My little brother and I are good friends, and I like to think we’re very similar. Yet where I’m most proud of him is that he has even more heart than I do, even as he learns what the bar for kindness is, both above and below. Last week, after I lost a video game of football to him, he asked what to tell a friend who had just lost a parent.

“Her dad just died. Cancer. What do I tell her?”

I couldn’t confess in the moment that although I had never been familiar with grief in my own life, I had a handbook for what to say in these situations. I express shock, because death is a phenomenon as much as it is a tragedy. I show my concern, because it is important they feel less lonely at this moment. I show my support, offering prayers of peace and strength, and myself in whatever way I can. By now, it felt like a formula, a simple system you applied to a difficult problem. So I simply repeated a version of the message I was familiar with. In the last year, I’ve had to comfort so many friends that it has begun to feel functional to say.

I have never been very close to grief, both for friends and family, and it is a mercy that bears its own anxiety. I am not unaware of the privilege of being spared the loss of those I love, but it inspires a fear that one day my luck may finally expire. All the same, I am not ignorant of how encompassing grief is. Its pale hands touch everything.

I have watched those closest to me lose those closest to them, and with it always came the greatest change.

When my oldest friend called to tell me she had lost her brother, I recall sitting on the floor of my kitchen through the call and for a while after. I knew her brother more from a distance, despite having gone to school with him in our younger years. In my memories, he was the cooler older guy we all knew, like in every show that ran on television. Despite not being in contact with him at the time, his passing remains painfully palpable to me.

I don’t remember anything I said to her on the call that day, but it became the day I learned to pray for people when I said, ‘I’m praying for you’. I couldn’t be sure if it was the right thing to say, but it was all I knew.

A year before this event, another old friend lost his dad. I had met him a while ago while visiting them, and my first thought after he passed was how kind he had been. My friend came over a few days after, and we drove around for a while talking about his dad, and then afterward we simply sat in silence. I didn’t have to say anything but simply listen, and maybe that was easier.

A few days passed after my friend’s brother passed; another friend and I decided to visit. We made a stop on the way to get her glazed donuts alongside other simple snacks.

At her house, we met our grieving friend in a faded T-shirt and a pair of pajama pants. I regretted instantly that this was my first time here. We greeted a long line of older adults before sitting in her other living room quietly.

She preferred to sit in the car with us, she said. And so we sat in the car, eating a box of donuts and playing quirky music from the radio. She talked about her brother’s plants and clothes, and his band, and his hair, and we simply listened. In between sentences, she would make a joke that we would all laugh at, before chipping in our own jokes in return. We sat there till the sun set. I may never forget that day.

A recently bereaved friend asked me what it means when people tell you, after you’ve lost a loved one, to call them if you need anything. “It feels so vague, like, can I ask for a house? I don’t want to hear it just because you feel like that’s what you should say.”

In the last year, I’ve had too many friends lose one of their parents. Some are friends I’m close enough to have just shown up at their house after hearing, and others I found myself praying for and asking them to call me if they needed anything. It would take time to realize that asking them to call me rather than just showing up was the lazier alternative.

I love my friends, but I can’t help but feel useless in their grief. In one of my earlier articles, I talked about the sort of difficulty involved in watching those you love suffer, and grief is one of the primary sources of this suffering. It feels like watching your friend struggle through a school exam, but your seats are too far apart to whisper any answers. My efforts feel like I have mouthed the answers, but I can’t tell if they can see it.

When a friend loses a loved one now, I worry for them. I think about how every birthday bears its own emptiness, how every celebration is a reminder that something is missing. And in the early weeks, I fight tears for them: will they ever be happy again?

In the years since, I've found that what I learn from watching my friends move through grief outweighs the pain of the early days. In watching the change that comes, I am filled with wonder. In purpose and faith, I have watched my friends give meaning to suffering.

For those who share my faith, one may have expected a separation from God, with pain as the gulf; I know I did. After all, why would he create a world that would allow them so much heartache? I saw instead that my friends had found a conviction of the goodness of his nature — that where it may not be good to them, it was good for them. In the greatest degrees of suffering, somehow they found a commitment to a will and love for them, perhaps even greater than what they had for those they had lost. Most importantly, there was a consolation for them each day: the promise that they will be reunited with their loved ones.

For my non-theist friends, I saw them find themselves in the impermanence of life. As one of my grieving friends would say, “Everything is beautiful.” In art, film, music, and the sciences, my friends became so committed to immersing themselves in creating work greater than them that their impermanence may never bother them again. But most importantly, they became far less afraid to question the present, and to take the kind of risks that make a full life.

Now, should grief rear its ugly head again, I am not certain what to tell my friends, or what my brother should tell his. Maybe I’ll simply show up, rather than asking again what they need from me. Maybe we’ll eat donuts in silence on new car seats with a view of the rippling waters of the lagoon. At the end of it all, I will pray for peace, and for life to show them kindness through the love of those around them.

More than a decade ago, on a sunny evening after a school sports event, I hung from a first-floor ledge by one arm, my feet hanging several feet off the ground with no way to climb up on my own. My brother and his friends watched from a floor above, waving and cheering. They had promised to pull me up if I changed my mind after hanging down the ledge, but eventually watching me make the jump turned out to be more entertaining to them.

It was the evening after my relay team had just won a race. Armed with a rush of adrenaline, and to show off to a girl I thought was prettier than Beyoncé, I decided to leap off the balcony of a building. I would fall and sprain my ankle, spending the rest of the year limping. I would go on to sprain my arm, wrists, and ankles in the coming months, and add each one to my list of accidents borne from bad luck.

My friend Tosin has a theory about this. She made a series of videos a while ago on increasing your surface area for good luck. They highlighted ways to put yourself in places where opportunities find you easier. I believe, however, that there’s also an opening for a shortlist of ways to shrink your surface area for bad luck in your 20s. The idea is not that you can absolutely avoid misfortune, but that we may be less prone to bad luck when we’re aware of how quickly seemingly inconsequential decisions can go south.

After living a decade since my last sprained limb, I think I can share a handful of actions I’ve seen surround ‘unlucky’ events.

One. Quitting your job without a (really good) plan B. The internet and self-help books may tell you that your salary is a bribe to forget your dreams. What they won’t tell you is that you may not be good enough at the boring things that’ll make your dream financially viable or even just successful overall. On the other hand, perhaps you plan to leave your job because it is eroding your quality of life. It is worth admitting that unemployment may erode it even faster; between a job search that is bound to become depressing and the impact it makes on your finances and how limited your decision-making becomes because you have no money.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t leave a job you hate or one that makes you so unhappy that you don’t remember why you ever got into the career, but it helps to know that your odds of regret go up considerably if you don’t already have a good enough alternative.

Two. Gambling your way to wealth. A friend of mine once nursed a gambling addiction, and he had a philosophy to it as well: he believed that he could only lose so many times before he won enough to recoup his losses. The flaw in this logic is that it assumes the universe rewards tenacity at hapless ventures with riches. The chances you’ll create wealth before ruining your finances and building an addiction are so slim that you’re honestly better off without it. It’s bigger than just sports gambling because volatile and poorly researched financial investments fall into the same category. You have a higher chance of irreparably damaging your finances than you do creating generational wealth in one week. Ignore the guy who says he turned two thousand into thirty million. You are not him, and usually neither is he.

Three. Dating for the plot. Some great relationships start with two people who didn’t plan to be much more, but they are an exception to the norm. A more familiar trope in the dating pool is meeting people who had one relationship that made them impossible to love in every one that followed. One person they decided to wing it with — ignoring incompatibility, ignoring red flags — hurt them in ways that may take a long time and therapy to overcome. If you can’t relate to that kind of relationship trauma, there’s no reason to go searching for it.

Four. Pairing high-risk careers with low-income realities. This is a pattern that the internet may be amplifying. If you come from a family where the economic realities aren’t particularly stable, you put yourself at great risk when you choose a career that may take years (or forever) to show results. Music, sports, and entrepreneurship are careers where you’re likely to spend years of your life in a career where your work experience is difficult to transfer or measure. This means that not only do you lose out on financial stability, but should you change your mind, you will be years behind in experience. If you must pursue these, at least keep a part-time job until your main career finds traction.

While real stories exist of those who succeeded with exceptional reward, the risk is heavy, and you need to be aware of how heavy. That being said, don’t tell this to your boyfriend the rapper; you’ll end up with a voice note on the album.

Five. Fighting people with nothing to lose. If you live in Lagos, especially if you drive, then someone has earned your ire. You jump out of your car ready to beat him till his ancestors get dizzy. Best case, you lose, and you’re injured and realize it wasn’t worth it. Worst-case, you inflict a fatal wound and begin your lifelong journey to a penitentiary. Or worse still, you’re the one who gets the fatal injury, and you have to explain to everyone in the afterlife that you’re here because someone chipped your car paint and you couldn’t let it go. There is very little that is achieved with violence that can’t be achieved without it, albeit by a longer route.

Six. Loaning or giving away money you cannot afford. Generosity is a virtue, unless you’ve abandoned your responsibilities to yourself to commit to it. Lending or gifting money you actually need will not only put you in a similar situation as whoever you decided to help, but it’s likely to build resentment against them easily. A longer conversation to be had is whether the validation of being ‘the one who comes through’ is risking your own wellbeing, and if you’re okay serving the thanks of others to yourself and your kids for dinner.

If you need to loan anyone money, ensure it’s someone who not only has a good history of repayment, but also an amount that you would be fine if you never got it back. Most importantly, my rule of thumb is to never loan money to people who you’re not close to when they reach out from the blues; more often than not, they’ve built poor credit with everyone else in their network, and you’re their only option.

This shouldn’t be misconstrued as cowardice or an absolute aversion to risk, but it helps to know that some risks have consequences that are disproportionate to their reward.

At the same time, I sometimes can’t help but wonder if a life lived in such caution is not one that is too protected or sheltered. Maybe you only live once, and great risk is the price of the life you truly want. Some crave the adventure of a life filled with adrenaline from knowing how quickly things can go wrong, but surviving it nonetheless, because flirting with risk has its appeal, the kind that an overly guarded life does not offer. Yet life can last a long time, and one spent absorbing the consequences of poor luck can leave a bitter taste in your mouth.

For many new risks, I go back to the ledge and decide if I’d clamber over again. I think about the appeal of entertaining my brother and his friends who would cheer me from the higher floor for risk-taking. I think about the adrenaline of the jump before I landed on my ankle. At the end of my reveries, my right ankle still hurts, and I don’t remember the name of the girl I was showing off to.

The first time I watched Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ as a child, I sobbed. I was on the couch with my older cousins, and I wept until my vision blurred at the suffering of Christ. Growing up in very Christian circles, one of the first things I learned was that I loved Jesus; there were a dozen songs to go with it, too.

In our home devotions, when we read and talked about the crucifixion and how it saved mankind, they were mostly stories. A childhood classic called Donut Man caricatured Jesus using donuts and little children, and so suffering came off softer. Watching the suffering of Christ in live action removed that veil. In the face of a less fluffed retelling of the story, I pondered the purpose of suffering more deeply through the eyes of those I loved.

My understanding of suffering is one of the more complex parts of how I interact with the divine. As a child, I tackled an illness alongside other difficulties that seemed never-ending. I believed that there was a specific way God needed to be spoken to for him to hear me. The Pentecostal churches we attended said just as much: if you prayed at night instead of during the day, if you gave offerings of your allowances, prayed and fasted, and took the communion. In the face of failing entreaties, I would show up on Sundays and couldn’t help but conclude that there was some mystery to God that let him hear when a church member needed a new car but not when children were struggling.

As I got a little older, my suffering became a gulf between me and God. My reasoning was simple: he was either wicked or there was simply no one on the other end of the phone. The first seemed more like it at the time; perhaps he was simply mean or vengeful. A memorable mid-week sermon taught that Africans were suffering for the sins of our forefathers, and somehow it was poor PR for the creator to my floundering self because it implied he was vindictive (a trait he disliked in mankind), but even more so for sins I was unaware of. My confusion became contempt; I didn’t want to be around people who wanted to sing of his goodness, because where was this goodness?

That phase passed. My prayers found answers, but not before I had taken to finding purpose in suffering. Yet while my relationship with God improved, suffering wouldn’t leave my lens. There was suffering in places it didn’t belong, with the innocent and with the righteous, and so I wrestled with God some more, because how good could he be if he allowed such injustice?

This debate is an age-old one. The Epicurean Paradox asks that if God is all good and all powerful, then why is there evil or suffering? If he had all the power and all the good, there ought to be no way for suffering to sneak past him.

In countless conversations and even more recently on YouTube shows, I have found myself in defense of this question. Thinkers like Augustine, Aquinas, and later on C.S Lewis present defenses (theodicies) that suffice for apologetics. Augustine posits that love requires free will, and goes on to espouse how such free will allows for greater degrees of good by allowing us to overcome evil. Aquinas builds on his work when he presents that evil in all forms is simply a deprivation of the wholeness of good, and so God didn’t create Evil; he simply allows the gap. The thesis from both thinkers is longer, but at the risk of reductionism, the claim is that suffering has a systemic purpose.

C. S. Lewis alludes to the same ideas in simpler language in both ‘Mere Christianity’ and ‘The Problem of Pain’, presenting that our suffering builds character and perhaps even helps refine us, like precious metals. But he also believed that even if it didn’t, we could not be more knowledgeable about its purpose than the good God of the universe.

John Hick presents a more complex idea in response to this, tied loosely to Irenaeus ideas, often called ‘Soul-making’: that our world serves as an incubator of sorts for our imperfect souls to develop into a perfect version by exercising free will and its consequences.

These defenses hold up fine in print. The goal of theodicy is to acquit God in the problem of suffering, and point to man as the primary actor in suffering, and while it has its shortcomings, it will win you some arguments.

Overall, when I find myself practicing kindness and empathy, I find it easy to trace it back to my learnings of suffering, and I continue to learn even as life deals me a new hand as we go along. Too often, when my pain passes, I forget how difficult it was in the moment. I have, however, also come to realize that pain that passes is a privilege.

As such, my suffering is no longer what makes it harder to see God. It’s the suffering of those I see as innocent. When I am rolled a die that appears so malevolent to me, I can assign meaning to it. I can blame it on a time I was less than moral. I can stand in the sun and say I am being refined to shine like gold. But these all lose their comfort when I look at others who suffer.

A month ago, nearly 3 dozen children were abducted by terrorists and taken into a forest where they were beaten and harmed in the pouring rain. Every day since then, I’ve imagined being a child again, plagued by things I prayed for God to take away. In this case, it is a series of conflicts that have lasted decades and may just continue. When I sit with these emotions, I tell myself again that suffering exists because of free will and it refines us, but the way that it has placated me in the past does not suffice this time.

I am more familiar with the suffering of others than I care to let on. Three of the closest people to me are plagued with the kind of suffering that appears not to pass. Each one is faced with a circumstance vastly different from the other, but each is without resolution. It is through them that suffering threatens to build a wall between the God of the universe and me.

I sat next to one of these loved ones and watched them sob over a thorn in the flesh that would no doubt return soon; all the apologetics became just words. All the lingo felt like complex language that makes academia of pain, and we tell ourselves that if it made sense on a board, it would make sense on our skin. I called a friend and asked, “What kind of father makes a playground and puts glass in the sand, knowing so well that it will cut his daughters?”

She replied: “Maybe the pain serves a purpose, one that we’re not aware of.”

“What kind of purpose couldn’t he find an easier way to present?” I asked, and we sat in silence on the call as we pondered the same mysteries that Job did.

There are more convoluted answers to the problem of evil, and one I find intriguing is in Carl Jung’s Answer to Job. Jung argues that the God of the Old Testament was less moral than Job was. He believed that Job was just, and that the events of the book of Job were what would eventually drive God to change by becoming man, to partake in our suffering, and in turn become more moral. It is one of Jung’s stranger religious pieces, but it presents a God who is no longer immutable and instead points to one who cannot be trusted as the source of morality. These are not traits that can be expected of a higher being.

When I struggle with looking at the God I see as good and unchanging through the lens of the suffering of others, I sometimes ask what Jesus was asked of the blind man: ‘Did his parents sin?’

I doubt it, though, if suffering could be undone by righteousness and moral uprightness, the people I loved would be whole. If we were all to suffer for the sins of our parents, then a dozen princes of Europe ought to be plagued with unconscionable ailments. Perhaps this is one of the more distressing patterns: that the real consequence of evil appears to be on the innocent and not its perpetrators.

My brother and I often talk about how so many great philosophers and theologians were people who embraced suffering they didn’t deserve, seeing it as part of their journey to knowledge and a clearer view of God. As such, I also believe strongly in theology around the necessity of suffering.

Yet when I look at those who worship God daily on bruised knees that may never heal, my own suffering and the language that explains it fade into the background, and instead I speak to the sky in defense of Job.

I had just closed out work when I wrote the opening to this piece. It is the start of the weekend. On my last call for the day, I listened as my coworkers listed plans for a brief span of rest before work would begin again next week. I have worked remotely for the last three years and really only leave the house when I tire of seeing my own face reflected off my screen.

Today, I stepped out to pick up a food order sent from work. It is a gift they send at the start of every month for working seven-ish hours in front of my laptop every weekday. I walked out to meet the delivery person, and like every time I step into the sun, I realized I should do this more often.

The delivery person had arrived on a bicycle, as usual. He must have ridden for no less than 45 minutes to deliver a food box. Today it was a young man, possibly in his late 20s. His name was on the app that sends delivery details, and although I tried my very best to remember it, I would have forgotten it the moment he left. A week ago, it was an older man with gray hair whose face I barely remember, who cycled to bring soup ingredients I had ordered. Although it was not yet noon, it was his third trip of the day, and many more would follow.

When I returned to my building, there was a young boy in the next compound, chopping away at the weeds in my neighbor’s garden. He is young — younger than my youngest sibling — but he is a hard worker. He is respected in the area because he does his work swiftly and without complaint. It is child labor, of course, but nobody thinks too much of it. One neighbor once said he had called the boy’s father, offered to send his son to school, and was met with refusal. It was as expected: if the boy was not working, their family would starve. The tragedy, though, is that no matter how hard he works, he may never get to leave here, and few people who live around him earn enough to right things for him — or care. This is the face of capitalism today: one of mankind’s most proficient tools for exploitation.

What is Capitalism?

The word “capitalism” is often used today to describe all the forces behind the parts of labor we dislike most, and so I think it is important to clarify that this essay is not another pile-on against modern labor, or a critique of everything about our modern world with capitalism as a scapegoat. While public opinion may have its grievances with the concept, it was not always viewed that way.

When Adam Smith articulated his own view of capitalism in Wealth of Nations, he appeared to view it as a libertarian idea around the phenomenon that was transforming Europe. Where before, only monarchs and a small group of lords owned resources and production, now anyone with enough grit and great ideas could build the future of their society. In this revolution, Adam Smith believed that in creating businesses, these individuals would create opportunities for others through employment, and individual ambition could become the fuel for social altruism.

For lack of better words, capitalism is an economic system in which individuals and businesses own the means of production rather than the governing state. It is a free market where price and production are determined by supply and demand. It is the premise of a woman who decides that her idea can both change the world and make her rich, and so she raises capital to begin producing for those who need it. As her business grows, she hires a hundred people who are just as committed; they get to be a part of that and share in the profits as compensation for their work.

To Adam Smith, this reality was positing a future of collective wealth, where ambition and even greed could benefit the populace by prioritizing profit. In the face of prosperity that everyone could now access, there was the promise that if you worked hard enough, you could become wealthy enough to work less. It was the gift of the new industrial world, and anyone could work their way up to it.

Alongside the promise of private wealth, capitalism also introduced benefits and systems that could replace responsibilities once assigned to family and communes. You didn’t need family when you were ill if you now had health insurance — and if you worked hard enough, it could take care of your family too. Retirement funds alongside senior centers replaced the necessity for your children to care and provide for you in old age. If you made enough money, you could afford private childcare. It sounded like the best thing we had come up with since fire and food.

By the 19th century, the industrial age grew alongside democracy. In countries where the core ideology had become freedom of choice and expression, capitalism and free markets appeared to fit right in. The global economy began to develop and grow, and capital became more accessible. Individuals would invest in ideas and pursuits they believed would move the world forward, and everyone worked harder to make it happen. The more capital you acquired, the greater your profits.

Queens, Kings and Gold

It is important to note that the industrial age was not the first face of capitalism. Centuries prior, European monarchs had invested in ships that would traverse the globe in search of new trade. This trade often included cotton, sugar, slaves, and tobacco. Yet, a consistent pattern in any endeavor that prioritized profit was how readily the humans who formed its labor force became almost indistinguishable from other means of production.

Looking back at King Leopold’s rubber trade in the Congo, and how his race to meet the demand for the commodity in Europe and America claimed millions of lives through violence, mutilation, and forced labor quotas, some would argue it was the monarchy bending capitalism to its own benefit. But regardless of where you stand, it is painfully clear that exploitation and capitalism have often gone hand in hand.

Over time, however, many of these more brutal capitalist pursuits ran into moral quagmires. Societies became uncomfortable with the dehumanization of workers for the goal of profit, and ideas like socialism, humanism, and Marxism became more appealing. These thinkers spoke out about how, despite the rhetoric of a free market, the owning class took advantage of the workers — slaves included — whose labor profited the bourgeoisie.

In the face of societies that were becoming more publicly humanist in their moral inclination, colonialism and slavery would become the scapegoats of what to throw out with the bathwater. Capitalism itself remained because it still appeared to be an engine for innovation and enrichment, but became visible as a system laden with power dynamics, and it needed to become less disturbing to look at.

In the years that followed, we began to use softer terms like “corporate”. We began to forget again that at the foundation of an idea that prioritized profit by any means, it was almost imperative that individuals would become objects of economic value.

Removing the Flowers

If you have been on the internet long enough, you will have come across an idea documented in quotes like: “Men have no value other than what they can provide,” or “A man who cannot provide is worthless.” It is an idea that when shared, often seems like a new observation by those who make it. And while it has its relevance in driving familial responsibility in more traditional circles, it speaks the language of late-stage capitalism: the idea that the value of a life or person is completely tied to the profit they can provide — because when the goal is capital, you describe your relevance by how well you contribute to it.

Yet this kind of reasoning is not unique to capitalism; we find it in other systems that define human worth through utility, and some are less attractive than others.

In his book Fascism, Roger Griffin documents essays from Nazi officials in the years before and during World War II. One of the more disturbing quotes comes from Franz Pfeffer von Salomon, a prominent official who served in governance alongside Joseph Goebbels — Hitler’s minister of Propaganda — and under Adolf Hitler before the Second World War began. He wrote condescendingly about the idea of equality among all people in society, calling it a “Jewish-Marxist” ideology. He believed that the highest measure of an individual’s position in society was dependent on their ‘actual performance in their professions.’

He writes in his essay ‘Barren Trees’:

“The first logical conclusion to be drawn from inequality is the inequality of value. A logical consequence of this inequality must be the principle of unequal treatment — that is, an unequal share of state power, property, and culture. All these must be distributed to people based on how valuable they are. Everything done for them not only means taking resources away from more deserving causes, but counteracts the breeding selection process… Trees which do not bear fruit should be cut down and thrown into the fire.”

Von Salomon was not necessarily inventing a new philosophy. He was removing the flowers from one that had formed the foundation of many profit-led endeavors. His reasoning is the kind associated with ideas that shift human value from being to use. It is uncomfortable, but precise.

Hannah Arendt tackles this idea in her work The Human Condition. She categorizes the ways humans participate socially into three parts — labor, work, and action — and highlights how we may have elevated labor to a position where we now view all individuals primarily through the lens of their productive function. There is far less provision for the inherent value and identity that was once more visible in collective societies. Arendt found this dehumanizing: that of all the features of humanity we might choose to elevate, we had chosen the one we share with animals. Eat, Sleep, Produce, Consume.

If you live in urban cities like Lagos, you’re familiar with this pattern. You’re awake by 5 a.m. to make it to work for 7 am. You spend every waking hour of the work week chasing ‘stakeholder value’, and your weekends are spent recuperating from the exhaustion of the week. After three decades, you have been productive. You’re not necessarily wealthy, healthy, free, or impactful.

In many cities today, if you are without employment, you are likely to have no health insurance and no social welfare provision to keep you from becoming homeless and destitute. There is a second layer to this, though: for those employed in roles lower on the capitalist rung of “stakeholder value” — many of which include creative careers — there is a real likelihood that you also lack health insurance and are one bad emergency away from abject poverty. Not because you don’t work hard enough, but because the output of your work may not hold enough monetary value in a capitalist market. Arendt found these sorts of realities concerning, that rather than invest in greater pursuits, we simply work every day without meaningful progress and continue to view our lives through that mirror.

In the face of this version of capitalism, we may find ourselves looking for the realization of Smith’s expectation that altruism would grow alongside it. The observable trend suggests that nothing went wrong — this may have always been the trajectory of capitalism. While Smith believed that the ambition to accumulate capital would continue to create more opportunities, he underestimated the human tendency to cement the wealth and superiority of a small group at the cost of many others.

When business owners accumulate capital in a world with limited resources, inequality inevitably becomes part of the equation. Collusion between business owners can easily control the market of supply and demand, and labor is not exempt. The value of individuals would no longer be viewed as inherent; it would be dependent on how much more profit they could generate. If capital was what was needed to make more profit, then the power to create wealth could continue to remain in the hands of whoever had already accumulated it and knew how to manage it.

Some would argue that the proletariat — the working class — bears some of the blame. They believe that in the pursuit of individual wealth and profit, we have become complicit in a system that now views individuals through the lens of their productive output. As such, every human experience or interest becomes a part of the market economy.

It is a phenomenon we are all familiar with, especially in the internet age, where every new social media post is someone selling your favorite hobby or recreational activity back to you as a market opportunity to increase your income. The feed is populated with content creators making commodified forms of our stories and identities:

‘GRWM to go to my dad’s funeral.’ ‘Here’s how I became homeless, and 20 ways to avoid it.’ ‘How to get paid by brands for visiting the beach.’

Hannah Arendt was concerned that in our pursuit of more, we may be losing our grip on what it means to be human, and she had only witnessed the launch of the first satellite. She believed that, unlike art, laws, and institutions, a desire to labor for material gain would simply not last — that we would expend ourselves in pursuit of necessity. We would go from grand beings who thought, wrote, and loved, who created the kind of institutions and work that lasted decades, to merely life-sustaining creatures, like the animals we believed were beneath us. In a society that only rewards financially valuable production, we are now incentivized to commodify everything we own, with less focus on the impact of our lives.

Our communities suffer from this commodification as well. When people are commodified, so are the communities they belong to. Social welfare, healthcare, and credit systems have replaced family structures, and your access to many amenities is tied to your labor. In many countries, your utility decides what benefits you can access, in contrast to communal systems that provided welfare for all members; And as more aspects of survival became purchasable, they ceased being obligations of community. Our communal bonds became strained — not only because many modern people can afford individuality, but because the social links that once made communal responsibility seamless stopped being necessary.

The New Corner Office

The most revealing chapter of this discourse, however, may be artificial intelligence. It is fair to say it is early to make definitive calls about AI, but the layoffs are here already. AI says plainly what capitalism has implied for decades: when the goal is profit, production is the priority. When there is a more functional and less expensive way to reach that end than human labor, we find ourselves in a bind.

There may be a fork in the road here. If human value has been defined by economic relevance until now, would the rise of artificial intelligence allow our species to explore our more social identities like Arendt would have liked? Or is there bound to be new conflict between the owners of production — who no longer need mass labor to generate great profit, effectively eliminating the altruistic element Smith had hoped for — and the workers who now find themselves on the disadvantaged end of an unequal divide that we helped build?

I think it is too early to say, but there is more to explore about AI’s role in capitalism in the second part of this essay.

It is the weekend. I intend to make it to church this Sunday. Afterward, I will cook a lunch of soup and swallow, and write the follow-up to this: about the more sacred places where the principles of capitalism have subtly become God, how AI picks up where we have left off, and why the Pope makes enemies when he says that man is made for purposes greater than profit.

A few weeks ago, I spent an evening away from the glow of my computer screen. I was taking a walk with my brother to the football field in my estate. I thought about how I rarely ever played football there growing up. A part of me preferred to read, and the other half was antisocial and unsure of what to say to the kids at the field. Sometimes I convinced myself that I was better than them because I spent my time at a seemingly loftier feat, and although it may have been delusional, it felt better for a while.

That evening, however, I let my little brother convince me to come along. We didn’t have a football, and so we just sat by the field; somehow, I preferred that. Playing with others meant meeting new people. And despite how often my friends now tease that I ‘make friends with everybody’, there’s still a large part of me that’s cautious, stemming from a fear of not being accepted. There’s a form of subtle vulnerability in meeting new people or even just asking for their names that says, ‘I want to be seen.’

My brother tells me that it’s a little cringe to come to read on the field, and I tell him that I don’t believe in the concept of ‘cringe’, and neither should he. It’s a repetition of a thought I’d shared with the girl I like, just the week before: that risking being cringe is the cost of being seen, and not fading into the background because you’ve attuned yourself to everyone else. I liked to think I had outgrown the fear of being seen in the things I enjoyed, or even worse, the fear of being seen as trying too hard.

The conversation takes me back to a memory from early secondary school. My mother had gifted me an old phone of hers, and while I was excited to share it with my friends, the rule was that it couldn’t include any secular music. I didn’t mind, I didn’t care for secular music at the time - partly because I’d also told my older cousin that listening to Chris Brown would send people to hell.

I remember showing up in school with the phone and handing a friend the phone to play some music, happy to share this album by J.Moss that I loved to pieces. My pride in that song didn’t last long; it became a running joke that all I listened to was Christian music, and somehow that was corny. At the time, I was unfazed.

However as time passed, I became self-conscious for wanting things that others didn’t find appealing: Christian Rap, Esoteric Literature, Anime, Writing, Eschatology, and even my basic interest in philosophy. I edited things about myself and my interests. Hiding things I knew I liked because I knew it wouldn’t ‘fit in’. I would observe people who seemed to do things flawlessly or have interests that were easier to accept, and I thought about what I needed to change to appear the same. In some way, I think I started to cede a part of my authenticity.

How much could I try in public before someone thought it was corny and it invited sneers? It’s interesting because now I find a paradox in this, as the most flawless executions often require the most effort.

Now I’m glad that phase was short-lived.

Now, as an adult, I meet people who like the weird things I had learned to edit to moderation or obscurity, but I subtly still struggle with how much of myself can be seen before I’m afraid that it is ‘cringe’.

But despite my newfound place in authenticity, I’m still watchful when I share new things. New habits, New interests, Quirks or anything that doesn’t fit into what’s commonplace. There’s a part of me always just waiting and observing for that subtle eye shift that implies derision and may force me back into self-consciousness.

“We should race on the field,” My brother proposed on the field that day. I roll my eyes. I’m a grownup, I couldn’t be running on the field like a child, it would be -

“You think it’s cringey to run because you’re old?” He asked, reading my face and possibly my mind. I scowled before responding. “I’m not old.”

I was reminded of the sermon I had just preached to him about how there was no such thing as cringe. How I had said that it was a prison made by people scared that their interests would be rejected, who then struck first at things different from them. So I stood to my feet.

We raced back and forth across the field until the evening turned inky black, and although I lost every race, I was excited. I was not doing it for applause or acceptance, but simply because I wanted to. My thighs ached for days, but I was proud of myself, and still am. I’m doing the things I enjoy, instead of things you enjoy.

In the words of some person on the internet: ‘Make I con dey suffer because of wetin stranger go talk? God Forbid’

I think Lana Del Rey was right, hope is a dangerous thing.

Mulan was always at the top of the list for my favorite animated movies. If you squint while looking at an old Childhood photo of mine, you can see the television in the background where Mushu, the dragon, berates Mulan for missing the shot at the villain. The movie, like many other children’s films, is an exercise in hope, a belief that no matter what terrible thing happens, it’ll all work out anyway, and whatever actions you take toward your goal will always work out.

Hope gets a lot of good PR, from Disney Movies to Vision Boards to the occasional success story from the guy who dropped out, came from a low-income family, and now owns an app we all use. What do we do with hope that fails, though, and actions toward a dream that doesn’t come to fruition?

My subtle confession is this: the things that I hoped for that never manifested have brought me more grief than the things that came about without expectation. So today I’m concerned about hope, and all the power it holds to get me to tomorrow, or break me because I held it too close.

I haven’t written New Year’s resolutions since 2022. Not because I’m one of those people who end up cutting it up by February, but because there’s just a monolith of hope it presents for how my year ought to go. More than anything else, it puts so much pressure on things I can’t control, and I spend so much time watching the sky for a star that may never pass.

I think about the quote from Rick and Morty where Rick says: “Everything’s going to be fine in the end. And if it’s not fine, then it’s not the end.” But on some days, I want it to be fine before it’s the end. And maybe that’s not hope’s forte.

The internet is awash with messages of hope and how things get better. And it’s not just there. The pastor says, ‘This year will be your year’, and I text my friend to ask if the pastor knows for sure, because what if it’s not ‘my year’ and I’m unhappier for having thought it was.

I’m guilty of this offense too, I tell my friends: ‘It’s going to be just fine’ and I don’t know for sure, but it’s never done in spite, but in hope that the hope will keep them going.

However, I’m now faced with the blunt side of hope, clinging to what could be instead of accepting what is. In reaching for the promise of a tomorrow that could be, today makes me unhappy or unsatisfied. I’m in expectation of something I’ve set on the path of life by myself, regardless of what the variables of life may be.

I’ll be honest and say that sometimes being Christian makes my struggle more immersive, because I’m consistently drowning in painful optimism, believing that even if the house I’m in is on fire, I won’t burn. It’s my confession to say that I often find that it keeps me so far from what reality says that I wonder where the line that crosses into delusion is.

There’s a Buddhist concept called Samudaya (Interesting name, I know) which suggests that suffering comes from craving, delusion, and expectation from a thing or its outcome, and I think it’s a place where many of us live.

Imagine being a child promised a new bicycle, if you’d never been promised a bicycle, your disappointment is less or even non-existent because your hope is never wrongly placed. Hope is beautiful, and maybe even necessary, but it’s equally risky.

Some would say that it’s better to have hoped and not received than to never have hoped at all, but I’m not so sure. It feels like there is less peace in disappointment, regardless of how great our hope was.

I don’t think I have it all figured out yet when it comes to balancing hope and disappointment, but I think there may be a gift in detachment. Not a detachment from life, but from holding on to expectations too tightly.

I’m not craving a life without suffering or difficulty, because that’s unavoidable. But I know that accepting the state of life as it is keeps me from the hurt of delusion that it will always be perfect.

So TLDR? It’s the delusion of a perfect life that brings us pain, and the craving for things that may never be. And perhaps peace doesn’t come from certainty, but acceptance of the uncertainty of life.

So I try not to drown in the promise of tomorrow. In some way, I now have the peace I originally desired when I accepted that things may never turn out exactly how I had hoped.

Living in Lagos is an extreme sport, and it took a year of sanity in Ibadan for me to agree as well. However I had barely been back a year when some other bizarre events would find their way to me, this one being the most unhinged of them.

I was headed to work at Gbagada, and it takes two mini-buses -My friend says ‘mini-bus’ is complex English, so Korope- to get there. I’d left the house thirty minutes early so I could make it to work before 9am - for once. 

There was nothing in the way the bus was built that hinted that it was about to be a carriage for chaos, it was cleaner than most and the driver had Bella Schmurda playing. I had met people who believed Bella was a lyrical philosopher, and I liked him enough to nod in assent. Hearing his music play ought to be a good sign, right? 

We got into the bus and the driver tore into the road like there was romantic tension between his tyres and the road. We were barely halfway into the journey when the large door of the bus loudly ripped itself off its hinges, away from the bus and clattered noisily onto the road, just missing a Toyota Corolla behind us. The sound had been loud and grating, but I was barely fazed. I live in Lagos and constantly expect the worst. 

After the traditional ‘Blood of Jesus’ and ‘This thing could have killed somebody’ comments from the women in matching ankara at the back, the driver parked on the side of the road and apologized as he needed to borrow a screwdriver to screw the door back on.

When a friend of his came along to assist with the door, it was clear from their conversation that the same thing had happened just the day before. It reminded me why once a week, I googled prices of a new car at random dealerships even if it would cost me a year’s salary to get one; Public transport vehicles in Lagos are engines of hazard.

This is where things get insane. The two women in matching clothes decide they can’t wait for the driver to fix his ailing bus and get off while he’s looking around for a screwdriver to screw the door back on. 

Shortly after, the driver gets back in his seat, sweaty and oily. His first words aren’t sorry, but ‘Where everybody go?’. I’m seated in front and I point ahead to where the women who have gotten off are walking toward our destination. He sets the clunky bucket of metals he calls a bus to accelerate and follows them.

He catches up to them and asks for money for bringing them ‘that far’. The first woman refuses, but soon gives in and hands him N150. The other woman is more stubborn and an argument ensues, she swears at him and he swears back at her. She lets him know the only way he’ll be getting a dime is over her dead body, it’s ballsy but I couldn’t care less, I’m in a hurry. 

Eventually the bus driver reaches for her ankle, yanks off the shoe on her left leg and tosses it onto his dashboard. The woman is livid but swears she’s still not going to give him a dime; And so the driver floors the accelerator and takes off. In the rear-view mirror, I see the woman continue her journey, walking with a limp gait because she now has only one shoe on in the mud. 

I ask the driver what he’s going to do with the shoe, he shrugs, and answers that maybe he’ll give someone, or he will wear it. But who would want one shoe without the other half? And if he intended to wear it, then perhaps we were better suited to be going to Aro in Abeokuta, than Berger.

At this point, I’m  hardly upset about the entire thing, the story is just chaotic enough that my HR knows I couldn’t have made it up. As for my plan to show up at the office early for once? It would need an adjustment for another thirty minutes early, to account for the engines of hazard.

Share Life, Me and the Randoms

(Also, Random, but I apologize for the silence before now. I was lacking the burst of light that makes it possible for me to write things people enjoy. I’ve got a few rays now.)

Up until this year, my mother would find those boxes in the study and proceed to toss them in a bag she planned to throw out, but before then, they would disappear again to some unknown location. It must have been one of her joys when a loud storm tore a hole into my room at 1am in June, that all the boxes of what she considered junk, were now soaking wet and needed to be thrown out.

2020 was the first time I realized how sentimental I was, and that version of myself would be even more surprised at what I have now. There’s a box that resembles what I assume Pandora’s looked like, where I keep special items and things I’ve been gifted; An old watch, a handband I once thought was lucky, an old perfume bottle, letters, a note, birthday cards, two spent train tickets from Christmas in 2022, receipts from my favorite dinners and a prescription slip for my first set of anxiety meds. It may sound like a lot, but I view myself as something similar to that box, a mosaic of everyone I’ve ever met and loved.

One sentimental object is missing from the box however, it’s a train ticket to another city from the weekend before Valentine’s. It preceded lunch, a photograph I cherish, and a joke to the Uber driver that we were engaged - even if the only ring I had ever given her was either an emoji or from a Haribo’s gummy bear set. The train ticket that seems to bind these specific memories is in the back of my phone pouch, the only thing there, and I think it’s metaphorical that it now faces the cracks of my phone’s glass body.

I separated my phone from its case and wondered for a bit if both inanimate objects cared about being separated, before taking a look at the cracks that now replaced the once reflective glass panel behind my phone. I needed to get a new phone, I thought. I looked over my sentimental ticket slip and wondered how many would be traveling for Christmas. My close friend had politely declined to spend Christmas day together, he was traveling to his village for the holidays. I often can’t relate to that feeling, my ‘village’ in Eti-Osa is home to offices and skyscrapers. 

It came to mind now that I had seen a poster for a contest about creating the ‘Ultimate Naija Christmas’ and I thought back to what Christmas used to be for me. I would have spent most of it with Family; Playing video games, greeting visiting relatives, eating myself sick, and falling asleep on the staircase leading to the freezing living room at my aunt’s house. In the last two years, I had spent a large part of the days leading up to Christmas with my friends at random events. Now most of both Friends and Family live time zones away, and there will be little to no Christmas tidings. 

Now, I would need to design a Christmas card that talked about the Ultimate Naija Christmas, but I struggled at first. I struggled because I wasn’t sure what the ultimate Naija Christmas ought to be for 2023, so much had changed and it felt as though many of the elements that stayed true wouldn’t be the same this year. My mother blamed it on inflation, my friend blamed it on being single, and my brother blamed it on me just growing up and ‘being old’.

There’s an estate behind the one where I live where their ‘transformer’ blows up three to four times a year, usually at Christmas, because someone threw fireworks and other incendiary devices into it. It took the loud bang from that transformer and surrounding poles - literally, not creatively- to finally bring to the fore the little things that had made Christmas memorable as a child, and although it felt a little sour in my mouth to draw from nostalgia rather than the present for this design, something about it felt right. So I got around to it and realized that the ticket I took everywhere in my phone case would be the first of the sketches. 

The second illustration I got around to was a gift basket. My brother and I joke about how that’s how you know a good year. If I get gifted a basket from communities or work or a project, then it’s a good year, and if I don’t then it’s been a bad year. I headed over to the store shortly before designing that illustration and decided to take a look at what goes in those baskets, and maybe, just maybe I would send one to a friend this year. The price tag changed those plans, however, but this was still going into my illustration.

Third, my friend, Mimi often complains about hating ‘Father Christmas’ because as a child, some big-bellied Santa Claus absconded with her party pack. Outside of our plans to buy a van together someday and abduct random people dressed as Father Christmas and beat them, I realized he needed to be a part of this card too. Mimi and I could kidnap him later - even if one of us is anemic and the other person weighs less than 50kg. My guy, Cholo made a joke on Instagram about abducting chickens , I knew that had to go in too. Santa Claus and his abducted chicken.

Lastly, there is no Christmas without a tree. However skinny, plastic, and covered in ornaments that will shatter into a thousand pieces if dropped because you haven’t replaced them in years. There just needs to be a tree. 

Other minimal things went into the design of the card, like sketching a national theater and realizing there were too many damn windows and then just using a silhouette. In all, it was a beautiful experience, and a chance to choke on nostalgia ahead of the holidays.

Having completed the illustrations on this project, I began to think about the things from my present that I needed to start to keep in my box. It seems that the anomaly of growing up is that no matter how insignificant the present is, you will always yearn for it in the future. So be sentimental, keep cards, tickets, and receipts from Christmas dinners, so that soon if you’re in another place or time far from those you once loved, you’ll have things you can hold onto and dream of days you may never let go of.

P.S.: Here are the two designs I decided to push for the contest. It helps to note that I would eventually submit my less preferred design of the two by accident, but I guess it is what it is

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Evolutionists postulate the concept of survival of the fittest, where humanity began its advancements from our time in the ocean as cells called Prokaryotes, Flatworms and then and then possibly fish. Soon we developed feet and crawled out onto the land as amphibians. This was one of our bigger mistakes, if true, as there are no bills under water, except maybe wherever Shark Tale was based. 

Every thousand years or so we seemingly learned a lesson in how our features interacted with the earth’s environment and made changes in line with it. We didn’t break off to find freedom in the air like the birds, but continued to crawl the earth on fours

I would be lying if I didn’t say I often hope we will evolve past capitalism sometime in the coming year or two.

Being bound to the earth, unlike our bird ‘cousins’, you’re bound to spend a lot of time in your home. One interesting thing though are those days when you sit in your room in the dark and find that a pile of clothes you recall folding together by yourself now appears to be a demon of sorts, or even Aku or Ayamatanga. You would turn on the light to find that it’s nothing but your clothes, but somehow every time the lights are out, you still see them morph into darker elements.

I recall reading an academic article last year that documented that this phenomenon was a result of our ancestors making shapes out of predators and prey in the dark whilst hunting for them. In the dark, it stands to reason that a murderous leopard would hide itself in the bushel of trees and it would take an evolved hunter to spot it and spear it to death.

No, that’s not why you’re good at spotting only toxic girlfriends and camping in their apartment for weeks before it goes to shit.

One of the more permanent concepts in existence is change, or ‘evolution’. We learn, we change and in all our future interactions, we live with the hope that we do not repeat the same mistakes.

In my work life, this is something that is a part of my day to day as someone who works in tech and around building products. We build and we push out, collect user feedback, learn new things and implement and continue to iterate the same process on and on. It only makes sense to me that we act the same in our love lives as well.

A relationship ends because you didn’t have feelings for the person you got into it with, so you’re focused on someone you have feelings for; Until you get into it with someone who is emotionally unavailable and it ends; So you get into it with an expressive lover who wears their heart on their sleeves, but somehow the timing isn’t right. 

Now you’re taking notes in your journal, if you’re self aware enough, about what went wrong and how many new limbs the creature that is your love life has to develop to walk on water, breathe fire and blend into glass, all in a journey toward finding the ‘perfect love story’. 

Of course, there are those that believe that the journey is the destination, and becoming the perfect person with the ideal situation is a fairy dream. They would have you believe that your 20s are for pointless wandering so that you and your fated person can wait out the years that are designed between you.This perspective suggests that the trials and tribulations of one's twenties are merely a prelude to the eventual meeting with a soulmate. While I see the beauty, the logic is lacking.

Then again, what do I know about logic and evolution? I studied Communications.

Perhaps instead you believe that every situation can either be a challenge or a lesson, and like the progressive design of the advancement of living things, you learn and then redesign your present state to adjust for your new lessons. Sometimes this adjustment may involve changing partners because they’re holding back your evolution as well, who knows?

As we journey through the ever-changing landscape of love, we often find ourselves on a quest for ‘more’. It's almost as if each relationship is a stepping stone, leading us to believe that there's something better, something more exhilarating just around the corner. Greener grass on the other side, for lack of better words.

In our modern world, we are bombarded with endless options through dating apps, social media, and the constant allure of new experiences. It’s similar to a fish version of human evolution being presented with a world where its society was advanced enough to seamlessly communicate with those miles away and destroy mountains with a mere button push.

This abundance however seems to create a paradoxical situation where we believe there's more there than there actually is. In the same vein there is the possibility of expecting far less for our romantic future that has us decide that anything we get is just fine. In either direction, you’re likely to evolve - or devolve- yourself into a box. I think about the Kiwi birds, having found an environment without predators and evolved to a state that needed no night vision and without the ability to fly; they now face extinction.

The key to lasting happiness in our love lives seems to lie in embracing the stages of evolution, both in ourselves and in our partners. Just as species adapt and change to thrive in their environments, we may just need to adapt and change in our relationships to thrive emotionally. Instead of constantly chasing ourselves up the evolutionary ladder, finding contentment in the present moment and accepting the unique journey of our love life can lead to genuine happiness. Each stage, with all its quirks and imperfections, contributes to the beautiful tapestry of our evolving love story.

In the end, the science of love seems to point to the fact that adaptation and acceptance are fundamental to our happiness.

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Design for innovative products, while however is a little more complex, It’s an essential process to help create working visuals to help push products, brands or even simple concepts. Like every creative career, there are many steps and parts that help bring it all to fruition. I claim to be a chef because of that one time I made mango jam, so I’d say that design is a lot like baking, putting together several ingredients toward a given result. 

The ingredients here however I would touch on as principles that guide visual design. We can identify these individual parts as principles of Visual Design.

So, what are the little parts that make up design?

Before you go any further, this article is best listened to with ‘Tin Pan Boy by Yungblud’ playing.

The first principle is alignment. Alignment usually just points to the arrangement or placement of objects and elements in a design in relation to each other and to the overall composition. This can include aligning text and images to maintain order, aligning a group of objects to a ruler or other objects, or simply aligning elements to a central point. In principle, alignment creates a sense of order and balance in a design and makes it more visually pleasing.

The second principle is Contrast. Contrast draws from design’s intersection with colors and how best to help these colors interact with one another. This intersection may reflect on color, typography and imagery to help draw the eye of the viewer and define focus points in any design.

The third principle is repetition. Repetition touches on the use of similar elements, such as patterns, colors, and typography, throughout a design to create a cohesive and consistent look and feel. This can include repeating elements in a grid pattern, using the same color scheme or typography throughout a design, or repeating a simple shape or pattern in different areas of the design. 

Sort of like how you’ve ordered the same meal at Chicken republic so long, you deserve a badge. Patterns are endearing, and it helps to remember that when designing.

The fourth principle is proximity. Proximity refers to the placement of elements in relation to each other in a design. This can include grouping related elements together, such as text and images, to create a sense of hierarchy and organization in a design. It also includes using space to separate and distinguish different elements, such as headings and body text, to make them more easily readable and understandable.

Water, Earth, Fire and Air. All four nations lived together in harmony, but everything changed when you hit backspace on MS Word and all the rectangles on your document ended up in Ukraine.

Lastly, The fifth principle is balance. While principles in balance can be very subjective, in avatar terms, it’s just making sure the Fire Nation guys stay on their side of the planet. Balance points to the distribution of visual elements in a design to create a sense of equilibrium and stability. 

This can include using symmetry, such as placing elements in a mirror image on either side of a central axis, or asymmetry, such as using different elements of varying sizes and shapes to create a sense of movement and interest.

Bringing everything together, visual design is an essential aspect of creating designs that communicate and solve problems. Thanks for coming to my ‘Ted Talk’, I hope you find this useful.

The first rule of Fight Club my articles is that these words are imperfect without music, so this is the part where you head over to your music app and pick out ‘How Good’ by Social Club Misfits.

Looking back now, there must have been a bias of sorts because sometimes we left on music videos by Michael Jackson and Beyonce when they played, perhaps by oversight, but there was to be no Dbanj or Weird MC. 

My dad at some point had liked Michael Jackson, and a few times that meant he hummed along to the songs if they ever came up on the radio, but that was the most to it. There were no CDs or mixtapes of any sort.

Someone said once that everyone remembers where they were when they found out Michael Jackson died, and this rings true for me. A family friend had come over with my dad to pick us up from school, and halfway through the trip, it had come up on his crackling radio. My dad and his friend had chatted about the Prince of Pop all the way home and I wondered if now we’d go home to listen to Michael Jackson, just as a tribute of sorts. We didn’t.

By the time I was ten, most of the songs I knew were either from cartoon theme songs or the popular set of gospel artists at the time; Don Moen, Hillsong, Donnie Mcclurckin, Kirk Franklin, and the likes. My mum would tell us from time to time that her water broke with Hillsong's ‘At the Cross’ playing in the background when she was going to have my brother. It didn’t make him a sweet child, but perhaps that’s why he spends hours writing worship music these days.

Of course, it meant that during birthday parties that other kids invited us to, I was in my seat awkwardly sifting through my party pack in hopes that no clowns would ask me to complete a Wande Coal song. 

Caprisonne, Suprise Pack, Cheeseballs. I hope the clown with purple hair isn’t looking at me.

I suspect that’s why it took forever to figure out how to act at parties as a grown-up; And why now my default behavior at parties is to just never shut up.

Not getting to hear these songs often didn’t mean they weren’t still in my head somehow though. In my nursery years, I loved Asa’s music, and when my mother left Beyoncé’s music videos playing on the TV in my early years, I boldly proclaimed that Jay Z’s wife was the most beautiful woman on planet Earth.

Now I know that it’s probably Jhene Aiko or SZA. 

By my early teens, Donnie Mcclurkin and Midnight Crew had started to bore me. I was more interested in rap and other more upbeat genres, but a shift from songs about the Holy Spirit to music about Sex and being shot at would have been tectonic.

I still cared about the messaging in the music, but needed something a lot less dull than what I was used to at the time. It felt like I was hearing and listening to the same things time and time again.

An internet search led me to a band called Rapture Ruckus, an Australian Christian rap band that my brother and I would listen to day and night. They had no more than fourteen to twenty songs, each about three minutes of bashing and banging of cymbals and drums and Kindergarten-esque lyrics like ‘Sun shining but in a new way.’

We soon tired of their music as well, you could only enjoy listening to the same twenty songs day after day. On the days I would sneak my phone off to school with friends, there was an unspoken rule that I didn’t get to connect to the Bluetooth speakers because nobody wanted to hear: ‘I believe I’m a new creation, planned out before creation’. Looking back now, it must have sounded so weird at the time, and perhaps a little ‘too Christian’.

I once stood at one of the balconies of our Three-story school building with my friend, Adun, and asked her if there was such a thing as being too christian. She didn’t think there was, her parents were pastors too so she could understand growing up in an environment where all your influences were Christian. 

I would find a balance for Christian music a few months after, when I discovered Lecrae and his 116 clique. Their music while still Christian was a lot more adept than the Australian bunch. My older cousin would play Jesus Muzik and Tell the World, two tracks that still remain my favorite, every time he had to drop off my siblings and I, we would all sing along word for word.

Shortly after, when I would write the JAMB exams that got me into Uni, it must have surprised my brother when my slip came in with a score over 270, because he and I knew that Lecrae, Trip Lee, KB, Andy Mineo, and the rest of the gang were the only things that were in my head at the time. I recall loudly singing along to Andy’s ‘Paisano’s Wylin’ on the way to the brick building in Ifo where I took the exams.

Outside of Ted Dekker, these artists were possibly the largest influence on my personal journey as a believer for most of my teenage years. 

Songs like Andy Mineo’s Superhuman and Death Has Died taught me things about the frailty of the human state, the humility it should teach us, and the weakness of death despite the seeming strength of grief. Lecrae’s songs like Fear, Anger Management, and Timepiece would touch on human emotions and how to manage them in a way that reflects the relevance of a new life. KB and Trip Lee were all but my pastors with songs like Heart Problem, All My Love, Crowns and Thorns, Open Letter, and many others. 

Being a teenager, I quickly idolized them and by the time Instagram rolled around, they were possibly the first set of people whose views I cared about. I carried around a small BlackBerry Torch that my cousin had gifted me and scrolled along trying to find when (if ever) these artists were planning a concert in Lagos.

A few weeks before I would start out at Covenant University, I came across an interview featuring Andy Mineo. The discussion delved into his role as a rapper with Christian beliefs, and Andy expressed that he saw himself as a Christian who happened to be a rapper, rather than a Christian rapper. At that moment, I felt somewhat perplexed and questioned why he didn't proudly identify as a Christian rapper. 

A few months later, Lecrae made a similar statement in an article, and it led me to ponder if there was a perspective I had overlooked. 

Was I now too Christian for those I held on a pedestal? 

I am poor with early commitment. But before I tell you about my struggle with keeping my hands entwined with any new experience, this article is best read with Hozier’s ‘Take me to Church’ playing.

‘If I’m a pagan of the good life, my lover’s the sunlight.’

I stumbled on a video a while ago where a girl says that the only thing consistent about her is her inconsistency, and I couldn’t relate more. A part of my brain believes there’s nothing wrong with it but I doubt it.

My friends would agree that when I came upon a new obsession, I would be like Rick Sanchez from the episode where he’s obsessed with some power rangers-esque robots. I’ll cease to shut up about a new place, person, church, book or experience that had splattered my day or week with iconic color.

I imagine that in describing what exactly made it so interesting, I would look like this guy half the time:

By Friday, however, there would be little left of any of that interest, because not only was I now bored of it — my attention span isn’t great — but I couldn’t promise that I could commit to it or them. I’m that three-year-old at the beach who would spend a few seconds on a seashell, lick it and then go off to find the next shiny thing.

Sometimes, though, I would find that what I felt about something lasted more than a few days or weeks. And this is where the journey to seemingly soul crushing devotion begins, so stay with me.

Your next step is to find a mantra that helps you stay in place for the days when your energy wears out. For me, it’s a quote I picked up from someone I disliked but respected, he’d usually say: ‘Efforts are in vain if goals are not achieved.’

Secondly, lie to yourself that so long as you’re invested, there’s no such thing as failure. This often leads to sunk cost fallacy, but honestly it’s better to have over-invested past failure than being underinvested and never seeing what could have been.

In it all, I’ve begun to find that I’m not afraid of committing to things because I think I’ll fluke or it’ll fail. I’m slow to commit because when I put myself to something, a part of it seems to meld with my person and I begin to recount it in my night prayers.

So maybe in truth, being slow to commit may not be borne of a fear of failing, but a fear of being so immersed with something that you find it difficult to open yourself to change when it’s no longer present.

Tomorrow when the sun rises and I’m assailed by an armada of new experiences, people and projects, I hope I can divine which deserves this habit of soul crushing devotion.

First things first; Rest in peace, Uncle Phil. Thanks Tam for getting me started on newsletters finally.

In the heart of every creative, I would like to assume there’s a personal journey, one that’s fraught with a dozen paths charted (and many failed). That journey that is my life is possibly the greatest adventure that there is. However like Jaskier - The pesky singer from ‘The Witcher’ -, we all need a way to tell the stories of these seemingly great adventures.
As a storyteller, my favorite medium is the written word - on most days anyway. The process of crafting stories is akin to orchestrating a dance of words and emotions. Each sentence is a step, every paragraph a choreography. Through this dance, I've discovered the power of language to transcend reality and take readers on journeys beyond the horizon

Some of the stories may seem mundane in the wholeness, but every part of it is the jigsaw that is our person. So while I can’t promise that all of the stories I will share here will be believable - or even real -, there’s a lot to be told and much to be mused about.

I’ll talk about the void that assails me when I sketch logos for new projects, trying to decide what to name our little startup, random musings of new fiction shorts, the day I nearly electrocuted my father -by accident obviously -, getting lost in a new city, writing Shakespearean letters to a love interest and even just the days when it feels like the moon is a little paler than she usually is.

In hopes that not only do my stories make you feel a little more at home in our world, but also so we can embrace the good and bad days as Creatives whose minds continue to spark like wildfire.

Creativity may often leads us down unconventional and sometimes seemingly eccentric paths. It's a road filled with the most unexpected things. However it is precisely these twists and turns that make the voyage worthwhile. Every setback becomes a lesson, every detour an opportunity for growth.

As I look toward my creative future, I keep hope that it's a story without an end. A tale with infinite chapters, running on for miles into the horizon of an evolving world. The beauty of creativity is its boundless nature—it knows no limits, no final destination.

So, here’s to countless boundless stories

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Grief is a difficult guest to host. She kicks open the door at midnight, breaks your knees with a wrench, and lays her sheets on your dining table to rest till she can wreak more havoc by dawn.

Like I was holy bread, Grief broke me on the Lord’s day. I watched as she blessed the communion that was my bleeding wife and a stillborn daughter. She let me say the prayers, but God was not at the table the surgeons had set to deliver my first child. By dusk, Death had filled her belly and Grief was prancing around the theater room like a child desperate to win musical chairs.

Words became worthless as false promises of prayers and condolences trailed us to the car. The faux respite that the words provided faded before we reached the Third Mainland bridge, and soon Simi’s sisters began to sob heavily in the back seat. I couldn’t decide whether I could cry yet, whether the invisible laws that said men couldn’t shed tears would permit me to cry just yet.

My mother was seated by our gate as though she had relieved Oga Tuesday of his job, and would now be the one to fight off the robbers and kill the cats she swore were witches. The clap-clap of her slippers seemed to echo in my ears as she moved to meet us, her eyes squinting toward the glass in search of Simi and the baby.

“The baby looked like a lump.” I burst into laughter when my mother’s eyes met mine, and I could see her heart melt instantly like fake candles. Her soft hands reached for my head and grief finally enveloped me. My strength expired and sobs rocked my heavy frame.

Days would pass and Darkness would cast its blanket over the sky night after night before I would find lucid words again. “What’s the need for love, Mama? If everyone will die one day?”. It was not a philosopher’s musing, but the murmurs of a grieving mind.

Mama’s eyes widened in surprise first in response, then in deep thought. Her hand grasped my shaking hands and her gaze turned to the moonless sky as though she had hidden the answer in the stars. “I think it is because they will die one day, that we love others.”

“But the pain, Mama. It is as if someone has removed my reason to live.” I grit my teeth in anger at some higher force, but the rage could not gold for long. I was too exhausted to be angry.

“It is scarcity that gives things value. Ignorance makes knowledge worthwhile. It is the chance that your wife may love another man, your husband may not appear on the morning of your wedding, or even that the one you love may not love you back. This is what makes your chest jump when a woman says she loves you.”

I snickered derisively to myself. “Whoever designed love is clearly a masochist.”

“Jesus is not a Masquerade” Mama answered with a huff. In that brief moment, my heart began to slow and my laughter echoed in the night wind. The joke lost on her, Mama in a false fit stormed into the house while I remained outside laughing while my sides hurt. At that moment, Grief seemed to leap over the fence and away into the night, until dawn.

African stories often have the most potential to mirror life or even foretell future evils, but today I had to cross an ocean to tell a story about Gen Z and the Millenials.

The Norse have a story about a god named Balder. Balder was the most loved of all of the gods, and as a god of light and joy, he was treasured by a host of gods that had lived most of their lives fighting wars and saw him as a blessing of sorts to them.

Now, Balder’s mother, Frigg loved him so much that she travelled around the realms to beseech every living and non living thing to never hurt her son. Every thing in existence apparently gave her their word to never hurt Balder.

Of course, as with many of such stories, tragedy soon struck. Frigg had forgotten to ask the mistletoe’s word to protect Balder because it was too small a plant. To keep things short, a weapon is crafted from Mistletoe that eventually kills Balder, the one loved by all.

In August, I was Balder. Much like many other Gen Z/ Millenials who had been Balder before me. I was insulated against the average problems, but the mistletoe of mental health still remained looming.

The Balder story always made me a little sad but in recent months I realized how much it mirrors our current reality. Harari in the book, Homo Deus touches on how the Industrialists and Baby boomers were so focused on eradicating sickness, pain and poverty for their future generations that mental health went completely unnoticed.

Gen Z and Millenials are the Balders, and while the world has moved to a point where our ancestors would refer to our capabilities as godlike, the little mistletoe of poor mental health and awareness hangs over our heads.

Someone once said to me that there’s always a quote at the start of most of my conscious work, so I won’t disappoint her.

There’s a quote about genius and insanity being two sides of the same coin. Of course this story is more about the latter than the former because when you forget how to read, you’re not exactly on the genius side of the coin anymore. This is a story of how I drowned and had to learn to walk on water, and tasted the silver sandwich that is a wet cloud. (Zuko totally bungled that quote by the way)

DPDR is what they call it. That feeling that you don’t live in your body and that nothing is real. Words make no sense and you seem to be losing your mind, a couple of crumbs everyday, till your mind seems to implode on what is now only a scaffold for a once working construct. This may be a verbose and dramatic description of how I felt, but losing the ability to cross the road on your own has a way of reducing your perception of your own soundness.

For weeks it felt like I lived in a fog. I couldn’t read, couldn’t sleep, conversations were nearly impossible because every word spoken to me sounded like a foreign language. I was at the cinema every two days or so, because I didn’t feel comfortable in my own space. Home for me became where I doubted if climbing over the railing would really drag me to the ground slowly and painfully because nothing felt real, or that I wasn’t dying the way my heart suddenly began pounding and my breaths would become difficult and labored due to panic attacks.

I like to think my first winning moment was deciding I needed to be home in Lagos, with my family because I would clearly perish on my own. The second was the decision to see someone who knew what was wrong with me and why I knew that if I kept it to myself for much longer, I would likely join the mad man at Bere I had written a short story about just a few weeks before.

I’ll keep the rest of the specifics to myself, because this story shouldn’t be so much about me. I met with a therapist and then a doctor who knew that although something was wrong, It could be fixed.It was something called Depersonalization/Derealization (DPDR), and in those few weeks, I worked through medications and sessions, meditations and confessions, prayers and nightmares.

I took its time but the fog faded and when I managed to finish the ‘A fault in our Stars’ book without stumbling through words that seemed to have no meaning, I was fine again.

My family and my friends were my primary source of support without judgement or even the isolation that often comes when people know you struggle mentally. It was from this understanding that the ponderous spiritual epiphany for Uncloudy assailed me one night; I began to realize that while I had a lot to be thankful for, there were people without the same resources and support I had received in this time. Many of them would be considered attention seeking or unproductive or perhaps even bewitched for simply struggling with what was a physical illness beyond their control. It was these thoughts that prompted Uncloudy.

In the words of Zuko; ‘Sometimes, clouds have two sides, a dark and light, and a silver lining in between. It’s like a silver sandwich! So when life seems hard, take a bite out of the silver sandwich!’

Uncloudy stems from my need to hold the next person’s hand and guide them through a fog in the way that others did for me, and because usually it’s harder to offer help when you’ve not been in a similar place (Take Zuko for example), We’ll be building a community of people who know what a ‘Silver sandwich’ is and how to ease our darker clouds.

Uncloudy is set to be an online space for mental wellness resources and a community that many often lack in our African society, and while it may start off with simply digital content and newsletters, there’s a lot more to be done as time goes on. I am open to partnerships, suggestions and collaborations toward building our budding community.

Thank You for reading. It means the most to me