Some things disturb me and I think they should do the same for more of us, one of them is that most human beings are not controlled because they are weak but because they are afraid. Fear is one of the oldest and most successful codes ever written into the human mind becuause you do not always need chains when you can convince a person that disobedience will destroy their future, their body, their reputation or even their soul. A frightened individual watches and guardes themselves before anyone else does, they censor their own thoughts, suppress their own questions and call it discipline and eventually forget there is a bold difference between obedience and freedom.

We are all somehow introduced to this very early in life, before we have the means or right words to question everything, school quietly teaches us that if we do not obey, we will fail and anyone who fails is placed lower on an invisible hierarchy of human importance. The one who performs well or better is celebrated as though that achievement itself is proof of superior human value, the one who cannot survive the system is slowly taught to feel behind, inadequate or defective to society. Excellence then becomes something everyone goes for with anxiety hanging over their heads and not really because they want to. We don't say much about what happens to a child who learns fear before they learn who they actually are. Education is important and I am not suggesting that ignorance should be romanticized but whoever gets into the system must be aware to not be consumed by it.

Every human being deserves access to knowledge, understanding and the ability to navigate the world consciously but the real information is kept out of human reach and what is put out is the one that constructs humans to fit the man made system that does not serve them fully. Education is not intelligence and intelligence can not only be found in a classroom or a lecture hall, life and experiences make one intelligent. Not every individual will grasp, enjoy or perform well within a system of education shaped by colonial history and standardized expectations. Some people do not fail because they are not intelligent enough but they fail because their intelligence is not profitable or rather understandable in the code of the institution testing them. It is a terrifying thing to think about when millions of people build their entire identity around being academically validated.

What if some people are not unintelligent but are simply being examined by a system that was never built to accommodate them? Before the introduction of books and influence of what knowledge was supposed to look like, I believe human beings already knew things. There were traditional/herbal doctors before modern medical institutions existed, there were teachers, mothers for a better example before classrooms, farmers before agricultural degrees and philosophers before anyone called philosophy a subject to be explored professionally. Knowledge existed in communities, stories, land, observation and generations of people watching one another survive which we watch in documentaries and TV productions now.

Human beings were educating themselves long before colonization arrived with books and declared certain forms of knowing civilized but somewhere along modernization, natural abilities got reduced beneath occupations labelled professional, prestigious and better paying and slowly, people were considered unsuccessful when their gifts or talents can not easily be turned into the kind of labour the system prefers.

Education can liberate a human being but it can also train one to become useful to someone else's design and this does not mean education is bad, it means we should be honest about how the systems were built and why. No system is created in a vacuum and people don't construct structures without being interested in what they will benefit from those who will be accomodated and placed inside them. Society needs workers, administrators, professionals and people capable of maintaining the system so people are taught how to survive inside the system and then call the ones who cannot cope in them failures. We are not speaking much about whether the system itself was designed to accommodate all humans equally or by the book.

Then you grow older and discover that school was only the beginning, you enter a larger society with another command around fear, obey or go to jail. Suddenly, being human is being expected to live as though one is constantly walking on eggshells, terrified of crossing lines drawn by people whose lives may look nothing like theirs. It is unfair to judge anyone under circumstances that the person who created the law has never experienced and has never had to survive, it shows how humanity is increasingly restricted by rules written without examining pain, poverty, desperation or reality and we must slower when it comes to confusing the existence of law with the assumption that every law deserves unquestioning obedience.

Law and order are necessary because human beings can be dangerous to one another, a society where people are free to destroy, exploit and violate one another without consequences would eventually consume itself but such is happening already, law makers and politicians are not abiding by their own rules and laws. Humanity did not discover morality when governments began implementing laws and building prisons, long before modern states, communities understood danger and developed ways of dealing with those who made others vulnerable, I believe human beings have always carried instincts about harm, protection, responsibility and survival. We have always known in one form or another, that some actions tear the fabric holding people together.

What changed was that punishment became centralized and fear became increasingly useful to those holding the authority to punish. Punishment became power and eventually discovered the usefulness of fear and this is why corrupt leaders survive even after they have failed and stopped serving the people they claim to represent. People become afraid to speak honestly because honesty can be interpreted as sabotage, criticism looks like disrespect, disagreement becomes treason and exposing corruption becomes an attack of states. Even speaking negatively but truthfully about a leader can become dangerous when leadership begins treating itself as something sacred, leaders are no longer simply a public servant but symbols that people must protect from the truth and the major sign of political sickness is when citizens become more afraid of their government than the government is afraid of failing its citizens.

No human being should be exempt from criticism because they have power but fear makes criticism psychologically impossible, people are too good with calculating consequences over the truth. They forcefully have to ask themselves who might hear them, what might happen to their jobs, their families or their safety and eventually silence stops feeling like cowardice and starts feeling like survival. That is how control becomes sophisticated, not by forcing everyone to agree but by making disagreements dangerous to express. Societies do not need to love their oppressors if they have been successfully taught to fear the consequences of the truth.

Then comes religion, offering humanity another version of the same question, obey or suffer after death and now fear becomes eternal because the punishment is no longer limited to a prison sentence, public humiliation or social rejection but now you are told that the consequences of getting it wrong may follow you beyond your body. Believe correctly, behave correctly, worship correctly or risk an eternity you cannot return from to explain and I cannot help wondering how much obedience has been mistaken for devotion simply because fear looks so convincing without an alternative. How many people call or consider themselves faithful when they are actually terrified? The question is uncomfortable because religion is not simply an idea for many people but it is family, identity, history, safety and sometimes the only language people have ever used to speak to the universe but discomfort is not always disrespect and questioning something is not necessarily attacking it but it sometimes is the most frightening question and the most honest one.

Are you doing what you believe is right because you have discovered goodness within yourself or are you doing it because you are terrified of what will happen to you if you do not? If hell disappeared from the human imagination and living equation, how many of us would still call ourselves good? The question is disturbing because a person who only refuses to harm others because they fear punishment has never been a good person, they have just simply been behaving by the book. Fear creates discipline without creating morality and obedience without love, an individual can follow every religious rule and still secretly hate the people standing beside them in churches, they fight for men and women in churches. Individuals can be faithful in public and cruel behind closed doors, holy in appearance and violent in thought because what we call righteousness is simply fear disguised as goodness.

God does not belong exclusively to any religion, no matter how confidently people claim to have contained Him, we are human beings born from and into different societies, languages, histories and encounters with existence and that means we will understand, pray and worship differently. It would be strange to believe that billions of people could live radically different lives and only one cultural expression could possibly reach the Creator, religions are organized and maintained by human beings and anything humans organize will eventually contain human rules, human authority and human limitations. That is why, whether we are comfortable admitting it or not, every religion contains the possibility of becoming a cult, every structure is dangerous when belonging is more important than the truth.

I say this without pretending I am not part of the humanity and the experiences, I am and have been inside systems, beliefs and expectations too. I have obeyed things without fully understanding why I was obeying them, I have inherited fears that did not begin with me and defended ideas before asking whether I had personally encountered their truth and so I am not writing from the mountain as someone who has escaped humanity fully. I am writing as someone who is still trying to recognize the walls inside his own mind and that is what makes freedom difficult, not only for blacks but the whole world was colonized by a system that understood and learned how to speak in ways we'd all resonate to.

Everyone has the right to choose what they will serve and none of us are completely free from something. Some people are slaves to money, some to approval, some to politics, some to religion, some to the opinions of people who will eventually die without fully knowing themselves. I am not pretending to be above surrender either or too wise, if anything, I consider myself a slave to spirituality and consciousness, spirituality that allows me to remain human because I do not believe spiritual awakening requires me to pretend I am incapable of flaws and that my creator loves me nonetheless, if thinking and questioning normalized things was a sin then I would be wiped off by the Creator because I'd be a danger to his creation. I would rather be consciously imperfect than perfectly performing for an audience of frightened people.

There is something psychologically exhausting about constantly trying to prove that you are worthy of God, society or your own community, you monitor your thoughts without understanding them, you apologize internally for questions you have not yet thought of fully, you feel guilty for being curious as if curiosity itself is a form of betrayal. Eventually, you become afraid of being human and yourself because your own mind has become a dangerous space to explore, you stop asking difficult questions not because you have have all the answers but because you have been trained to fear where the questions might take you and that is one of the most successful forms of control ever created over humanity.

What happens when an individual is finally no longer living with fear? Not reckless, not destructive and not arrogant but just not psychologically terrified of asking whether the things they inherited are actually true? What happens when they realize that obedience and goodness are not automatically the same thing? What happens when they understand that being guided is different from being controlled? What happens when they discover that love chosen freely means more than love extracted through fear and limitations? That is why independent thinking has always scared organized systems.

Fear produces believers, citizens, workers and followers but it doesn't necessarily produce conscious human beings because consciousness requires something fear constantly tries to destroy, the courage to look directly at the thing you have been told never to question. There is a good possibility that you will still believe after questioning, you will still worship after doubting, you will still obey after examining the reason for obedience but your faith, your morality and your life will belong to you and that is far more frightening to a controlling system than a thousand obedient people who never learned how to think for themselves.

So I will close with questions that I cannot answer for anyone else, when you remove the threat and fear, who are you? When nobody is promising you heaven, threatening you with hell, grading your intelligence, monitoring your obedience or punishing your disagreement, who remains? Would you still be kind if there was no reward for kindness? Would you still not harm people if nobody was watching? Would you still worship if you were certain that God could not be impressed by your performance or have we become so accustomed to fear that we no longer know where obedience ends and our actual selves begin?

I wish you love because fear has already shaped enough of the human experience, I wish you light but not the kind borrowed from my own or someone else's certainty and repeated until it sounds like your own voice. I wish you the courage to have thoughts that make you uncomfortable without running back to the people who taught you what you are allowed to believe and I wish you a relationship with your Almighty Creator that does not require you to perform your spirituality for a man made system. Question what you fear and understand it, especially when that fear is being presented to you as wisdom. Question what you obey, especially when obedience is demanded before your understanding is allowed because to me, the most terrifying cage is not the one you are locked inside but the one you would defend even after the door has been opened for you to experience freedom.

Call me mad if it will make you sleep better but I have been thinking about how we have all or eventually will, sell our souls. Not in some dramatic or dark supernatural sense but in the ordinary ways we have learned to consider as normal. We strip pieces of our humanity away almost everyday and hand them over to systems, institutions, careers, money, status and people above us and then call the remaining version of ourselves successful. That is the most disturbing part I'll be exploring in the article becuase no one even has to force us anymore, we have learned to just participate willingly.

Look at almost any space people consider successful, be it academics, business, careers, entertainment and corporate life. There is a similar pattern, a price for entry and that price is usually a part of yourself. Someone superior to you decides what you need to become, how you should think, how you should behave, what you should wear, what you should tolerate and sometimes even what you should desire. Your mind gets re-engineered and you are rewired for the environment, then rewarded for adapting to it. Eventually, you just forget what you looked like before you learned how to survive in that space.

Capitalism makes this even more interesting, life is engineered around the idea that working hard, sacrificing enough and enduring enough will eventually give you some form of superiority over everyone else. Have a look at how almost everything we celebrate demands years of sacrifice, degrees, careers, businesses, titles, wealth, marriage and status. We praise people for spending their youth exhausted, disconnected and constantly postponing themselves. Then, when the body finally begins failing them through illness, burnout or emotional emptiness, we call it the price of success.

The “work hard” rhetoric is one of the most convincing illusions we have collectively just agreed to believe. Hard work matters, I agree but hard work alone can rarely make you filthy rich. Look closely at people with serious resources, I'm talking about real money, real influence and real control, you will often find something besides the labour part, it is either inherited power, strategic shortcuts, exploitation, political connections, corruption or simply an advantageous starting point. Meanwhile, millions of average people are working themselves into the ground and still barely moving anywhere positive.

And then there are the things nobody wants to discuss or don't know how to because they make the whole arrangement uncomfortable and I will take my shot. It's known now because people do report being asked to sleep with managers or people in positions of authority in exchange for opportunities, people beg for jobs, we practically kneel before those who control access to money and employment, people stand in long queues for hours and sometimes under very humiliating and inhumane conditions, simply hoping somebody will decide that they are worthy of an opportunity. We have become so accustomed to these things that we cannot even ask ourselves when and how this became a normal way for human beings to live and find possible solutions.

Even time itself has been organized for us, there are specific morning hours when we are expected to wake up and if you pass those you are lazy, there are specific hours when we must work or go to school at early ages, specific hours when we are permitted to eat lunch even at adult ages, when to socialize and rest. These arrangements do not necessarily serve every individual but we adopted them so early and young that questioning them now feels almost rebellious. It feels illegal or a sin to simply tell someone “this schedule does not or cannot work for my humanity” because the system does not particularly care, it just needs people moving at particular times and we eventually learn to move when they tell us to move.

We grew up inside systems that taught us what should be celebrated before we were old enough to decide for ourselves whether they all really deserve celebration. Marriage is one example, I would like to get married at some point but I am using it becuase we rarely ask whether marriage, in its socially prescribed form is actually worth pursuing in the normalized way, what serves me cannot necessarily serve the next person. But society has a general look, a married man and woman are often interpreted as successful from their marriage, it is evidence that they have accomplished something but it is just another way of congratulating them to have successfully performed the life we are all told to want.

So now, are you not stripped of some of your humanity every time you participate in something your soul does not naturally want? Does your soul and body genuinely enjoy waking up because an institution told you to? Do you enjoy spending most of your waking life producing and serving someone else? Do you enjoy begging for opportunities, competing for validation, pretending to agree even when you don't, swallowing humiliation or remaining in relationships because society has already decided what they mean?

If the answer is no, then perhaps you understand what I am trying to say. Selling your soul does not necessarily have to look dark, sometimes it simply looks like a promotion, like a degree, like a wedding ring, a fancy glass corner office, a title, a salary or a simple blue tick beside your name on social media “your existence is verified” by someone else. It sometimes looks like being praised for surviving something that should never have required you to destroy or go against yourself in the first place but we are human and we are very good at decorating our own cages.

And this is where the illusion of hard work becomes even more dangerous for me having to work until your body fails you is the most evil thing. Having to push yourself through illness, exhaustion, anxiety and sometimes reallg life threatening conditions and then because you survived it, you develop a strange sense of superiority, “I did it, therefore everyone can.” This conclusion ignores everything that made your miserable path possible, it makes survival look like a moral superiority and suffering evidence that everyone else is simply not trying hard enough.

To me, it is another form of selling your soul and your humanity because the system does not merely take your labour but it gradually alienates you from other human beings where you start measuring your worth against theirs and their failure validates your success, their unemployment makes you feel more disciplined and their poverty looks like evidence that they did/do not work hard enough. You start defending the very system that exhausted you because admitting that it is broken would force you to question the meaning of everything you have sacrificed to obtain.

Capitalism does not necessarily strip everyone of their humanity in one dramatic way, they system is designed to do it gradually with a little ambition there, some senseless fear, a title that makes you boast, a salary more than everyone else's, a promotion, another degree or another year of sacrifice. This happens until one day you look at yourself and realize you have become remarkably successful at being someone you never intended to become. You have the money, you have the title, people respect you but you don't have much of yourself and time left.

That is the real transaction, not money for your labour but your identity for belonging, you’ve sold your humanity for status, your freedom for security, your lifetime for recognition and your soul for the privilege of saying “I made it.” No one has to hold a gun to our heads because we will participate as everyone around us participates and call it adulthood, ambition and responsibility. At some point, we should call it what it sometimes is, a socially acceptable way of losing yourself.

There are questions that make me uncomfortable and this is one of those, is goodness just another form of obedience? Don’t read this wrong, I am not suggesting that people should be bad, corrupt or cruel but I am questioning whether being “good” can simple be a strategy of losing and surrendering, especially inside a corrupt system. My real question is not whether we should be good or bad but it is whether we have been taught to confuse goodness with compliance because there is a difference between being a decent human being and being conditioned to accept whatever happens because resistance has been labelled immoral, the distinction is really difficult for me to ignore.

Again, I am not saying people must become corrupt to survive life but I am saying that people sometimes have to remain themselves before they can remain “good” because life does not always present us with clean choices and circumstances can force people into moral grey areas where every available option carries a cost. Let us imagine an unemployed person with bills to cover being offered a bribe to get into the employment space, the bribe is wrong and we know that but again, imagine someone wrongfully accused escaping prison because they believe they need to gather evidence to prove their innocence. That is also wrong under the rules, both people have violated something society considers acceptable but we instinctively understand that these situations are not the same. The other person may be seen as corrupt while the other may be seen as desperate, perhaps even justified, simply because morality does not only evaluate an action but also evaluates the person, the circumstances and sometimes the threat that person represents to society.

There is something almost insulting about telling a person who is cornered by life to simply “do the right thing” while the people who bend the rules, exploit loopholes and manipulate the system continue accumulating everything that person has been told to patiently wait for. There is a contradiction here that deserves examination. Some people are expected to wait for opportunities, promotion, the economy to improve and circumstances to change while someone else is bending the rules, exploiting the loopholes and taking what the patient person has been told will eventually come to them. At some point, patience srarts looking different, it can still be virtue but it can also become the language used to make people tolerate conditions that should have been challenged. I am not arguing that corruption is the answer but I am questioning what happens psychologically when morality repeatedly asks the powerless to endure while power continues rewarding itself.

Human beings created these categories, we interpreted them, enforced them and gave them consequences and we cannot deny that we have always lived inside unequal relationships of power. There have always been people with more money, authority, access, influence and protection than others. Because of that, I wonder whether some of the things we call “good” are actually good for human life or whether they are simply useful for maintaining a particular arrangement of human beings. The distinction is terrifying because something can be socially acceptable and still destructive, something can be moral and still produce weakness, something can be peaceful and still preserve injustice. Humility can quietly teach one to accept their own inferiority and the most dangerous form of obedience is the kind that convinces people that their obedience is always virtue. My argument is not against humility, peace or morality itself but an attempt to examine what happens when those values are separated from agency and strength. People are taught to accept everything because acceptance is considered good but what happens to their desire to change their circumstances? At what point does acceptance stop being wisdom and become surrender? That is the question I cannot seem to leave alone.

Human beings have a natural instinct to influence, create and achieve, we are naturally wired to want to compete, to want autonomy, recognition and to shape our communities rather than simply being shaped by them. It is deeply human to look at the world and refuse to accept that this is all your life is going to be and that impulse is not necessarily evil but it inspires revolutions, it makes a poor person dream beyond the circumstances they inherited and a powerless person decide they do not have to remain powerless forever.

The desire to influence reality can become destructive when unchecked but it can also be profoundly life affirming but morality sometimes seems suspicious of these instincts before wondering what they might become. It is true that ambition can become greed, confidence can become arrogance, power can become corruption, competition can become selfishness, desire can become temptation and strength can become oppression. There is always a warning attached and some warnings are necessary, human beings are capable of turning almost anything into a weapon but the warning must never be stronger than the aspiration because then morality teaches people more about what they must not become than what they could become.

When morality becomes primarily concerned with preventing the strong from becoming too strong rather than teaching everyone how to become stronger is where my discomfort begins because morality is sometimes reactive rather than aspirational, it gets more concerned with controlling what human beings must not become than helping them discover what they could become. It constructs ambitious people not to become arrogant but rarely looks at how they can become powerful without becoming cruel, it dictates the successful person not to exploit the poor but rarely touches on how we can create more capable people who no longer need to remain dependent on the powerful because there is a profound difference between making the strong weaker and making the weak stronger. They may look morally similar from a distance but they are not the same thing. If you take power away from someone powerful, you have reduced power. If you teach someone powerless how to develop competence, courage, discipline, knowledge, resources and independence, you have increased human capacity. One approach reduces someone's ability to dominate while the other increases someone's ability to stand on their own. It is not about how we can control power but how we can create more people capable of possessing it.

That is the morality I am searching for, not a morality that teaches people to become smaller, quieter and easier to control but one that makes them stronger, more capable and more independent. I do not want to romanticise corruption or pretend that breaking rules automatically makes someone courageous. Sometimes breaking the rules is simply destructive but not every person who breaks a rule is motivated by the same thing or every person who obeys every rule is necessarily acting morally. Circumstances matter, power matters, intent matters, survival also matters and morality becomes more honest when we are brave enough to examine all of them.

The goal should not be to make everyone equally powerless because we are afraid of what power might produce but the goal should be creating people who are powerful enough to choose restraint. There is a difference between someone who cannot fight and chooses peace and someone who possesses the capacity to fight but consciously chooses something higher, there is a difference between being unable to retaliate and having the power to retaliate but deciding not to, goodness without agency can become submission, goodness with agency can become character and that is the distinction we have been missing.

I am not looking for an excuse for corruption, I am simply searching for a morality that understands human beings as more than obedient creatures who must simply endure. I want a morality that allows ambition without automatically turning it into greed, strength without automatically turning it into oppression, confidence without automatically turning it into arrogance and power without automatically turning it into corruption. And I believe we should stop asking only how to restrain the powerful and start asking how to make the powerless more capable because bringing everyone down to the same level of weakness is not the same as lifting everyone toward strength and that brings me back to the question that started all of this. Is goodness just another form of obedience? Perhaps not for me but goodness becomes obedience when it demands surrender without agency, patience without opportunity and morality without regard for circumstances. Being good should not mean becoming powerless, it should mean having the strength, capacity and freedom to choose what you do with your power and if goodness requires helplessness, if morality works best when people simply accept their place then I have to ask the question, is or was goodness ever really the objective or was it always obedience?

What is “good” and what is “bad”? I am not saying or believe everything is acceptable but I know for sure that morality changes when survival is the only option. We often judge people as if everyone makes decisions from the same comfortable position, with food in the fridge, money in the bank and a guaranteed promising future but no one really has that guarantee, we just behave as if we do.

Take a father with children to feed with no job, no savings and no real prospect of employment. At some point, he has to make a plan and if crime becomes that plan, then what exactly are we asking him to do? Sit quietly and wait for a respectable opportunity that may never come? Continue convincing himself and his children that better days are coming when nobody actually knows whether those days will come or not?

Waiting patiently sounds noble until you understand what someone is being asked to wait through.

We have romanticised waiting so much, taught to believe in waiting for the right opportunity, waiting for your breakthrough, waiting for employment, waiting for God and until things get better but no one has a contract promising them that better days are coming. Nobody knows when their last day will be but so many people live as though they have another ten years to sit around waiting for life to finally go as they wish and at some point, waiting stops being patience and starts becoming another form of surrender.

That is why I look at people differently, take a stripper going out to make money, pays her rent, feeds herself, takes care of her children or sends money home. Society may look at her and decide she has compromised her dignity but sometimes I look at them and see someone who refused to let poverty become her permanent identity. Then take someone sitting with unemployment and deteriorating because certain opportunities are considered beneath them, I honestly don’t know who is more liberated because what is dignity when your child is hungry? What is morality when your electricity has been cut off? What is respectability when someone you love is suffering while you keep waiting for a socially acceptable opportunity? I am not saying every action becomes right because someone has a reason, harm is still harm but I have become uncomfortable with judging people’s choices without asking what kind of circumstances forced those choices onto the table.

A starving man does not experience not having bread philosophically, he experiences it and feels it in many painful ways and that is the part people forget when they speak about morality from a comfortable distance. Desperation changes thinking and the mind, when survival becomes immediate, abstract principles become very small things with no value. You can spend years telling someone what they should never do until life puts you in a situation where you're actually questioned about what yourself are actually willing to do to escape the situation.

This is where societal normalized faith doesn't work for me, I believe in Jesus but I cannot understand why following Jesus should mean becoming terrified of every societal rule. Jesus challenged religious comfort, he sat with people respectable society rejected, he questioned authority and disrupted the boundaries people considered sacred. Eventually, he was crucified by the very society whose moral structures he had challenged so why would I spend my entire life terrified of breaking social expectations simply to be validated by people? Sometimes I wonder whether what we call morality is actually just the fear of rejection or maybe we don’t always want to be good but rather want to be approved and there is a difference. We learn very early that being accepted is safer than being honest and so we begin performing goodness for an society, we learn which behaviours earn applause and which ones invite shame. Eventually, we stop asking whether something is right and start asking whether people will forgive us for doing it.

Society is incredibly selective about its morality, the same person who condemns someone for how they made their money will happily accept that money when it comes in handy for them. We condemn the method and quietly enjoy the outcome and that hypocrisy fascinates me. Perhaps society doesn’t hate the darkness as much as it hates seeing someone survive outside the rules it created. Most people know someone in their community who is said not to have built their wealth through a conventional nine to five job, someone who made a plan, someone who figured out survival outside the respectable routes available to everyone else. There are speculations about them, they are but when something needs to be done, their phone somehow becomes the first one people call and that tells us more about society than it does about them.

There is a quote from Michael De Santa in GTA V, “surviving is winning Franklin, everything else is bullsh*t, fairytals spun by people afraid to look life in the eye, whatever it takes kid, survive.” It sounds almost childish when you hear it inside a video game but outside the game it becomes uncomfortable. Survival is rarely beautiful, it doesn’t always look good, sometimes it comes through a nightclub life, sometimes through an illegal side hustle and sometimes through a decision you once swore you would never make.

Sometimes the person you call immoral is simply discovering how to keep breathing and that doesn’t make everything they do right but it should make us hesitate before pretending to understand them because poverty itself has been romanticised. You can be broke with dignity, hungry with integrity, suffering beautifully. You can tell yourself that God is testing you but eventually the romanticism wears off you or your children are still hungry, rent is still due and the lights are still off and that is why I am more interested in the psychology of survival than the performance of morality. I want to know what happens to a person when every respectable door closes, what happens when the thing they need most is on the other side of something they were taught to consider unacceptable? What happens when their principles and their survival finally stand across each other? That is where I think we can discover something frightening about ourselves as humans.

I would like to believe I know exactly who I would become, I would like to believe I would always choose the noble option but I also know enough about human beings to understand that you don’t really know yourself until survival starts testing your principles. We all know what we do when life is kind to us, when our stomachs are full but he real question is who we become when life changes to what we never expected or planned for and maybe survival doesn’t make us immoral but it simply removes the luxury of pretending we were ever as innocent as we thought.

People must be admired for being popular but there is a negative norm around it. Famous people are studied and majority of their followers/fans do not just look at the way they dress, how they speak and the words they use, the food they consume or the way they look but compare themselves with the “famous” versions of such people. Famous faces are looked at as references by most people and their bodies are goals to achieve, their famous lifestyles are looked at as proof that living a normal life is lagging in some certain way. Admiration is slowly changing into imitation and that as well is being turned into insecurity and influence that one must turn into a copy of a fictional version that a person must idolize.

If you closely analyze the current standards of beauty, all of them appear to be artificial but are accepted as if they’re biological facts. A face must have a certain symmetrical alignment, skin must have an everlasting smoothness, teeth must look unnaturally white, everyone expects to have a slim and curvy body with hair that looks effortlessly manageable while they are honestly not unless one is willing to spent hours with accessories, modifications, chemical products and daily maintenance which people label as “natural beauty”. The paradox is what astounds me the most. I’ll use woman as my reference and not because I have a problem with them but they’re the closest example that resonates with my observation, most of them declare natural hair as “too tedious” and go all out to purchase a weave, get it properly fixed, sprayed, retouched before or upon installation with “glue” only to later remove it. I am not against the use of weaves, everyone has the right to wear what they like or express themselves how they want but my question is, how much about the hair growing on your own scalp have you come to dislike that you are willing to get a hairstyle that almost seems like camouflage to me and not merely a hairstyle of natural expression?

The same thing applies to using makeup and nothing is wrong with wearing makeup, it is art and a form of expression, transformations are inherently human and they have been around from the past centuries just like jewelries but is it not psychologically weird to spend an hour or hours to make up a face just for people to not witness your unaltered face underneath the makeup? I think enhancement has and is slowly losing being a form of decor and turning into a negotiation with one’s true self reflection. I strongly feel that the present beauty industry has mastered making people believe that insecurity is actually self care.

I have the same feeling with phones and camera quality, we’ve adopted a peculiar relation, a person takes a picture on android phone and then dislikes their own reflection but what exactly about you do you despise so much? Is it the phone for exposing the less beautiful version of your self or the inadequate beauty in relation to the edited faces you have been seeing all over social media? All of a sudden, phones reveal a face unfiltered from all other modifications (filters, lighting, camera angles and digital effects) which is why it appears so offensive, many people are so accustomed with seeing themselves through technological mediums that they mistake their actual reality for insults for the lack of a better word. I have no problem with any device brand but the iPhone obsession, I feel it’s mostly about status, fitting in and having a visual identity and not really the object. It is not just with young people but almost an entire generation has been brainwashed with the idea that a particular device represents taste, achievement, attractiveness or social relevance and everyone just pretends they only buy what they like but we all know there have been different eras of devices from the Blackberry,sliding Samsung, Nokia and many others. There are brands that honestly outperform the iPhone with camera quality, battery health and overall performance but enough influencers have done their work around iPhone to convince people that it is the only device with class.

So yes, everyone can use an iPhone if they truly want to but why is it normalized that one must feel less taped in or even embarrassed when they don’t own one? That for me proves that something deeper is going on, it’s not the camera quality most people are going for but permission to feel accepted or belong in certain circles and that is what is psychologically mind blowing about celebrity culture. One doesn’t have to state that you are inferior but instead repeatedly showing someone who seems more beautiful, rich, contented, fashionable or engaging will brainwash them into doing that comparison at no cost and social media has actually turned this into a daily normal thing.

Yu wake up and you’re watching people’s amazing moments from traveling, engagements, new cars, improved body (BBL), perfect skin, “seemly” effortless relationships and somewhere down the line, your “real life” starts looking boring and appears to be smaller. Then you know you have failed to recognize your own ordinariness being contrasted with another’s well planned for image and people call that reality when it’s a psychopathic chase.

Most people have become performers instead of simply living, they get dressed, they eat and travel for photos and content. People go into relationships, announce milestones, build personalities that look aesthetically well. The effect is so bad that it can get one so accustomed to performing that they can’t do anything without thinking of likes and engagements that they mever had to stress about before, now for life to make sense, online strangers must applaud and approve.

For once, just wear what you truly like and desire, let your hair grow in its natural form, reject the influence to get the latest gadget you don’t necessarily need. Be human and stop spending hours trying to edit and filter your face. Shift your priorities from making life seem valuable to adding actual meaning to it. There’s liberation that comes with being normal and displaying yourself with what you really own, with letting your skin carry its natural texture, with making peace with appearing in pictures with a face resembling yours, with letting your hair fall naturally with all its texture without feeling the need to explain anything to anyone, with not making your entire life about displaying status. Just be human and free!

Not everything in life needs constant upgrades, some parts and thing just need your acceptance. Celebrity culture has and is becoming a danger because admiration metamorphizes into loss of self. When and how one likes something has turned into a question if other people will desire it more if done in a certain way, constructing a character from trending concepts totally replaces personal development, fixing appearance becomes an endless endeavor and one just becomes something to always being woked on and corrected.

Becoming one’s true self and getting comfortable with being less of what is known and normalized must be everyone’s goal and not the version that always has to be filtered, not the celebrity inspired version, not the version made for the internet or one that captures views well but YOU because spending an entire lifetime perfecting a person one was never were supposed to embody makes them a slave of themselves.

Religions are partly the reason so many people never truly understand God and I'm saying this as a Christian, not as someone who has abandoned Christ but as someone who is continously questioning everything humans inherited. Every religion has beauty but every religion also has loopholes because religion is carried by human beings and human beings have always had one weakness, we love attention. Many churches and religious groups have become very occupied with preserving themselves that they unknowingly stand where only God should stand, institutions have become louder than the encounters and the labels have become more important than the person.

Look at Jesus, something doesn’t fit the way we often present him today. He never seemed obsessed with making people revolve around Him, every conversation, every miracle and every lesson seemed to redirect people back to something they had forgotten inside themselves. He wasn’t constantly proving how divine he was, He kept reminding people that they were capable of becoming more than they believed, He spoke about light, He spoke about the Kingdom within, He spoke about the single eye being full of light. He spoke about entering the upper room with wisdom, understanding and transformation, His greatest miracle was convincing ordinary people that they had buried extraordinary things beneath fear.

Most of us are still living in spiritual kindergarten, we have become experts at repeating beliefs we never sat down to wrestle with ourselves. We inherit conclusions before understanding and memorise verses before asking if and why they matter to us, we are loyal to traditions without being fully honest with ourselves and rush to mistake certainty for wisdom because the easiest way to stop searching is to convince yourself you’ve already arrived.

Heaven? Was it ever meant to be treated as nothing more than a place waiting for us after death? I think heaven first begins in the condition of the mind, the higher mind that produces love, wisdom, peace, compassion and truth is already heaven beginning to breathe through us, while the lower mind consumed by fear, pride, hatred and selfishness slowly becomes hell long before we die and every single day we individually decide which one we are going to carry into the world and that is why the invitation has always been to grow into the mind of Christ. Not simply to admire Jesus but to become transformed by the way he saw people, the way he loved, the way he forgave and the way he understood God. Until our minds begin changing, heaven will always feel distant because we keep looking for a destination instead of allowing a transformation.

I think we have also misunderstood the Bible, we want to force it into being only a historic book or only a collection of stories but it is simply the Bible, a holy book. It is holy and every page carries something deeper than information. Jesus says in John’s Gospel that his words are spirit and life and if his words are spirit, then they were never meant to be reduced to the limited understanding of the mind because they're meant for the spirit. Every verse quietly asks one question: What is this saying to your spirit today? If you never ask that then reading becomes another religious exercise that leaves you exactly where you started.

Life itself seems to work the same way from every conversation, every disappointment, every joy and every loss carries something beneath the surface and Scripture invites us to read it the same way, not rushing to arguments about the past while ignoring what it is exposing inside us now. Read the Gospels and notice that Jesus constantly points people toward God, he keeps calling them inwards towards light within, towards the Kingdom within, towards a relationship that no institution can create. That must challenge you because it forces you to ask whether you as an individual have been looking everywhere except the one place he repeatedly pointed. The distance between you and God can never be perfectly measured in anything more than in noise.

We should be able to put our religious identities down for a moment, not to reject them but to remember what comes before them. Before being Christians, we are human beings, flawed human beings, confused human beings, searching human beings and maybe it is only then when we stop trying to protect everything we were taught that we will become available to what God might still want to teach us because freedom begins the moment we become honest enough to admit that we don’t know everything.

I think differently about angels, I was never taught to imagine them first as distant beings somewhere beyond the clouds which I appreciate more now that I'm grown up. For me, the first encounter with an angel is the quiet guidance that keeps pulling us towards the truth, the conviction that interrupts us before we make the wrong choices, the invisible whisper that refuses to let us become comfortable with our lies, the impulse towards love when hatred would be easier. However one understands angels, I cannot escape the feeling that God is never as distant as we imagine and the conversation is quieter than religion often makes it seem but constant.

I believe in Christ, I believe in God but I also believe that the greatest obstacle between us and God is sometimes everything we inherited without ever questioning. I believe that the day we stop looking for God only in buildings, labels and borrowed certainty is the day we will finally become quiet enough to recognise that the One we were searching for has been calling us from within all along.

My name is Billy Kubheka, peace be with you all.

The dust has settled, some ordinary citizens have met the president secretly to discuss a national matter, the hashtags have slowed down, the shouting is slowly becoming silence again and South Africans are left with a mark of Xenophobia. South Africa is slowly returning to what it does best, moving on before anything they fought for/about has actually changed. Here in Johannesburg, where I’ve spent my time and where my observations come from, life is back to normal. Illegal immigrants are working, legal immigrants are also working equally. Most of the people debating immigration probably couldn’t tell the difference if they were standing in front of them but that isn’t even the point I’m trying to make, my point is much simpler than that.

South Africa cannot solve the problems of the entire African continent, we have the AU, PAP and UNHCR to name a few organizations that have a role in this but have been quiet. South African cannot carry every nation while struggling to carry itself and this isn’t a statement of hatred, it’s a statement about capacity. We are already facing unemployment, broken municipalities, unreliable service delivery, overcrowded public hospitals and an economy that seems to reward survival and corruption more than hard work. When your own house is leaking, pretending you can shelter the whole neighbourhood may sound noble but it doesn’t stop the roof from collapsing and once it collapses, the same neighbours will also point fingers at you for failing to think.

Compassion without capacity is just another “cute” form of failure.

What unsettles me even more is something we hardly ever say out loud. I’ve spent enough time around well established people, people with businesses, properties and households that require workers to notice a pattern. South Africans often complain about illegal immigration and yet some of those same South Africans willingly employ undocumented workers because they are cheaper, quieter and easier to exploit. It becomes convenient to blame the immigrant while quietly benefiting from their desperation.

A person who fears deportation has very little bargaining power. They are less likely to demand fair wages, less likely to question impossible working hours and very less likely to report abuse. If someone accepts R100 for a day’s work because saying no could mean having nothing tomorrow, the employer saves money while convincing themselves they’re simply offering an opportunity. The worker survives another day but survival should never be confused with fairness. Sometimes exploitation wears such a clean branding that people mistake it for generosity.

The easiest slavery to hide is the one both sides convince themselves is necessary.

That is why I never believed the recent marches would achieve much because even before they began, they felt like frustration looking for the nearest target rather than accountability looking for the source. It is emotionally satisfying to point at the people with the least political protection and it is much harder to confront the systems, incentives and decisions that allow these conditions to continue year after year. Scapegoats have always existed because they give anger somewhere safe to land without forcing society to confront itself.

If there is one thing history repeatedly teaches, it is that governments usually respond most urgently when public frustration begins to affect the country’s functioning and the confidence of the economy. When production slows, revenue falls, investors grow uneasy, businesses lose certainty and essential services come under strain, political pressure often rises dramatically. Whether one agrees with such moments or not, they reveal how closely political stability and economic stability are tied together.

Imagine the conversations that begin when people stay at home and retail activity slows, tax revenues fall, ports move less cargo, businesses lose productivity and international observers start questioning confidence in the country’s direction. Hospitals operating under pressure, transport systems struggling to maintain normal schedules and markets reacting nervously would not simply be statistics, they would become reminders that governing is measured not only by speeches but by whether a nation continues to function effectively. Governments everywhere understand that prolonged instability carries economic and political consequences that can extend far beyond a single week.

No administration welcomes that kind of uncertainty, global credit ratings become part of the conversation, investors confidence weaken and borrowing can become more expensive. Businesses delay decisions while families wonder what tomorrow will look like, none of these outcomes are victories for ordinary citizens but they do demonstrate one uncomfortable reality that governments often feel economic pressure more immediately than they feel public frustration expressed through speeches alone.

Power itself acts differently when uncertainty reaches its own doorstep and maybe that is why our public conversations keep circling the same arguments without moving forward. We spend so much time arguing about immigrants that we rarely stop to ask who benefits from keeping wages low, labour vulnerable and accountability out of reach. We argue over symptoms while the incentives creating those symptoms remain comfortably untouched because it’s easier to point at the person crossing the border than to question the employer opening the gate or the institutions failing to enforce the law consistently.

The real question South Africans should be asking the government is not simply who crosses our borders illegally but why so many people inside the country continue to profit from a system they publicly condemn. Until we are honest enough to confront that contradiction, the dust will keep settling, the headlines will keep changing and we will keep mistaking motion for progress while nothing beneath our feet actually moves.

So for you to understand and enjoy my piece please don't apply too much knowledge of your culture, religion or politics, just use your own logic for a few minutes and strip everything back. Imagine you knew nothing about the world except what you could observe with your own eyes, I honestly believe women are the closest thing we have to understanding God’s creative power. Not because they are God but because every single human being who has ever existed entered this world through one. We’ve repeatedly said and seen this so many time that we’ve forgotten how impossible it actually sounds.

Imagine if children didn’t come through women and there was a scientific portal somewhere on Earth where every human being came from, one place where life simply appeared. People would fly across the world just to see it, governments would protect it with armies, scientists would spend centuries trying to explain it, religions would be built around it and people would kneel to it, they would pray around it. Wars would probably be fought over who controls it and nobody would call it ordinary because mystery always gets our respect but because life comes through women, we’ve made the mistake humans always make, confusing familiarity with ordinary. We’ve watched and seen pregnancy happen for thousands of years, so our minds stopped treating it like the miracle it is. We do this with everything, the sun rises every morning so we barely look at it, qe breathe every second so we never think about breathing. A mother’s womb has become so common that we’ve forgotten it is the first home every king, every billionaire, every prophet, every scientist, every criminal, funny but yes you every criminal and every person reading this has ever known.

That’s why I believe women deserve more than appreciation days, flowers and social media posts once a year, they deserve to know who they really are themselves. They carry something that no laboratory has ever recreated and no civilisation has ever replaced, all our technology, intelligence and scientific breakthroughs, humanity still cannot create life the way a woman does. We can build rockets, split atoms, create artificial intelligence but we still stand helpless before the mystery of life growing inside a womb.

This isn’t me putting women above men, that’s not the point. The point is that we spend our lives searching for evidence of God in the skies while overlooking one of the clearest reminders of His creative power walking beside us every day, that’s what being human does to us. We stop seeing miracles the moment they become familiar and the greatest tragedy isn’t that miracles don’t exist but we’ve become so used to them that we no longer recognize them when they’re right in front of us. Love women, respect women and protect women.

Worshipping a God you’ve never seen sounds irrational to someone who has already decided that reality ends where human sight begins. To many people, believing in God feels like surrendering intelligence but the real limitation is believing that only what your eyes can measure exists. I think the answer is both simple and impossibly complex and not because God enjoys confusing usbut because we are finite creatures trying to comprehend an infinite Creator. The distance between those two realities cannot be erased, it is the difference between the inventor and the invention, the artist and the painting, the programmer and the software. Every piece of technology has limits because its creator decided it would. Human beings also have limits, not because God lacks power but because we were never designed to possess His and so trying to completely explain the infinite with a finite mind is like asking a cup to contain an ocean, eventually the cup doesn't expose the ocean's limits but its own.

Our greatest intellectual mistake is assuming that because we cannot contain God, He must fit inside our understanding.

The hardest truth for the human mind to accept is that God’s attributes never compete with one another. His love never weakens His justice, His wrath never cancels His mercy, His holiness never diminishes His patience and His grace never compromises His righteousness. Human beings cannot relate to this because we are internally divided, we love one person while resenting another, we forgive today and seek revenge tomorrow, we are kind until we are inconvenienced, we assume God must function like we do, when in reality His perfection exists beyond anything we have ever experienced. We often ask where God is when suffering happens but rarely ask what humanity would become if fear, consequence and accountability disappeared. How terrifying would this world be if every evil thought could be acted upon without restraint? Even in unimaginable pain, there are mothers who lose newborn children, fall to their knees in prayer, somehow gather enough strength to hope again and eventually bring another beautiful life to the world and that resilience deserves reflection. Would we search for God if life never broke us? Would prayer exist if every desire arrived exactly when we demanded it? Would gratitude survive in a world where nothing was ever lost? Sometimes it is suffering and not comfort that exposes how desperately we need the One who created us.

Human beings usually don’t ask where God is until they discover where their own strength ends.

Scripture teaches that sin does more than introduce immoral behaviour, it damages the way we think. Our minds become experts at twisting truth whenever the truth threatens our pride. As Romans 1:18–26 explains, people suppress the truth not because evidence is absent but because the truth demands surrender and that psychological battle continues today. Many people know enough about God to acknowledge Him but still spend their lives chasing control over everything He never promised them, we want influence without humility, spirituality without obedience, blessings without surrender and power without accountability. We have become remarkably skilled at trying to manipulate the universe instead of submitting to its Creator. We do not merely reject God, often we compete with Him and desperately try to occupy a throne that was never built for us.

The first temptation in Eden was never fruit, it was the promise that human beings could become like God.

Surely one of the most uncomfortable truths in Christianity is that God can never be fully known and not because He is hiding but because infinity cannot be exhausted by finite minds. In His sovereign wisdom He deliberately chose not to reveal everything. As Deuteronomy 29:29 says, “The secret things belong to the Lord our God but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever.” Many would interpret this as unloving because they believe a loving God should answer every question, reveal every mystery and satisfy every curiosity but good fathers understand something children don't, not every truth is survivable simply because it is true.

Imagine if every human being knew the exact date and hour they would die, society itself would begin to fall apart, some people would spend their entire lives counting down to their final day instead of living, others would become paralysed by anxiety years before death even arrived, some would never fall in love because they already know heartbreak is waiting, some parents would refuse to have children because they could already see the pain of burying them or being buried by them. Others, knowing they have only days left, would abandon every moral restraint because consequences no longer seem relevant. Human beings already struggle to recover from ordinary break ups, losing jobs, betrayal and disappointment, panic from exama and interviews, some carry wounds for months or years. What would become of a mind forced to carry the unbearable weight of tomorrow before it has even survived today?

That possibility alone reveals something profound about God, His silence is not always distance but sometimes it is protection. His hiddenness is not always rejection, sometimes it is mercy. Humans often accuse God of withholding information when in reality He may be shielding us from knowledge our minds were never designed to carry, we confuse unlimited information with unlimited wisdom but they are not the same. A loving Father does not tell His children everything simply because they ask but He tells them what they are able to bear.

I hope you find both love and light in these thoughts but even more than that, I hope they leave you unsettled enough to question whether your greatest struggle with God has really been His mystery or your refusal to accept your own limits.

My name is Billy Kubheka, peace be upon you all.

The article is not written to convince anyone to become Christian or for anyone to embrace ancestral traditions against their conscience. My hope is much simpler, before turning God or ancestors into a joke for an audience, pause long enough to ask whether your convictions are truly your own or whether they have merely been rewarded by people.

Questioning God is not offensive, God is the truth and the truth doesn’t fear questions. Ask difficult questions, challenge Christianity if that’s where your mind takes you, read on other religions and walk away if your conscience genuinely tells you to. Blind belief has never impressed me because a faith that survives only when nobody asks questions is already weak. My interest is something completely different, questioning God is one conversation and mocking Him is another, one comes from curiosity and the other often comes from ego.

Questions search for understanding and mockery usually searches for validation.

I’ve noticed a growing trend on social media platforms, many people aren’t simply leaving Christianity but they’re performing their departure. Every second post seems designed to prove how enlightened someone has become because they no longer believe in God or because they’ve found a new way to ridicule Christianity, the applause comes quickly, the comments fill with people celebrating them for being “free thinkers” but my question is simple, if your conviction needs strangers to constantly validate it, is it really conviction or performance?

Social media has convinced an entire generation that attention is the same thing as truth, it isn’t, the algorithm only knows what keeps people watching and it doesn’t know what is wise. The internet rewards confidence, life rewards wisdom and the two are not the same. Questioning Christianity doesn’t concern me, questioning churches doesn’t concern me, questioning pastors doesn’t concern me because human beings have questioned everything since the beginning of civilisation. What concerns me is how quickly we mistake confidence for intelligence, most people in their early twenties makes posts and suddenly declare there is no God, no ancestors, no Creator and no spiritual reality beyond what can be measured. I don’t find that impressive but very concerning, not because young people shouldn’t think, they absolutely should but because the youth mind has a habit of confusing certainty with understanding. Life has a way of humbling opinions that once sounded untouchable, the older many people become, the more comfortable they are with admitting there are still things they don’t understand and that isn’t weakness, it’s maturity.

Wisdom often begins where certainty ends.

What also fascinates me is how some people who demonise ancestors think the Bible introduced Africans to God, long before missionaries arrived with translated Scriptures, our great grandparents already spoke about Modimo, uMvelinqangi, uNkulunkulu wokhokho nabomkhulu and many other names. They already understood that existence pointed towards something greater than themselves. The Bible gave many people another way of understanding God, it did not invent the idea that there is a Creator and that is why I have never understood why people try to force a war between God and ancestors. Ancestors gave life, God gave life its beginning and those are not the same roles. A tree must exist before fruits can grow, honouring the fruit should never mean cutting down the tree and likewise, honouring the tree should never mean pretending the fruit doesn’t matter.

Honour your father and your mother. Exodus 20:12

Our ancestors are part of our story, they were never meant to replace the Author of the story.

The relationship many people build with God also deserves honest criticism, some people treat prayer like placing orders online, they ask, wait and then when nothing happens according to their timetable, they conclude God must not exist and this has never made sense to me. The very same way your own parents don’t or wouldn’t give you everything you ask for, how you sometimes have/had to wait, how they sometimes went silent because they understood something you didn’t is exactly how I see God's response to prayers. People expect the Creator who overlooks entire universe to jump every time we make a request, the problem isn’t God but the relationship we imagined we were entitled to have with Him.

Many people don’t reject God but they reject the version of God they invented.

The Bible says, “God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap.” Galatians 6:7 and I think that verse is less about punishment and more about reality. Plant carrots and you will harvest carrots, jump from a building, gravity won’t pause because you don’t believe in it and you will fall, lie to yourself long enough and trust wil eventually disappear. Reality has never adjusted itself to accommodate human opinion, whether someone believes in God or not, life is built on consequences.

Mocking God isn’t only speaking against Him, mocking God is believing we are somehow exempt from the order woven into creation itself and what unsettles me most about rejecting the very idea of God isn’t disagreement but what can happen when nothing exists above us except ourselves. Once we become our own highest authority, it becomes much easier to rewrite right and wrong whenever it benefits us and human beings are remarkably intelligent when it comes to justifying themselves. We can convince ourselves that almost anything is acceptable if we remove every higher standard beyond our own desires, this doesn’t mean every person who doesn’t believe in God lives without morals, it does mean every society must wrestle with where its moral accountability comes from and who or what has the authority to define it. The questions are bigger than social media debates but they shape entire civilizations.

The greatest danger isn’t losing religion, it’s losing the humility to believe you could be wrong.

In the end, my point is actually very simple, believe, don’t believe, become Christian or don't, remain traditional or don't, follow another faith or walk away from all of them. The choice belongs to you and no one should force it but don’t mistake mockery for intelligence and don’t mistake thousands of strangers clapping for you as proof that you’ve discovered truth because when social media has moved on to its next trend, you’ll still have to live with your convictions. You came into this world alone, one day you will leave it alone and whatever lies beyond that moment or whatever you believe does not will not be faced by your followers or the people who celebrate your anger, it will be faced by you. YOU WILL CARRY YOUR CROSS.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.” Proverbs 9:10. Wisdom doesn’t begin when we finally stop asking questions but when we stop assuming we already have every answer. My name is Billy Kubheka and I say “Peace be upon you all”.

I find it so strange that it has been normalised for people to proudly say they "keep up with the news" as though staying informed automatically means staying psychologically healthy. I don't see what is special with every morning beginning with a new crisis, a murder, another war, a corruption scandal, a economic collapse waiting around the corner and a reason to feel uncertain about tomorrow. We call it being informed but I sometimes wonder whether it is simply another way of becoming emotionally exhausted, you cannot repeatedly consume fear and expect your subconscious to remain untouched by it.

The human mind was built to survive danger, not to witness the dangers of the entire world before breakfast.

Breaking news is an interesting phrase because the story is not the only thing that breaks but something else breaks alongside it, your concentration, your emotional stability, your perception of the world and your confidence that tomorrow might simply be an ordinary day. Breaking news deserves its name because every interruption quietly fractures the nervous system just enough to keep it anticipating the next emergency, the body cannot easily distinguish between a threat outside your window and one repeatedly entering your mind through a screen. Fear does not need to be constant to reshape a person, it only needs to become familiar.

Television fascinates me psychologically, whether or not the word literally means it, I often think of it as "telling a vision." That image captures something important, we rarely witness reality directly but in most cases we experience reality after it has been filtered through editors, producers, headlines, camera angles, dramatic music and carefully selected interviews. By the time a story reaches us, countless decisions have already been made about what deserves our attention and what emotions should accompany it. We are not simply watching reality unfold but we are watching a version of reality that has already been interpreted and packaged.

The most powerful stories are not always the ones that are true. They are the ones repeated often enough to become your emotional reality.

Even the word broadcast makes me pause, I know its historical origin is different but I cannot ignore the symbolism of something being "cast" broadly across society. In the same way I reflect on the word NEWS as North, East, West and South, a symbolic picture of messages travelling in every direction. Whether coincidence or metaphor, the image expresses something that feels psychologically true, information spreads across an entire society, shaping not only what people know but also how they feel about the world they inhabit.

What fascinates me most is that journalism rarely has to lie in order to distort perception. Selection can be just as powerful as deception, imagine documenting an entire year of someone's life but choosing to show only the days they cried. The documentary would contain real events but it would leave viewers with a profoundly incomplete picture of that person's existence. In much the same way, if destruction is shown every day while kindness is rarely considered newsworthy, destruction begins to feel ordinary and kindness also feels exceptional, not because reality has changed but because our attention has been trained to notice one far more than the other.

Psychology has cognitive distortions such as catastrophising, overgeneralising, minimising the positive and all or nothing thinking. These patterns are associated with anxiety and depression because they encourage people to perceive reality through a disproportionately negative lens. Ironically, these are remarkably similar to the emotional habits that can emerge from consuming a constant stream of crisis focused news. Even if journalism never intends to produce those effects, intention and consequence are not always the same thing. The brain eventually stops asking what happened today and starts asking what terrible thing is waiting to happen next?

Your worldview is often less a reflection of reality than a reflection of what repeatedly occupies your attention.

None of this means journalists are malicious. I believe most genuinely want to inform the public, expose injustice and hold powerful people accountable and those are important responsibilities. However, good intentions do not eliminate unintended consequences, q medicine can heal while still producing side effects and information can educate while quietly exhausting the people consuming it. If millions of people begin and end every day immersed in tragedy, uncertainty and outrage, we should not be surprised when anxiety starts to feel less like an individual condition and more like a cultural atmosphere.

I believe we can report the news differently without sacrificing truth, we should never hide suffering or pretend that evil does not exist but we should also resist creating the impression that suffering is the only story worth telling. Tell us about the crime but also tell us about the community that rebuilt itself, tell us about corruption but also tell us about integrity. Tell us about disasters but also tell us about the people who responded with extraordinary courage, a society deserves to know not only what is broken but also what is being repaired.

Truth without hope easily becomes despair and hope without truth becomes propaganda, a psychologically healthy society needs both. The future of journalism is not choosing between optimism and realism but remembering that reality has always contained both. If the news continue showing us only humanity's wounds then we should not be surprised when people begin to forget that humanity also possesses an extraordinary capacity to heal them.

Surely there is a better word than love that I simply have not found yet because what makes sense to me is responsibility and the willingness to become someone another human being can genuinely rely on seems far more enduring than holding hands in public, posting anniversary content or buying expensive flowers that will wither within hours before ending up in a rubbish bin. The gestures are beautiful but beauty has never been the same thing as permanence.

C.S Lewish says love is not an affectionate feeling but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good.

Love fades, sometimes it cools and sometimes it quietly changes into something neither person recognizes anymore. If love is only a feeling then every relationship is eventually at the mercy of chemistry but if love is understood as responsibility then it survives seasons that emotions simply cannot and that is why commitment makes more sense to me than romance alone. Responsibility asks something of you, romance often asks only to be admired.

You can genuinely love someone and still never do anything meaningful for them. Equally, you can be deeply in love with someone who has never truly chosen you, there are people sitting beside loyal partners today while secretly hoping an ex, an old crush or someone emotionally unavailable will finally see them the way they have always wanted to be seen. If that person returned tomorrow, some would abandon everything they currently call love and that possibility should disturb us more than it does because that many people call love is simply the desire to be chosen by the one person who never chose them.

“The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.” Leonardo da Vinci

We also misunderstand how love is expressed and assume that because something makes us feel loved, it must mean the same to someone else, it rarely does. You buy flowers, someone else values uninterrupted time. You buy a beautiful shirt, they long for emotional presence and you spend money believing you have demonstrated devotion yet your partner feels emotionally untouched. The disappointment that follows is not always because your love was rejected, it is often because you were validating yourself without realizing it. You were speaking your own emotional language while expecting another person to understand it instinctively.

Love is not merely about expression but it is about translation. The hardest truth is people often love comforting lies more than they love genuine love itself. Most people do not want to hear what needs to be said but they prefer hearing what protects the version of themselves they have already chosen to believe. The truth demands change, comfort demands nothing and that is why honesty feels so offensive because honest people threaten the stories we tell ourselves to survive.

In the end, the greatest test of love is not how intensely you feel it, how publicly you display it or how beautifully you describe it but the real question is painfully simple, when the excitement fades, when beauty changes, when life disappoints and when love no longer feels like love, will responsibility remain?

The current government in South Africa has become, in many respects, a modified version of apartheid, not through explicit racial legislation but through economic neglect, spatial inequality and political indifference. Apartheid was an economic model carefully engineered around cheap Black labour. Johannesburg grew around gold while labourers were pushed into camps and settlements that existed only to serve industry and the 1913 Native Land Act stripped Black South Africans of land ownership and institutionalised segregation. In 1948, the National Party formalised apartheid into law, enforcing racial separation, white supremacy and an economy dependent on the exploitation of Black labour.

Legally, apartheid has ended but psychologically and geographically, much of its architecture remains. Black South Africans were once permitted into cities primarily to work before returning to overcrowded townships and rural areas. Today, access is no longer determined by race written into law but by wealth and economic exposure. Many suburbs today remain economically inaccessible, they are heavily protected by private security, gated communities and social exclusion. If you look unfamiliar while walking certain streets, suspicion arrives long before welcome and a security van will be at your attendance within the blink of an eye. The message has merely evolved: if you cannot afford to belong, you do not belong.

Townships and informal settlements were deliberately designed as dormitory towns with little infrastructure, few economic opportunities and overwhelming overcrowding. That basic reality has survived democracy, shopping malls have appeared but sustainable local economies have not. Millions still have to wake up before sunrise to travel long distances into economic centres, surrendering significant portions of already modest incomes to transport costs. Apartheid did not only segregate people physically but it designed a financial system that exhausted Black workers before they even reached their workplaces. That psychological and economic burden continues to shape everyday life.

RDP houses restored roofs over many heads but dignity requires more than walls. Communities continue to experience inconsistent electricity, unreliable water supplies, failing infrastructure and poor service delivery. Housing without functioning public services cannot be mistaken for complete liberation and the psychological consequences are equally severe. Many who grow up in townships or rural communities still describe entering affluent suburbs as though they have crossed into a country where they were never expected to exist, that lingering sense of not belonging is one of apartheid's deepest victories because oppression becomes most effective when it survives in the minds of those it once controlled.

The damage inflicted by apartheid still limits generations born after its legal end, instead of dismantling those inherited inequalities with urgency, ANC corruption has, in my view, entrenched them. Liberation loses its meaning when poverty remains geographically predictable, when opportunity still follows old maps and when millions continue to inherit the same disadvantages under a different government. Changing political leadership means little if the structures producing inequality remain largely untouched.

Under apartheid, those who resisted the state were often monitored, arrested and brutally suppressed. Today, public protests are frequently met with a heavy security presence and close surveillance. While the circumstances are different, governments that increasingly view citizens with suspicion instead of trust risk repeating damaging patterns of state power. A government confident in its legitimacy does not fear its people but it listens to them. When leaders begin treating public anger as a threat instead of a warning, they should ask themselves a difficult question: have they become so consumed by power that they can no longer distinguish governing from controlling? Apartheid is wearing different colours.

Muammar Gaddafi did not die because he lacked weapons, he died because he convinced himself that power could permanently suppress public anger. Like Louis XVI before him, Hosni Mubarak after him and countless governments history has buried, he confused silence with consent, fear with loyalty and longevity with legitimacy. Every ruling party eventually begins believing the same dangerous fiction: “It cannot happen here.” That illusion is the final stage of political arrogance, it is the point where governments stop governing reality and begin governing their own mythology. If the ANC has any respect for history, it should stop obsessing over election mathematics and start studying the psychology of governments that mistook public patience for permanent permission. Revolutions do not begin when people become angry, they begin when governments become deaf.

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” Desmond Tutu

The ANC continues speaking about unemployment as though it is merely an economic statistic and it is not. It is a well created psychological weapon aimed at its own population, a nation cannot spend decades manufacturing millions of economically abandoned citizens without eventually manufacturing political instability. South Africans in their fifties now jokingly describe themselves as “youth endala.” and that is not comedy, it is collective grief disguised as humour. It is an entire generation admitting that adulthood was postponed by a state that promised liberation but failed to deliver economic independence, every year without meaningful work strips away dignity, identity and hope. Human beings do not simply become poorer under those conditions but they become psychologically estranged from the institutions that were supposed to protect them. Governments seldom recognise the danger because they measure unemployment in percentages while citizens experience it in humiliation.

“There are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen.” Vladimir Lenin

Recent nationwide marches should have shaken the ANC into uncomfortable self-examination but instead, the President approved 600 millions of rands to prepare for controlling demonstrations while millions remain trapped in unemployment, collapsing municipalities, failing infrastructure, deteriorating public services and shrinking economic opportunity. That is not merely a policy choice, it is a psychological confession that there is money that will work to serve officials. Governments begin decaying the moment they invest more in containing public anger than in eliminating the conditions producing it and every additional police deployment communicates a devastating message to citizens: we are preparing for your reaction instead of correcting our actions. A government that fears protesters more than poverty has already admitted where it believes the greater threat lies and history shows that once a state starts treating its own people primarily as a security problem, it has already begun losing the moral argument.

“The masses are always the decisive element in history.” Amílcar Cabral

History has already written this script. The French Revolution did not erupt because bread suddenly became expensive but it erupted because years of inequality convinced ordinary people that those in power neither understood nor cared about their suffering. The Arab Spring followed the same psychological pattern. On 17 December 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor repeatedly humiliated by corrupt officials set himself alight in an act of despair that became a symbol of accumulated national frustration. Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution forced President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali from power after twenty-three years. Egypt followed, where eighteen days of relentless public mobilisation ended Hosni Mubarak’s three-decade presidency. Libya descended into civil war that culminated in Gaddafi’s violent overthrow. Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh surrendered power after sustained demonstrations, while Syria spiralled into catastrophe following the violent suppression of protests. These nations did not share identical political systems or outcomes but they shared the same fatal blindness: governments convinced themselves that accumulated resentment could be managed indefinitely without fundamentally changing how they governed.

“Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor, it must be demanded by the oppressed.” Martin Luther King Jr.

The defining force of the Arab Spring was not only rage but communication. Social media destroyed government's monopoly over information, allowing ordinary citizens to organise faster than states could control the narrative and South Africa is even more digitally connected. Public frustration no longer accumulates in silence, it spreads in real time, crosses provinces in hours and transforms private despair into collective consciousness. The ANC cannot out message a lived reality, no press conference can persuade an unemployed graduate that opportunity exists when every rejected job application says otherwise. No slogan can convince communities that corruption is under control while municipalities collapse around them. Political psychology is brutally simple: when enough citizens conclude that the future has been stolen, they stop defending the system that stole it. Governments rarely fall because the opposition suddenly becomes brilliant but they fall because ordinary people withdraw their emotional investment from those who govern them.

“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” Desmond Tutu

This is not a prophecy of revolution, it is a warning against political arrogance. Democracies possess peaceful mechanisms for change but those mechanisms survive only when governments take public grievances seriously before alienation becomes permanent and The ANC still has a choice, it can continue dismissing unemployment, corruption, porous borders, collapsing municipalities, economic stagnation and declining public trust as public-relations problems to be managed between elections, or it can recognise them for what they have become: the psychological architecture of national disillusionment. History has never been kind to governments that mistake endurance for legitimacy or silence for satisfaction and the most dangerous moment for any ruling party is not when citizens begin shouting but when those in power convince themselves they no longer need to listen.

Buckle up, the road ahead is slippery. Would you still be a virgin if your family had never taught you to value it? If your religion had never sanctified it? If your culture had never celebrated it? Before you answer, ask yourself another uncomfortable question: have you ever imagined sex, desired another person or entertained erotic thoughts while still calling yourself a virgin? If the answer is yes, where does that place you as a virgin? Matthew 5:27–28 does not only expose men who lust after women, it dismantles the comforting illusion that purity exists only in the body while the mind remains morally untouched. Long before society regulates bodies, it colonizes minds. That is where purity culture begins and not in biology but in cognition.

The body does not invent shame. Society teaches it.

Men are often genuinely afraid for their daughters and that fear is understandable. The world can be cruel to young women but somewhere between protection and possession, a dangerous line is crossed. Men become both guardians and judges of female purity while rarely measuring themselves by the same standard, that contradiction deserves scrutiny. It is psychologically revealing when those who excuse their own sexual histories become the loudest voices policing women's bodies. Female virginity becomes less about safeguarding women than preserving male certainty, lineage, honour and control. What is presented as morality often disguises a deep desire to regulate female autonomy. That is not protection but it is power wearing the mask of virtue.

A double standard survives only because one gender writes the rules while the other carries the consequences.

Virginity itself is not the enemy. Many women freely choose abstinence for personal, spiritual or moral reasons and that choice deserves respect. The problem begins when society transforms virginity into a measure of a woman's worth, the social meaning attached to virginity has been constructed over centuries to elevate some women while condemning others. In many communities and households, a daughter's virginity is treated like inherited wealth, something to preserve until it can secure social status, economic advantage or a desirable marriage. Bride price or marriage negotiations can unintentionally reinforce this thinking when a woman's sexual history becomes part of her perceived value. The celebration is not always about two people building a future together, sometimes it is about the successful preservation of an asset and the language of love quietly gives way to the language of transaction.

The moment a woman's value becomes negotiable, her humanity becomes secondary.

Cognitive psychology explains why these beliefs become so difficult to escape, repetition becomes identity. Girls hear from childhood that good women remain untouched, respectable women remain desirable and desirable women remain sexually unavailable. Eventually these messages stop sounding like social expectations and begin sounding like inner convictions. Shame rewires behaviour more effectively than force ever could and women begin monitoring themselves long before anyone else has to. Their clothes, laughter, friendships, movements and even thoughts become objects of surveillance. Meanwhile, boys are often taught that desire is natural, relentless and almost biologically unavoidable. The result is a psychological imbalance, men are excused for temptation while women are burdened with preventing it, it's a cat and mouse thing now, the other one chases while the other one runs.

Ironically, purity movements often produce the very hypersexualization they claim to oppose. Young girls are taught that their bodies possess enormous moral significance before they fully understand their own humanity. Every interaction becomes potentially sexual to them, one mistake becomes a permanent stain. Premature sexual activity certainly carries emotional and physical risks, but so does teaching a girl that her dignity can be permanently damaged by one decision. Many young women lose their sense of innocence long before they ever have sex and not because of physical intimacy but because they have been taught to fear their own bodies and one disturbing question remains, how does any man confidently declare that a girl is "still pure"? What gaze must exist for someone to inspect another human being's innocence? The question itself exposes the disturbing obsession beneath purity culture.

When innocence becomes something others inspect, it has already ceased to belong to the innocent.

This contradiction becomes even more disturbing when culture and religion are used to silence young women. In parts of South Africa and elsewhere, there have been documented cases where teenage girls have been married to much older men through cultural or religious practices, often with little meaningful power to refuse. Such practices deserve moral scrutiny regardless of tradition because consent cannot exist where fear, dependency or unequal power dominate. History should explain our customs and not excuse injustice. Culture is meant to preserve human dignity and not demand its sacrifice. The measure of any tradition should not be its age but whether it protects the vulnerable.

Traditions deserve respect only when they serve and respect the people expected to live under them.

The cruelest lie purity culture has ever told women is that they exist in only two categories which are either pure or impure, worthy or damaged, respectable or promiscuous and human beings are infinitely more complex than that. Character is not stored inside anatomy, integrity cannot be measured by sexual history and a woman's dignity does not begin with virginity, nor does it disappear after virginity. My question has never been whether women should be proud of being virgins but my question is why societies continue to treat virginity as a public achievement rather than a private decision because the moment virginity becomes something imposed instead of something freely chosen, it ceases to be virtue and becomes control and control has never been the language of love but it has always been the language of power.

My name is Billy Kubheka, thank you for reading my mind. Love and light.

The greatest spiritual deception is not that God is absent but that we have been taught to look everywhere for Him except within ourselves.

Spirituality and religion are not easy until one becomes conscious of the difference between knowing about God and knowing God and for many of us, our understanding of God was inherited before it was discovered. We were introduced to Him through doctrines, institutions, traditions, fears and interpretations created by other human beings. The result is that many people enter into a relationship with God as if they are entering into a transaction. We pray expecting a reward, we suffer expecting compensation and obey expecting protection. We give expecting a return and yet a relationship built on transactions is not intimacy but it is negotiation. The deeper spiritual awakening for me begins when we realize that God's relationship with us is not transactional but profoundly personal, it is an inner work, the slow and often uncomfortable journey of becoming conscious of the divine presence already within us.

A transactional God creates anxious believers and a personal God creates conscious human beings.

"If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation" 2 Corinthians 5:17.

The emphasis is not merely on changing behavior but on becoming something new in consciousness and this is why I have gradually distanced myself from the idea that Jesus will physically return to Earth, not because I lack faith in Him but because I have become increasingly aware of the radical nature of what He taught. Jesus said, "The Kingdom of God is within you" Luke 17:21 and if the Kingdom is within, then perhaps the greater challenge is not waiting for God to appear somewhere else but awakening to where He already is. The return we seek externally is meant to happen internally through awareness, transformation and fellowship with God in the present moment.

The return we are waiting for externally is an awakening that must first happen internally.

The questions that arise from such contemplation are not questions of unbelief but questions of consciousness. If Jesus died for our sins, why do so many still live imprisoned by fear? If resurrection is promised, why do we fear death as though it has the final word? If God is merciful, why have generations been introduced to Him through terror before they were introduced to Him through love? If God knows the exact day of our death, why are we left to live in uncertainty? These questions are not attacks on faith, they have served as invitations to think beyond inherited assumptions. Faith that cannot endure honest questions becomes fragile and faith that survives them becomes wisdom.

The spiritual journey begins when we stop asking, 'Where is God?' and start asking, ‘Why have I become unconscious of His presence?’

"The fear of the Lord" spoken of in scripture was never meant to be the fear of a tyrant but the reverence one feels when standing before something infinitely greater than oneself. Perfect love casts out fear, 1 John 4:18 and Jesus consistently moved people away from anxiety and toward trust. He called God "Father" not ruler, he spoke of a relationship not servitude. Again and again, He redirected people from religious performance toward spiritual understanding. The greatest rebellion of Jesus was not against sinners but against systems that convinced people they were separated from God and needed intermediaries to reach Him.

Many people were taught to fear God's judgment before they were taught to understand God's presence.

The people who taught us about God have often unknowingly shaped who we believe God to be. Many inherited a God who keeps score, waits to punish and measures worth according to religious performance. Yet the God revealed through Christ appears remarkably different, He dines with outcasts, He forgives before being asked, He heals on the Sabbath, touches the untouchable, speaks to those society rejects and consistently places compassion above religious conformity. "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath" Mark 2:27. Human beings were never created to serve institutions but institutions were meant to serve human flourishing. Jesus understood that consciousness, love and mercy mattered more than ritual.

Religion often teaches people to search for God in systems, Jesus taught people to discover God in consciousness.

"Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?" 1 Corinthians 3:16.

These words carry revolutionary implications. If God dwells within, then spirituality becomes less about reaching outward and more about awakening inward. It becomes less about conformity and more about transformation. Less about ritual and more about relationship, less about fear and more about awareness.

The greatest distance between man and God is not physical separation but spiritual unconsciousness.

God is not failing you because your life does not resemble someone else's. We were not born to live identical stories, we were not born with the same challenges, opportunities, wounds or lessons. Each soul arrives here to navigate a unique path through existence. Some journeys are marked by abundance, others by struggle and most by a mixture of both. The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike (Matthew 5:45), not because God is indifferent but because life itself is a classroom where consciousness is formed.

God is not failing you because your journey is different, comparison is often the death of spiritual understanding.

The deeper realization is that God is not a cosmic accountant balancing transactions from heaven. He is the source of life itself, quietly present within every breath, every moment of awareness and every search for truth.

"In Him we live and move and have our being" Acts 17:28.

The closer we move toward that realization, the closer we come to understanding what Jesus may have been pointing toward all along: not a God waiting somewhere far away, but a God nearer to us than our own thoughts, patiently waiting for us to awaken to His presence.

Perhaps Jesus did not come to bring humanity a new religion but perhaps He came to awaken humanity to the God it had forgotten was already present.

Stay blessed.

Death is inevitable and fear is optional.

If life is beautiful and so death is beautiful, I have never understood why so many people spend their lives fearing death. It seems strange to dedicate precious years worrying about something that is inevitable, unsolvable and waiting for every living thing. Why would you spend your life stressing about a destination that every human being has already been promised? Death arrives for kings and beggars, believers and skeptics, the brave and the fearful alike. It asks for no permission and accepts no negotiations. The tragedy is not that we die but the real tragedy is that many people never truly live before they do.

I think of myself as a raindrop, a raindrop falls from the sky, waters the earth, nourishes life, sometimes destroys and eventually returns to where it came from, that is how I understand my own existence. My achievements are rain, my failures are rain, my kindness is rain and my mistakes are rain. Both creation and destruction belong to the same water and understanding this has allowed me to forgive myself for being human. I was not born to be perfect, i did not choose to be born, why then should I punish myself as though I was designed to live without flaws?

I am a raindrop, I came from somewhere to serve my purpose and one day I will return.

The rain does not apologize for the flood, nor does it boast about the flower it helped grow but it simply fulfills its nature. Human beings, however, spend their lives carrying guilt for being imperfect and shame for not being extraordinary. We act as though our flaws are proof of failure instead of proof that we are alive yet nature never judges itself that way. The river is not ashamed of its bends, the tree is not ashamed of its scars. Only human beings demand perfection from creatures who never asked to exist in the first place.

Water taught me another lesson. It bores its way through rocks and mountains to reach its destination, it travels impossible distances, not because it is stronger than stones but because it refuses to stop moving. That is why I struggle to believe in limitations, if I can think deeply enough about something, understand it to its core and conclude that it is possible then I owe it to my existence to pursue it. Thinking is one of the hardest things a human being can do, most people inherit conclusions before they ever discover their own.

Water does not ask permission from mountains, it finds a way.

Perhaps that is why so many people inherit fear, fear is often passed down like a family heirloom. We inherit it from parents, traditions and strangers who mistake anxiety for wisdom. We are handed warnings disguised as love and limitations disguised as care, people project their fears onto others because it comforts them to believe that everyone else should live inside the same boundaries they have accepted for themselves but when death finally arrives, every human being walks through that door alone. So why should I carry someone else's fear through my only life?

I do not fear death nearly as much as I fear reaching the end of my life and realizing I never truly lived it, I fear becoming a story that sounds impressive at my funeral but feels dishonest to the person lying in the coffin. I do not want people to celebrate an idea of me, I want the life they describe to be the life I actually lived. I want to be present in the stories told about me, not replaced by a version of myself created to satisfy the expectations of others.

The people who tell you not to live boldly will not spend a single night in your grave.

The uncomfortable truth is that the people who project their fears onto you will not follow you into death. They will cry, mourn, remember and eventually move on. Not because they are selfish or heartless but because life demands that they continue living, they would not spend twenty-four hours beside your corpse. They would not spend a single night in your grave. One day your name will become a memory then a story and eventually silence and that is the fate of every human being who has ever lived.

Most people will read this and feel sadness but I feel freedom because if everything passes then this moment becomes infinitely valuable. If nothing is guaranteed beyond today then today becomes sacred. If I may never see what happens after my life ends then my responsibility is not to obsess over the ending but to honor the chapter I am living now. Every laugh, every risk, every failure, every act of love becomes meaningful precisely because it will not last forever.

The tragedy is not that we die, the tragedy is that many people never truly live before they do.

Perhaps that is the meaning of life, not to conquer death, not to escape it and not even to understand it. Perhaps the purpose of life is simply to be fully present for the brief miracle of existing at all. To experience what is here while it is here. To stand in the rain while it falls, knowing it cannot last forever and loving it anyway.

“Your brain can tell you something is missing while refusing to tell you what it is. Yet you still think you completely understand yourself.”

Human beings are fascinating creatures. We split atoms, mapped the human genome and built machines that can perform billions of calculations in seconds. Yet despite all of our achievements, there is one thing we still do not understand: ourselves.

This is why I have always struggled with the concept of madness. Not because I deny that some people suffer psychologically, I do not deny that some people hear voices, experience delusions or lose their grip on “reality”. Those experiences are real, what I question is our confidence. The confidence with which we claim to understand what is happening inside another human mind when we barely understand what is happening inside our own.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder whether madness is sometimes a diagnosis and other times simply a label for behaviour that exceeds our understanding. After all, who decided what normal is? A human being right? And what was that human being using to define normality? The same mysterious mind that scientists, philosophers, psychologists and neurologists still struggle to fully explain.

That should make all of us uncomfortable because before we start diagnosing other people, we should probably explain ourselves.

Take a moment and think about one of the strangest experiences every human being has had. You suddenly realise you have forgotten something important, not completely forgotten it because you know it exists, you can feel it. There is a psychological itch somewhere in your mind and your brain sends an alert that something is missing.

You stop, you search, you think and ask yourself what it is. And then something “impossible” happens, your brain knows something is missing but it cannot tell you what is missing. Think about how absurd that really is, the very system that generated the warning cannot provide the information. You know something but you do not know what you know and the more you think about it, the stranger it becomes.

Who exactly is forgetting and who exactly is remembering? If your brain is you, how can one part of you possess information while another part remains unaware of it? Psychologists have tried and labeled it a retrieval failure, neuroscientists describe it as a breakdown between stored memory and conscious access but if we are honest, these explanations only describe the event. They do not explain the mystery.

Naming something is not the same as understanding it. Calling sadness depression does not fully explain consciousness, calling something madness does not mean we understand the mind. We often mistake labels for answers and that is one of humanity’s oldest habits.

Any species that cannot explain its own thoughts should be careful when explaining the thoughts of others.

What fascinates me is that this forgotten thought phenomenon reveals something terrifying about the human mind. It proves that there are parts of your own brain operating outside your awareness, there is information exists inside you without your permission and knowledge exists within you without your access. In simple terms, there are parts of your mind that know things you do not.

Read that sentence again.

There are parts of your mind that know things you do not and that should shake the foundations of how we think about ourselves. We like to imagine that we are the captains of our own ships but Science increasingly suggests we may be passengers giving directions after the journey has already begun. Researchers have repeatedly found that the brain often makes decisions milliseconds before conscious awareness catches up. In some experiments, scientists could predict a participant’s choice before the participant believed they had made it.

Think about what that means.

Your brain may already know what you are going to do before “you” know what you are going to do.

So who exactly is in charge? The deeper psychology digs into the mind and the less united the human being appears.

We are not one voice, we are a collection of systems. Memory arguing with emotion, instinct arguing with logic and fear arguing with reason. Consciousness trying to make sense of decisions that may have begun elsewhere and this is why I sometimes believe that the people society calls mad may be the most honest among us. Not because they are always right or because suffering makes people wise but because they expose something the rest of us spend our lives hiding. The mind is chaotic, the mind is contradictory, the mind is unstable and the mind is mysterious.

The difference is that most of us have learned how to package our confusion into socially acceptable behaviour, the person talking to himself on a street corner is called insane but the businessman talking to himself in his car is called stressed. A student arguing with imaginary future conversations in their bedroom is called normal, an athlete visualising events that have not happened yet is called focused. The difference between sanity and insanity is often less clear than we pretend and society tends to judge not the behaviour itself, but whether enough people are doing it.

Perhaps madness is not a condition but it is a category for behaviour we have failed to explain.

History gives us many reasons to be cautious, there was a time and even now some people still see epilepsy as possession, depression as laziness. Some people still dismiss trauma as weakness. Human beings have a terrible habit of mistaking their current understanding for ultimate truth and then science advances and suddenly yesterday’s certainty becomes today’s ignorance.

What if the same thing is happening with our understanding of madness? What if future generations look back at us the same way we look back at medieval doctors? What if many of our conclusions are not entirely wrong but deeply incomplete?

That possibility should humble us because the greatest mystery in psychology is not the patient sitting in a hospital ward, the greatest mystery is the person reading this article.

You, you have never fully met yourself, you have never consciously observed every process happening in your brain, you do not know where every thought comes from, you do not know why certain memories remain while others disappear, you do not know why some fears exist, you do not know why certain dreams arrive, you do not know why your brain sometimes hides information from you and then asks you to find it.

Yet every morning you wake up and confidently call yourself sane and that confidence might be the strangest thing about humanity because if there is one conclusion I keep returning to, it is this:

The line between sanity and madness may not be a wall, it may be a single spectrum on which every human being already stands. The only difference is degree, we all hear voices and some call it thinking. We all believe things without evidence and some call it intuition. We all argue with ourselves and some call it reflection. We all live inside a mind we do not fully understand and some call it being human and perhaps that is the most uncomfortable discovery of all.

The problem is not that a few people are mad, the problem is that we have spent centuries pretending that the rest of us are not.

“The greatest mystery is not madness. The greatest mystery is that we pretend to understand the mind at all.”

Who decided their answers were final?

Sometimes I wonder about the people who invented school, not the buildings, not the subjects but the philosophy behind it. Who were these people who looked at the infinite complexity of human thought and concluded that learning should be measured by how accurately someone repeats an approved answer? Who decided that their conclusions would become the foundation upon which millions of minds would be judged? Who decided that knowledge should arrive as a finished product instead of an invitation to investigate further? I have questions for the architects of education, questions they probably would not have rewarded on an exam.

They say 1 + 1 = 2, fine but who decided what “1” is? Who assigned value to it? At what point did a human observation become an unquestionable law? Mathematics works because we agree on its language but agreement is not the same thing as absolute truth. The deeper I looked into the world, the more I realized that every answer rests upon assumptions made by someone before us. Yet school rarely asks students to examine the foundations, it asks them to memorize the building. I believe I was never wrong in school but my teachers simply wanted me to give them their answer, the answer printed in the textbook, the answer approved by the department, the answer that would fit neatly into a marking memorandum. If I arrived at a different conclusion through genuine thought, I was marked incorrect and not because my reasoning lacked depth but because it lacked conformity.

This raises a disturbing question:

When a teacher asks a question they already know the answer to, what exactly are they measuring? My intelligence? My curiosity? My creativity? Or merely my ability to reproduce information?

If the answer is already predetermined, then perhaps the exercise is not about discovery at all. Perhaps it is about obedience.
What if education has confused learning with agreement? As children, we were told to think critically but only within invisible boundaries. We were encouraged to ask questions until those questions become uncomfortable, we were told to be creative until our creativity challenges accepted assumptions, we were told to be independent thinkers until our independence leads us somewhere unexpected and the irony is impossible to ignore. Humanity celebrates its greatest thinkers because they challenged what everyone else accepted. Yet in classrooms around the world, students are often rewarded for doing the exact opposite.

This makes me wonder how many brilliant ideas died in classrooms because they appeared in the wrong format, how many future philosophers were told they were incorrect because their perspective did not match a rubric? How many innovators learned to silence themselves because questioning authority carried a penalty?

And then there is the structure itself, why do children wear uniforms? We are told it creates equality? I think it creates sameness. Why are students required to sit for hours at a time, often against their natural instincts? Why do bells dictate movement? Why is permission required for basic actions? Why does an institution designed for growth sometimes resemble an institution designed for control?
The comparison is uncomfortable, but discomfort is often where meaningful questions begin. A child enters a building at a specific time, they wear assigned clothing and follow a strict schedule. They are told when to speak, when to move, when to eat, when to be silent and deviation from the rules is met with punishment. Compliance is rewarded, independence is often managed rather than encouraged.

My question is not whether schools and prisons are the same, my question is why some of their structures look so similar.

Perhaps the greatest mystery is why society treats questioning as rebellion instead of intelligence. Every breakthrough in history began with someone refusing to accept that the current answer was final. Every scientific revolution, every philosophical movement, every social transformation started with a person asking, “What if everyone is wrong?”
Yet many educational systems still operate as though certainty is the highest achievement and doubt is a defect.

I do not believe intelligence is the ability to arrive at approved conclusions, i believe intelligence is the courage to explore beyond them. It is the willingness to ask questions that have no answer key. It is the refusal to mistake consensus for truth and maybe education should not be about teaching children what to think but rather be about teaching them how to think deeply enough to challenge even the people who taught them.
And if that makes authority uncomfortable, perhaps that is exactly the point.

Foreigners have exposed a very shameful side of us that is difficult to look at and even harder to admit as South Africans. Many people want foreign nationals to leave because they claim these individuals are taking their jobs but I would like to ask simple questions: how many South Africans do you know who have gone to get fake sick notes because they were drunk and couldn’t go to work? Or simply because they didn’t feel like going to work that day noma “ubambile”, umjolo as you know it better? How many do you know spend every month-end sleeping in clubs and taverns after getting paid, then arrive at work the following day with a hangover? How many people miss work and proudly claim that things will not run smoothly without them because they are supposedly the best in their departments? They see the problem they are creating, they know the pressure they place on their colleagues and employers. They know productivity suffers because of their behaviour and yet somehow, because it is them doing it, it becomes acceptable, fashionable even.

“Mixing business with pleasure”, how many people get employed and suddenly start dating managers so they can do as they please in the workplace? How many abuse relationships, favouritism and office politics to avoid accountability? Siyanazi nina. We know exactly what happens in these workplaces. No one took your job, you made the wrong decisions from taking privilege as a right that cannot betaken away and that unseriousness, that lack of discipline, that lack of respect towards employers and towards opportunity itself is part of what got us here. But instead of confronting that reality, we search for scapegoats and unfortunately, foreigners become the easiest target because they have very little power in a country that is not their own.

The truth is uncomfortable because it demands self-reflection, it forces us to ask questions about ourselves that many would rather avoid. It is easier to blame the foreign national than to admit that some people repeatedly sabotage their own opportunities.

As the saying goes, a man who refuses to examine himself will always find someone else to blame.

We speak about jobs being taken from us but we rarely speak about the attitudes and habits that make employers lose confidence in us. Employers cannot afford to have work slowing down at the beginning of every month because employees are recovering from payday celebrations, employers cannot afford endless absenteeism, excuses, fake illnesses and declining productivity. You as an individual would not tolerate that if you were running your own company. If you were a CEO responsible for keeping a business alive, feeding families through salaries and meeting targets, you would be forced to choose the person who helps you get the work done consistently.

That is the part nobody wants to discuss. Employers do not survive on emotions, they survive on performance, reliability and results. If one employee shows up consistently while another repeatedly arrives with excuses, which one do you honestly expect the employer to choose? We demand opportunities, but too often we fail to respect the opportunities we already have. Then, when the consequences arrive, we look for someone else to carry the blame.

What makes this even more worrying is that our youth are being introduced to these norms at university level. Students are drinking alcohol during semesters, attending lectures drunk and treating education as an inconvenience rather than a privilege. The same culture of irresponsibility that damages workplaces is being passed down to the next generation, they are inheriting habits that will not take them anywhere. They are learning that discipline is optional, that accountability can be avoided and that consequences belong to other people. Then we act surprised when graduates struggle to compete in a demanding economy because they haven't broken the habit they inherited in university and the space is now time demanding and moving very fast, adapting becomes a problem.

The saddest part is that the damage does not stop with the individuals making these choices, the unemployed and struggling citizens also inherit the consequences created by those who are careless with opportunity. Every act of irresponsibility affects perceptions, expectations and trust. Every abuse of an opportunity makes it harder for someone else who is genuinely trying, every excuse creates another barrier for those who desperately need a chance.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.”

Those words remain relevant because they remind us that blaming others is often a convenient escape from accountability. A nation cannot excuse its way into prosperity, it cannot drink its way into productivity. It cannot blame its way into success, foreigners did not create our weaknesses, in many cases, they simply exposed them. The real question is whether we are prepared to confront what we see in the mirror or whether we will continue attacking the reflection while refusing to acknowledge the face staring back at us.