formation. They have a rare gift: they can write about deep theological truths in language that ordinary people can understand without losing depth or precision.

Two books, in particular, shaped my re-education: John Owen’s The Mortification of Sin and J. C. Ryle’s Holiness. Reading them, I slowly realized something that should have been obvious all along:

I had not simply misunderstood faith. I had misconceived it entirely.

1. Faith Is Not the Absence of Knowledge

The faith described in Scripture bears almost no resemblance to the blind leap I was told to take.

The Apostle Paul, writing to the Romans, explains exactly where faith comes from:

“So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.”
— Romans 10:17

Notice the logic. Faith comes from hearing. And hearing comes from the Word. This means faith is not a vacuum. It is a response. It does not begin when thinking stops. It begins when revelation is received.

The object of faith which is God provides the rational foundation upon which faith legitimately rests. We believe because we have heard something worthy of belief. We trust because we have encountered someone worthy of trust.

Theologians used to distinguish between two aspects of faith: the act of believing and the content that is believed. Both are essential. Faith without content is just sentiment, a vague religious feeling with no anchor. Content without faith is just information, facts stored in the brain that never reach the heart. Biblical faith holds these two dimensions together.

What I encountered early on was not faith but something else entirely. It was fideism—the idea that religious truth rests on faith alone, independent of reason or evidence. And I have come to believe that fideism is a distortion of authentic Christianity, which consistently appeals to evidence, to testimony, to fulfilled prophecy, to the historical resurrection, as grounds for belief.

The problem was never that Christianity demanded the abandonment of reason. The problem was that I had only encountered cheap versions of faith from people who had never learned to think about Christianity itself.

2. Faith Presses Against the Tidal Force of Sin

You cannot read Owen and Ryle with any seriousness without confronting the sheer power of sin.

Sin, as they present it, is not merely the occasional moral failure or the regrettable mistake in an otherwise decent life. It is a principle, a power, a law operating within us. It insinuates itself into our desires, our ambitions, even our ways of seeing the world. It corrupts not only our actions but the very source from which our actions flow.

Inside us, something pulls toward comfort, toward self-preservation, toward the exaltation of the ego, toward the avoidance of anything difficult or costly. The old writers called this the fomes peccati which means the inclination to sin, the ready fuel that waits for any spark.

Outside us, the world reinforces these inclinations at every turn. We are bombarded with messages about what matters, what validates us, what makes life worth living. And these messages stand in direct opposition to everything Jesus said about the kingdom.

Faith, properly understood, is not passive agreement with a set of propositions. It is active resistance. It is the will, strengthened by the Spirit and informed by the Word, choosing to believe what God has said over what our feelings suggest or our circumstances threaten.

This is why the author of Hebrews defines faith as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). Faith makes real, gives substance to, realities that lie beyond our natural perception. It is not wishful thinking. It is the organ by which we apprehend the invisible.

3. Faith Grows

Another dimension of faith that I had not considered is that faith develops over time.

Faith is not a light switch either on or off, present or absent. It is more like a muscle. It can be strong or weak. It can be exercised or neglected. It can grow, and it can atrophy.

Peter, in his second letter, commands us:

“But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”
— 2 Peter 3:18

Notice that grace and knowledge are coupled. Growth in one requires growth in the other. And faith, which operates through both, necessarily expands as we mature.

This growth does not happen automatically. It happens through trials, as James explains (James 1:2-4). It happens through sustained engagement with Scripture, as Paul implies (Romans 10:17). It happens through obedience, as John demonstrates (1 John 2:3-6). And it happens through the simple accumulation of experience with God, the slow weight of remembering His faithfulness in the past, which makes trusting Him in the present slightly less difficult.

Even the disciples, who walked with Jesus in the flesh, understood that their faith was insufficient. They did not hesitate to ask:

“Lord, increase our faith.”
— Luke 17:5

Notice what they do not say. They do not say, “Lord, give us faith,” as if they had none. They acknowledge the faith they have while recognizing its inadequacy. They understand that faith admits of degrees. It can be measured. It can and must increase.

This truth protects us from two errors. It protects us from despair, because weak faith does not disqualify us from relationship with Christ. He does not break the bruised reed. But it also protects us from presumption, because genuine faith does not excuse us from pursuing its growth. We are commanded to mature.

4. At the Root of Sin Lies Unbelief

The most significant shift in my thinking, the insight that has most changed both my theology and my daily life, concerns the relationship between sin and unbelief.

We are often taught that pride is the root of all sin. There is truth in this. The Proverbs tell us that “pride goes before destruction” (Proverbs 16:18), and James warns that “God opposes the proud” (James 4:6). C.S. Lewis, in his book Mere Christianity, goes so far as to call pride “the complete anti-God state of mind,” the vice through which “the devil became the devil”

But I have come to believe that pride itself grows from something deeper. Beneath pride lies unbelief.

Consider a specific sin and trace it to its source.

Why do I lie? On the surface, because I want to avoid consequences or manage how people see me. But press further. Why do I care so much about how people see me? Because, at some level, I do not believe that God’s view of me is enough. I do not trust His promise that those who seek Him lack no good thing. I believe, in that moment, that human approval will give me something God’s approval cannot.

Why am I anxious? On the surface, because circumstances seem threatening. But underneath, because I do not fully believe that God is in control of those circumstances. I do not rest in His providence. I functionally adopt the posture of the Gentiles who strive anxiously because they do not have a Father who knows their needs (Matthew 6:31-32).

Why do I bend myself into pretzels for the approval of others? Because I believe their good opinion matters more than God’s. I have, in that moment, assigned to finite creatures the worshipful attention due to the infinite Creator.

Every sin, when traced to its root, reveals itself as a failure to believe something true about God.

This realization changes how we pursue holiness. And this is where C.S. Lewis offers a crucial insight. In Mere Christianity, he explains that God is not merely concerned with whether we follow the rules or break them. He is concerned with the kind of people we are slowly becoming . Lewis uses a helpful image. He says many of us approach the Christian life like an honest man paying taxes. We pay them, but we hope there will be enough left over to live on. We want to meet God’s demands while still preserving our “natural self” and its desires .

But God will not settle for this arrangement. Lewis writes:

“Give Me all. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want you. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there. I want to have the whole tree down. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked, the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead” .

This is the deeper project behind sanctification. God is not merely correcting individual behaviors. He is reshaping our very identity. He is forming us into people who naturally trust Him, who naturally find our approval in Him, who naturally rest in His sovereignty. This is what Lewis means when he says that “Christianity is an education itself” . It is a slow transformation into the kind of person for whom faith is not a struggle but a reflex.

If we only address behaviors, we produce moralists, people who have learned to manage their external conduct while remaining unchanged at the heart level. This is the way of legalism. It produces whitewashed tombs. But if we trace our sins to the unbelief beneath them, and if we understand that God is after nothing less than our complete transformation, we begin to address the actual disease. We ask not merely, “What did I do wrong?” but “What truth about God did I stop believing?” We locate the specific promise we failed to trust. We identify the specific divine attribute we functionally denied.

This is not mere navel-gazing. It is theology applied to the soul.

The Honest Prayer That Faith Requires

After a decade of walking this path, after reading the Puritans and the fathers, after wrestling with Scripture and with my own stubborn heart, after accumulating enough history with God to have a reservoir of remembered faithfulness, I have learned something deeply humbling.

The struggle that marked its beginning marks its continuation. The old unbelief does not simply evaporate. It retreats, regroups, and attacks from different angles. The tidal force of indwelling sin does not diminish with age. It merely changes tactics.

And so the posture appropriate to the beginner remains appropriate to the veteran.

Perhaps the most honest, most theologically precise, most existentially authentic prayer about faith appears in the Gospel of Mark. A desperate father brings his afflicted son to Jesus. When the Lord conditions the miracle on belief, the man cries out with an anguish that still echoes across the centuries:

“I believe; help my unbelief!”
— Mark 9:24

That single sentence holds together the two poles of authentic faith.

It is confession: I believe. I have seen enough, heard enough, experienced enough to affirm that You are who You claim to be and that You can do what You have promised.

It is also petition: Help my unbelief. I am aware that my faith is not what it should be. I sense the residual resistance within me. I feel the pull of skepticism and the seduction of alternative explanations. I bring my divided heart to the only One who can make it whole. Like the old hymn says, “Bind my wandering heart to thee!”

This is not the prayer of the immature. This is the prayer of the mature who have finally understood that maturity does not mean self-sufficiency.

Faith, as I have been slowly re-educated to understand, is not the enemy of reason. It is reason’s highest exercise. The mind, enlightened by revelation and energized by grace, resting in the trustworthiness of God. It is not the absence of questions but the presence of a Person who is worthy of trust despite the questions.

It is, finally, the decision to echo the desperate father across the millennia, to hold belief and weakness in the same breath, and to bring both to the only One who can do anything about either.

Recently, someone told me I had religious psychosis. They said it after borrowing a book.

If you’ve ever watched my OOTD videos, you’ve probably already seen the setting: my room. And more specifically, my books. They are not hidden. They are simply… there. Everywhere. On shelves, in stacks, sometimes in small piles that migrate depending on what I am currently reading.

Most of them fall into two categories: theology and history.
And when I say history, I mean African history, colonialism, and the long aftermath of both. The kind of books that ask uncomfortable questions about formation, identity, power, and faith. Then there are a few biographies, lives of people who were deeply committed to something, for better or worse.

There isn’t much else competing for attention in the room.

So when they saw the collection, they paused. They asked what I usually read. I answered honestly and without much thought: mostly theology, then African history, then books on colonial structures and their aftermath. That has been my intellectual rhythm for a while now.

And then, very casually, they said it. “Religious psychosis.” At the time, I didn’t react the way most people might expect

The Strange Elation

I didn’t feel offended. I didn’t feel misunderstood. I didn’t even feel defensive. I felt… strangely affirmed. Almost amused, if I’m being honest. And beneath that, a quiet sense of “finally, Nimefikiwa!” Finally as in being recognized as someone who is deeply, visibly invested in something that clearly shapes how I live and think.

Because in a world where most interests are casual and constantly shifting, sustained focus looks unusual. A room full of books on God, history, and formation does not read as “hobby.” It reads as commitment. It reads as intensity.

But as the moment passed and the emotional reaction cooled, something more important replaced it: reflection.

I began to ask myself a simple question.

Is an all-consuming orientation toward God, history, and human formation a pathology?
Or is it something our age has simply forgotten how to name?

From Diagnosis to Interpretation

We live in a time saturated with psychological language. Clinical vocabulary has migrated from the consultation room into everyday speech, and we wear it now like casual clothing. Everything is a symptom. Everything fits a pattern. Everything must be categorized, labeled, filed, and interpreted through the lens of mental health.

This is not entirely bad. It has given us vocabulary for suffering that once suffered in silence. It has extended compassion where condemnation once stood.

But it has also narrowed our interpretive range.

When the only tool you have is a diagnostic manual, every depth begins to look like disorder. Every intensity begins to resemble illness. Every life structured around something transcendent begins to appear suspect.

So when someone encounters a room filled with theological texts, historical archives, and biographies of deeply committed lives, the modern reflex is not curiosity. It is not wonder. It is not even respectful uncertainty.

It is diagnosis.

But I have wondered, in the weeks since: Were they reading my life through the wrong manual entirely?

Because what they saw as excess, I experience as coherence. What they interpreted as intensity, I understand as devotion. And those are not the same thing. They are not even in the same category of experience. One traps you inside your own mind. The other situates you within something vast enough to hold you.

The Lost Art

We are constantly told that critical thinking is disappearing. That the capacity for sustained analysis, for reasoned argument, for intellectual rigor, is in irreversible decline. The alarm has been sounded so often and so loudly that we have come to accept it as fact.

I disagree.

Critical thinking is everywhere. My readers are proof of that. The modern mind—for all its distractions, for all its fragmentation—remains remarkably agile, remarkably observant, remarkably capable of analysis. You are some of the sharpest thinkers I know. You deconstruct arguments for breakfast. You spot fallacies before they fully form. You question everything, including me, including this.

That is not the lost art.

What is actually disappearing, what has become so unfamiliar that we mistake it for madness is devotion.

This is something far more difficult and far more rare: sustained, disciplined, enduring focus on something beyond the self. The willingness to organize an entire intellectual and spiritual life around questions that cannot be answered in a single lifetime. The courage to commit to formation rather than mere information

.

Devotion is:

The sustained orientation of one’s intellectual and spiritual life around questions, texts, and traditions that demand more than casual engagement.

It is the opposite of curation. Where curation samples widely and commits narrowly, devotion returns repeatedly to the same sources, not because it lacks curiosity, but because it understands that depth requires repetition.

It chooses meaning over novelty. Not because novelty is worthless, but because meaning takes time, years, decades, a lifetime, to disclose itself. It allows itself to be formed rather than merely informed. Formation happens slowly, through encounter with what endures. Information arrives quickly and departs just as fast.

And when someone appears who has been formed, really formed, deeply formed, visibly formed, it unsettles us. Because it reminds us that formation requires submission. And submission, in an age of absolute autonomy, is the unforgivable sin.

The Archive

When I look at my room, I do not see evidence of psychological fracture. I do not see the detritus of a mind unmoored. I see architecture. I see a life organized around questions that matter

Theology: not as abstract system but as living inquiry. The pursuit of understanding God not as concept but as center. The refusal to treat ultimate questions as optional.

African history and colonial studies: not as academic specialty but as act of remembrance. The refusal to exist ahistorically. The devotion to understanding how identity, faith, and nationhood were shaped ,and deformed, by conquest. The conviction that healing requires honesty about the wound.

Biographies: the study of lives wholly given to something. Whether faith, reform, intellect, or calling. Lives that modern culture might also label too intense, too singular, too much. Lives that remind me devotion is possible because others have lived it.

This is not chaos.

My books are not noise in my head. They are conversation across time. They are voices, theologians, historians, reformers, thinkers, who dedicated their entire existence to understanding truth, suffering, faith, and formation. They challenge me. They refine me. They humble me. They remind me that I am not the first to ask these questions and will not be the last.

That is not psychosis.

A Necessary Precision

Let me be responsible here. Let me draw a line that must be drawn.

Genuine psychosis is a serious and often devastating mental condition. It deserves compassion, care, and proper clinical attention. It isolates a person in a reality detached from shared experience. It fragments thought, disrupts relationship, and causes profound suffering. It is not something to romanticize, aestheticize, or claim lightly.

I am not doing that.

Devotion, at its best, does the opposite of what psychosis does. It anchors rather than isolates. It connects rather than severs. It situates you within tradition, history, and community across centuries. It disciplines your thoughts rather than scattering them. It gives you a place to stand and something to stand for.

The Badge and the Burden Reconsidered

When I first heard the phrase religious psychosis, it felt like a badge. A confirmation that I had crossed into territory where most people feared to go. A sign that my devotion was visible enough to be named, even if named wrongly.

Now I understand it differently. Not as badge. Not as burden. But as mirror.

A mirror reflecting not my illness but our collective unfamiliarity with devotion. A mirror showing how strange commitment has become. A mirror revealing that in a world of fragments, wholeness looks like madness. In a world of distraction, focus looks like obsession. In a world of casual belief, conviction looks like danger. In a world that scrolls endlessly, stillness with books looks like pathology.

The mirror does not lie.
But it does not diagnose either.
It simply shows us what we have forgotten.

An Invitation, Not a Defense

This is not a defense of myself. I do not need defending. This is an invitation.

To you. To anyone who has made it this far. What are you devoted to

?

Not what interests you. Not what you consume. Not what you casually affirm or conditionally believe. But what has formed you? What has shaped the architecture of your attention? What would be in the room behind you in your OOTD video? What would your shelves reveal if someone looked closely enough?

Would they see distraction?
Consumption?
Entertainment?
Escapism?
Would they see someone being shaped by something?
Would they see devotion, however imperfect, however incomplete?

For those who have stayed with me this far: thank you. For those who recognize themselves in these words, the ones whose shelves tell a story, whose rooms reveal a devotion, whose lives are organized around something beyond the self, you are not alone. And you are not mad. You are simply living a lost art, and the loss is ours, not yours.

Before You Read

Christians are constantly taught the importance of context when reading Scripture. We know that a verse pulled from its chapter, its book, its place in the redemptive story can become dangerous

I do not claim to speak Scripture. But I do believe the same principle applies to human words, including mine.

The article I wrote

“Marriage: The graveyard of women’s dreams”was received by some as an attack on marriage or precisely married women. I want to gently suggest that such a reading requires removing my words from their context. And when words are removed from their context, they can be made to say things the writer never intended.

So let me offer the context again. Slowly. Carefully. With love.

What the Article Was Actually About

The article was about womanhood.

It was about watching my mother, a capable, intelligent, hardworking woman, slowly become smaller. Not in value, but in possibility. It was about the fear that took root in me: that womanhood itself might be a corridor leading to erasure.

It was about how I initially responded to that fear with deviation rooted in self-protection that bordered on self-loathing, rejecting aspects of femininity because I mistook the cage for the bird.

It was about how Christ met me in that place and began redeeming my understanding of womanhood, showing me that the problem was never femininity itself, but the distortions sin had introduced into how it is lived and valued.

It was about how that redemption moved me toward advocacy, toward standing in the gap for women still carrying ashes they were told to call beauty.

And yes, it was also about marriage. Because marriage is one of the things womanhood encompasses. Because I watched my mother’s marriage narrow her world.
Because I have felt the cultural pressure to shrink in order to be chosen.
Because marriage idolatry is real, and it is quietly crushing women.

But marriage was never the central subject. Womanhood was. Flourishing was. The present call of God on a woman’s life right now, single or married, waiting or not was. So in essence the article was about TIME and other kidogo things on the side

What I Was Not Saying

Let me name clearly what I was not saying, because several married women heard these things and I want to address them directly.

I was not saying that all married women orbit marriage or pause their dreams.

I was saying that the pressure to do so, by single women, is real, pervasive, and damaging. Some women resist it. Some internalize it. All of us, in some way, are shaped by the cultural messaging around it.

If you are a married woman who paused your education fully, stopped your career for your marriage as directed by God, I celebrate that. You are not the target of my critique. In fact, you are evidence that flourishing and covenant can coexist.

I was not saying that marriage requires no sacrifice.

Marriage does require sacrifice. Every covenant does. Christ modelled self-giving love. Paul speaks of mutual submission. But there is a difference between sacrifice offered within a covenant and shrinkage performed to obtain one.

Sacrifice within marriage flows from security. You are already chosen. Already loved. Already committed. Your giving flows from fullness, not desperation. You lay down your life and because the one you love is doing the same for you, and even when they don’t because God sees and He is our ultimate reward!

Shrinkage for marriageability flows from fear. You are not yet chosen. Not yet secure. Not yet in covenant. You shrink yourself in the hope that a smaller version of you might finally be acceptable. You sacrifice parts of your story, not for a person who loves you, but for a possibility you have been taught depends on your diminishment.

I was speaking to the second. Not the first.

I was not attacking marriage.

I believe marriage is good. I hope to be married one day. I affirm it as a God-ordained gift. Proverbs 18:22 says, “He who finds a wife finds what is good and receives favour from the Lord.” I do not dispute this.

What I was confronting is marriage idolatry. The quiet system of pressure that convinces women their value depends on being chosen, that their dreams must be postponed until a husband arrives, and that their fullness must be moderated to be acceptable.

That is not marriage. That is a distortion of it.

What I Was Actually Saying to Single Women

Women who have been told:

Don’t read too much, it intimidates men. Don’t advance too far in your career, it makes you look hard to lead. Don’t be too successful, it reduces your marriageability.
Don’t pursue that masters now, what if you meet someone and have to move?
Don’t become bold, because a man might not want too much.

These messages are real. They are spoken in families, in subtle jokes and well-meaning advice. And they are crushing the spirits of brilliant women who are being told, directly and indirectly, that their flourishing is a liability. And it’s only a liability because she is a woman!

To those women, I said:
Your intellect is not a threat.
Your career is not an obstacle.
Your ambition is not rebellion.

These are gifts from God. I said: Do not postpone your living. Do not put your obedience on hold for a husband who does not yet exist. Do not sacrifice your present on the altar of a hypothetical future.

Womanhood is not a waiting room. It is a calling.

And you are called to flourish now not just on the other side of a ring.

What My Mother Taught Me (And What I Did Not Say About Motherhood)

Some readers assumed I was critiquing motherhood itself. I was not.

I spoke about my mother because she is my mother. I spoke about watching her because that watching shaped me. But I did not presume to speak for mothers as a category or about motherhood

I know what it means to be a daughter to an unhappy, unseen, exhausted mother. I know the grief of watching a woman you love dim. I know the fear that plants in a young girl’s heart when she confuses suffering with destiny.

But I do not know what it means to be a mother. And I did not claim to.

If you are a mother who finds expansion in motherhood rather than contraction, I celebrate you. If you are loved well within your marriage and supported in your calling, I praise God for that.

Love and exhaustion, however, can coexist. Devotion and diminishment can share a body. That is the complexity I was naming not a condemnation of motherhood itself.

The Real Issue: A Distorted Relationship with Time

At its heart, my article was about time.

C.S. Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters, describes a strategy the demon Wormwood is taught: keep the patient’s mind fixed on the past with guilt or nostalgia or on the future with anxiety or fantasy. But never, ever allow them to live in the present. Because the present is where God meets us. The present is the only place where obedience actually happens.

That insight has haunted me, because I see it playing out in the lives of so many women and to speak honestly, in mine as well.

Marriage mania- that intense, anxious fixation on becoming a wife, is fundamentally a disorder of time. It pulls women out of the present and traps them in a future that hasn’t arrived. And I don’t use words like mania lightly, I am not talking about women who desire to be wives, no, I mean an overwhelming obsession with it.

When I’m married, then I’ll be whole.
When I’m married, then my life will finally begin.

And so the present becomes something to endure. A season of filler while real life waits in the wings. But here is the truth the future-fixated miss

God is not just in the future. God is here.

The same God who will walk with you through marriage is walking with you now. The same Spirit who will guide you as a wife is guiding you today. The same presence that will fill a covenant home is filling your apartment, your room, your single life at this very moment.

Postponement is not piety.
Waiting passively is not worship.
Endurance is not the same as faithfulness.

The present is where you study, serve, build, create, and grow. The present is where your character is formed, your gifts are developed, your voice is strengthened. The present is where you become the woman you will one day bring into marriage or bring into a lifetime of devoted singleness lived fully for God.

God’s will for you today is not inferior to his will for you tomorrow.

The calling on your life right now - to be sanctified, to learn, to work, to worship, to be faithful in the small things is just as sacred as any calling that awaits you. More than that: it is the foundation for whatever comes next. A woman who cannot live faithfully single will not suddenly become faithful when a ring appears on her finger. A woman who postpones her life until marriage will arrive at the altar expecting a husband to complete what she refused to build.

But a woman who lives fully in the present, who pursues God with abandon now, who invests in her mind and her work and her community now, who builds a life of meaning and purpose now, that woman does not need marriage to save her. She is already saved. She is already whole. She is already living the abundant life Christ promised.

And if marriage comes? She will enter it not empty and desperate, but full and free. Not looking to be completed, but ready to be one another.

That is the goal. That is the freedom.
That is what becomes possible when we stop living in the future and start meeting God in the present.

What I Hope You Hear

If you read my first article and felt accused, I am sorry that was your experience. That was not my intent.

If you are a married woman who entered marriage whole and continues to flourish within it, thank you. You are evidence that covenant does not require erasure. If you are a mother who has found deep joy and expansion in your calling, I celebrate you.

But if you are a single woman who has been told you are too much…
If you have muted yourself in hopes of being chosen…
If you have postponed obedience because you are waiting for marriage to begin your life…

Then these words are for you.

Womanhood is not a place where dreams go to die.

It is a calling. And you are called to live fully now, not because marriage is bad, but because God is good.

And He is present. And He is worthy of your obedience today.

“Great is the Lord and most worthy of praise; His greatness no one can fathom.” Psalm 145:3

I did not resonate with it because I hate being a woman. I resonated with it because I watched a woman I love live it.

I watched my mother.

I watched a capable, intelligent, hardworking woman slowly become smaller. Not in value. Not in worth. But in possibility. Her life did not collapse dramatically. It narrowed. Quietly. Gradually. The kind of narrowing that society praises because it looks like sacrifice, duty, and strength.

What happens when the light in a woman’s eyes grow dim? When the brightness dims not from age but from attrition? When a woman’s light is slowly extinguished by the weight of responsibilities she was never meant to carry alone?

My mother’s light did not go out in one dramatic moment. It was starved of oxygen over decades.

And as a daughter, you do not always have the language for what you are witnessing. You just feel it. You feel the weight of her responsibilities. You notice the exhaustion she calls normal. You observe how her dreams are not destroyed in one moment, but postponed indefinitely until postponement becomes disappearance. That does something to a young girl.

It plants a quiet fear that womanhood itself is a corridor that leads to erasure. That to become a wife, a mother, a “good woman” is to slowly negotiate away your fullness. That the Proverbs 31 woman is not a portrait of flourishing but a checklist for gradual death.

For a long time, my response to that fear was deviation. Not the kind of deviation rooted in clarity, but in self-protection that bordered on self-loathing. I began to subconsciously associate traditional womanhood with limitation. With shrinking. With loss of agency. I rejected womanhood loudly. I distanced myself from it internally.

I told myself that to be safe, I had to be different. Stronger. More independent. Less soft. Less dependent. Less feminine in the ways I believed had trapped the women before me.

Looking back, I realize that posture was fear disguised as empowerment. Because when you grow up watching dreams deferred within the lives of women, you can begin to suspect that femininity itself is the problem, rather than the conditions those women were forced to live under. You can mistake the cage for the bird.

Then I got born again. And that is when something unexpected began to happen.

Christ did not call me away from womanhood.
He began redeeming my understanding of it.

I began to read Scripture with new eyes.

I noticed that when God created woman in Genesis 2, he did not create her as an afterthought or a helper in the demeaning sense. The Hebrew word ezer — used to describe her — appears throughout the Old Testament most frequently to describe God himself as our help. The same word is used in Psalm 33:20: “Our soul waits for the Lord; he is our help and our shield.” To be a helper, biblically, is not to be subordinate. It is to be essential.

In Christ, womanhood stopped looking like a slow death of dreams.
It began to look like stewardship of them.

I realized that softness is not weakness. Nurturing is not erasure. Marriage is not meant to be a cage. Motherhood is not meant to be the burial ground of purpose.

The problem is not womanhood.
The problem is when womanhood is reduced to endurance alone.

Which raised a question I could not escape:

If Christ has redeemed my understanding of womanhood, what does he want me to do with it?

Salvation, I am learning, is not a private transaction. It is a public commission. When God transforms a person, he almost always sends them back into the mess they came from, not as a victim this time, but as an agent of liberation.

Think of Moses, delivered from the Nile, only to be sent back to Egypt.
Think of Esther, elevated to queenship, only to be positioned for intervention.
Think of Paul, blinded on the road to Damascus, only to have scales fall from his eyes so he could help others see.

God does not redeem us so we can escape.
He redeems us so we can return with authority.

For me, that return has taken the form of advocacy.

I have devoted myself to the liberation of women. Not in the abstract sense of hashtags and slogans, but in the concrete, daily work of helping women reclaim what has been stolen from them: their voices, their agency, their dreams, their dignity.

Isaiah 61:1-3 has become a kind of ordination text for me:

“The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners... to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.”

I used to read those words and think of them as ancient poetry.
Now I read them as a job description.

Because I have seen too many women wearing ashes. I have seen too many women trapped in darkness, not prisons of stone, but prisons of expectation, obligation, and fear. I have seen too many women mourning lives they were told to be grateful for, even as those lives slowly suffocated them.

And I have come to believe that the gospel is not good news if it leaves those women exactly where they were.

James writes that “faith without works is dead” (James 2:17). I would add that redemption without advocacy is incomplete. If I have been freed from fear, how can I not help others find freedom? If my eyes have been opened to see that womanhood is not a curse but a calling, how can I not help other women see the same?

So I advocate. I speak.
I write.
I mentor.
I challenge.
I create spaces where women can ask the questions they were never allowed to ask, name the pains they were told to bury, and imagine futures beyond the scripts they were handed at birth.

My advocacy is not a career choice. It is a response to grace.

It is me saying to God: You showed me the truth about womanhood. Now let me be part of showing it to others.

And this is where marriage mania becomes not just a personal concern, but an advocacy concern

.

Because when I watch women postpone their lives, shrink their ambitions, and orbit marriage as if it were the sun around which all existence revolves, I am watching the same narrowing that happened to my mother’s generation, just dressed in different clothes.

In many of our societies, marriage is treated as the ultimate validation of a woman’s existence. It is spoken of with urgency, anxiety, and sometimes quiet desperation. Girls are not just raised to desire marriage; they are raised to orbit it.

Every ambition is filtered through it. Every timeline is measured against it.
Every delay is treated as a crisis.
Every unmarried woman over a certain age is pitied, prayed for, or pressured.

I have watched brilliant women pause their dreams while waiting for a husband. I have watched women pursue degrees they never fully use, careers they never fully inhabit, because the real goal, the only goal that counts, was marriage. Everything else was just filling time.

I have watched women enter marriages not because they were ready, not because they had found genuine partnership, but because the clock was ticking and the pressure was unbearable. And I have watched those same women, years later, slowly dim in the same way my mother dimmed because they brought a hollowed-out version of themselves to the altar, having postponed their becoming for too long.

Let me be clear: marriage is a good thing.
A beautiful thing.
A God-ordained thing.

I aspire to it one day.

Scripture is not silent on the goodness of marriage. Proverbs 18:22 says, “He who finds a wife finds what is good and receives favour from the Lord.” The Song of Solomon celebrates romantic love with an intimacy that still makes some Christians uncomfortable. Paul, in Ephesians 5, compares marriage to the relationship between Christ and the church, a mystery so profound it deserves reverence, not anxiety.

But marriage becomes mania when the pursuit of it cripples a woman’s pursuit of the fullness of what God has placed within her. When her education, calling, creativity, and intellectual growth are put on hold in anticipation of a role that was never meant to replace her identity.

Marriage was never designed to be the graveyard of a woman’s becoming.
It was meant to be a partnership that amplifies it.

The tragedy I witnessed in my mother’s generation was not that they became wives or mothers. It was that the structures around them, cultural, economic, relational, often required total self-abandonment as proof of love and virtue.

This is why advocacy matters.

Because when I mentor a young woman who is anxious about her marital timeline, I do not tell her that marriage is unimportant. I tell her that the woman she is becoming now is the woman she will bring to a marriage later. And that woman should be whole. Not desperately hoping a husband will complete her.

When I write, I do not condemn the institution of marriage. I call it back to its original design: a partnership of mutual flourishing, not a funeral for female ambition.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 7 that marriage brings worldly troubles and I used to read that as pessimism. Now I read it as honesty. Marriage is not heaven. It is not the end of becoming. It is a context for continued becoming, but only if both parties enter it as whole people committed to each other’s growth.

And if we enter it as half-people, looking for the other to complete us? That is not marriage. That is idolatry. And idols always demand sacrifice.

Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:17: “If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old has gone, the new is here.”

I used to apply that verse only to sin.
Now I apply it to vision.

In Christ, I am a new creation and that means I am free to see my mother’s life clearly: with love, with grief, with honour, and without fear that her path must be mine. I am free to pursue intellectual growth as worship. I am free to hope for marriage without needing it to save me. I am free to embrace femininity without equating it with disappearance. I am free to pursue God, purpose, and partnership without believing that one must cancel the other.

And I am free to advocate.

To stand in the gap for women who are still wearing ashes. To speak freedom to those still captive to expectation. To declare, with Isaiah, that beauty is possible not despite womanhood, but through it, redeemed

.

This article was inspired by a piece reflecting on the quiet guilt many daughters carry when they look at their mothers’ lives and think, “I want something different.” That reflection articulated a truth many of us feel but rarely say aloud.

But my conclusion diverges in one crucial way:

Womanhood is not inherently a place where dreams go to die.
It only becomes that when it is detached from truth, agency, and God’s original intention.

In Christ, womanhood is not a narrowing.
It is a calling. Not to disappear. But to flourish, fully, faithfully, and without apology.

Honouring our mothers does not mean rehearsing their suffering in a different decade. It means learning from it with discernment. It means saying thank you, and then going further. It means becoming the woman they could not fully become, not out of arrogance, but out of love.

And it means taking other women by the hand and saying: Come. There is room for you here. There is room for your dreams here. There is room for your fullness here. The God who made woman in his image did not make her to be small.

That, I think, is the deepest honour a daughter can give.

That is advocacy as worship

.

May we be women who do not disappear.
May we be women who call others to flourish.
May we be living proof that in Christ, the place where dreams go to die becomes the place where they rise again.

Amen.

Kenya: a name that conjures images of the Great Wildebeest Migration, the snow-capped peaks of Mount Kenya, and the pristine coastline of the Indian Ocean. It’s a nation celebrated as the “Pride of Africa,” not just for its breathtaking landscapes but for its dynamism. At the heart of this energy lies Nairobi, our vibrant capital, a city so alive with wildlife that it’s the only capital in the world with a national park within its boundaries.

And yet, just beneath this aspirational surface lies a quieter, uglier image.

A young man slumped over a plastic table in a dimly lit bar at 11 a.m. A woman in her early twenties nursing cheap spirits to blunt the ache of another jobless day. A headline about dozens dead from illicit alcohol. Another. And another.

This is not an anomaly. It is a pattern.

So we must ask an uncomfortable question: How can a nation so full of promise be silently ravaged by an epidemic of alcoholism, particularly among its youth?

The answer is not simply “poor choices.”
It never was.

II. The Marxian Lens: The New Opium

Karl Marx once warned that societies develop ways to numb themselves, mechanisms that dull pain, suppress rebellion, and make unbearable conditions tolerable without ever changing them. The phrase “opium of the masses” is often attributed to Marx, but the insight transcends attribution: when people are given a reliable escape, they are less likely to demand justice.

In 19th-century Europe, religion was accused of playing that role, offering heaven later in exchange for silence now.

In contemporary Kenya, alcohol plays a far more efficient part. It does not promise eternal reward. It offers immediate relief.

Relief from unemployment.
Relief from humiliation.
Relief from the gnawing sense that life is not unfolding as promised.

Alcohol is not merely consumed, it is prescribed by the environment. And the system that produces this environment is neither accidental nor neutral.

It is profitable.
It is convenient.
And it is devastating

III. Engineering normalcy: How the system works

Alcoholism in Kenya does not spread because young people lack discipline. It spreads because powerful systems make intoxication the easiest, cheapest, and most socially acceptable response to despair.

1. The Economic Engine

Kenya’s alcohol industry is enormous. From multinational beverage corporations to local distributors, brewers, advertisers, and tax authorities, alcohol is big business.

Walk through any town, urban or rural and count the number of alcohol outlets versus libraries, sports facilities, or community centers.
Then count the billboards.

Alcohol is marketed as success.
As leisure.
As masculinity.
As adulthood.
As reward.

When alcohol becomes more accessible than hope, addiction is not a mystery. It is an outcome.

The state, too, is compromised. Alcohol taxes are a significant source of revenue. This creates a perverse incentive: regulate just enough to appear responsible, but never enough to disrupt the cash flow. The problem is “managed,” not solved.

Rehabilitation centers are underfunded.
Prevention campaigns are cosmetic.
Accountability dissolves in bureaucracy.

A poisoned well continues to generate income, so long as the deaths are dispersed and the victims are poor.

2. The Political Pacifier

History is clear: an intoxicated population is easier to govern.
A young person numbing their frustration with cheap liquor is not organizing.
They are not reading policy white papers. They are not registering voters.
They are surviving the night.

Kenya’s youth face staggering unemployment and underemployment. Degrees lead to debts, hustles barely sustain life, and endless exhortations to “work harder” echo in an economy that has structurally locked them out. But we have seen what happens when that bottled-up frustration does not turn inward. We saw it during the Maandamano season of June 2025, when a generation sober, furious, and digitally united poured into the streets. Those protests were not a passing event; they were a seismic revelation. Generation Z, armed with nothing but smartphones and collective clarity, shook the very foundations of political complacency. They proved that a clear-minded, un-pacified youth is the single greatest threat to a stagnant status quo.

That is why the normalization of alcohol is not merely a public health failure, it is a political safety valve. The system learned a dangerous lesson in June 2025: an awake youth is uncontrollable. So, what is the answer? Not to address the root causes of their despair, but to re-engineer the escape.

Alcohol absorbs the rage that might otherwise become resistance.
After Maandamano, the discourse didn’t pivot wholly to job creation or systemic reform; the landscape quietly became dotted with more bars, more happy-hour promotions, and more influencers selling the aesthetic of forgetting. The message, subtle and pervasive, shifted from “Tuko Pamoja” (We are together) to “Tuko Outside” (We are outside).

Instead of sustained protests, there are strategic hangovers.
Instead of policy demands, there is curated distraction.
Instead of the collective power of Gen Z in the streets, there is the private escape of a generation back in their bottles.

This is not conspiracy; it is cold, political convenience. A generation that is medicating its pain is not a generation building power. It is a generation merely enduring. And for those who benefit from the current order, endurance is far safer than enlightenment.

3. The Cultural & Social Glue (Now Turned Toxic)

Let’s be clear from the outset: this is not a sermon for absolute teetotaling. The issue is not the substance itself in a historical or ritual context, but the toxic transformation of its role in our society.

Alcohol did not always function as a solitary escape. In traditional Kenyan societies, from the busaaof the Luhya to the muratina of the Kikuyu, communal brews were regulated, ritualized, and deeply embedded within frameworks of responsibility and restraint. Drinking was a social act, governed by elders and occasion, a thread in the fabric of community that reinforced bonds rather than fraying them.

What we see today is a violent perversion of that thread. Commercial spirits, high-potency, cheap, and wrapped in glamorous advertising, have severed the link between drinking and community accountability. The ritual has been replaced by the transaction. We have moved from the communal calabash to the solitary bottle; from a practice of connection to one of coping.

Alcohol is now our universal solvent, present at every emotional extreme: at weddings andfunerals, job promotions and crushing rejections. It has become the default language for grief, stress, boredom, and even celebration. To opt out is to risk social exile; to question the frenzy is to be labeled a killjoy or holier-than-thou.

This is the ultimate victory of normalization: when a problem becomes so woven into daily life that it becomes invisible. The glue that once held us together in shared experience has turned adhesive and toxic, it now binds us to a cycle of avoidance, debt, and ill health. We are not being called to abandon social bonding, but to awaken to the fact that the very thing we use to bond is now poisoning the well of our collective spirit.

The awakening we need is to recognize that what masquerades as glue has, in fact, become a solvent, dissolving our ambition, our health, and our capacity for genuine, unmediated connection. The challenge is not to swear off a drink, but to reclaim the social ritual from the grip of a predatory, pacifying industry.

The National Cost: A Sedated Future

The toll of this epidemic is measured not just in personal ruin, but in national decline-a slow, systemic erosion of our collective potential.

Our healthcare infrastructure, already burdened, bends under the weight of liver disease, hypertension, and injuries linked to abuse. Our workplaces, meant to drive our economy forward, are haunted by absenteeism, foggy decision-making, and talent lost to the bottle. In homes across the country, families fracture not with a bang, but with the slow, corrosive drip of broken promises, financial strain, and emotional neglect.

Most devastating, however, is the theft of possibility. Every young mind clouded by dependency is a spark of innovation unlit- a business not started, a problem not solved, a piece of art not created. We speak proudly of our “youth dividend,” our demographic advantage, yet we have allowed a predatory system to turn that dividend into a liability. We are sedating our greatest resource.

What does it mean to be the “Pride of Africa” if that pride is drunk into silence? A lion pride survives by nurturing its young, sharpening their instincts, and preparing them to lead the hunt. It does not thrive by sedating its cubs.

The ultimate cost is this: a future postponed, a nation running on fumes instead of fire. We are trading tomorrow’s promise for tonight’s numbness and the bill is coming due for us all.

Awakening from the Stupor

To confront the alcoholism crisis in Kenya is to challenge a pervasive and convenient fiction: that this is merely a story of individual failing.

Yes, personal choice exists. But choice is not forged in a vacuum. It is shaped and often strangled by the environment around it. When the landscape is paved with cheap escape and social pressure, what looks like a free decision is often a conditioned surrender.

We must learn to see the bottle for what it has become in our context: it is a tool of social control, a political pacifier, and a profit center built on a foundation of quiet despair.

Therefore, the first and most radical step toward change is not necessarily sobriety, but clarity. To look at our communities, our economy, and our culture with clear eyes and ask: Who benefits from our collective numbness? What future is being deferred while we are distracted?

Kenya’s destiny will not be distilled from a bottle. It will be forged in the clear-eyed courage of a generation that chooses to feel, the frustration, the anger, the unmet potential, and to channel that feeling not into private escape, but into public demand. We must build a society that offers more than survival, more than a chemical pause from pain, more than a managed decline.

The Pride of Africa does not need another round.
It needs a revolution of the awake.