I lost my father at a young age of 12. I remember my reaction when the news of his demise came, and it was.. no reaction at all. as a young child, I've been to burials of family members but even then, death sounded distant. something far away that happened only when you were old. I thought that really couldn't happen to me because there was no way I could cross paths with something so far off. we were taught the bible, english and math. Dad's demise was the first close-up I ever had with death, and I didn't know how to take it partly because I was never taught. in hindsight, I would say I was in denial. my father seemed larger than life itself, with his tall, lanky figure and dark skin and quiet demeanor. he carried himself with grace, and he loved life. he loved life so much he was so full of it. he loved music and people. most of all, he loved us; his family. we meant the world to him and I loved him so. and that was why I couldn't believe he would ever leave us. I have a vague memory of me hunched at the back of our house that day, with my grandma's phone which I had sneaked out of her bag, trying to dial his phone number. even now, I still remember the digits; it's hard to forget things like that when he and mom would constantly drill their contact informations into our heads incase we ever ran into an emergency and they were never there. I figured if only he would pick up the call and I hear his voice, his laughter.. full of life and mirth, then I can tell these people to shut up and stop spreading lies. but he never did. he never will.

how does one come to terms with the fact that they're down to only one parent? it was new. it was scary. I was.. afraid. afraid that whatever took dad might come back for mom as well, and then we'll have nobody. quietly, I nursed this fear amidst the funeral preparations and everything happening around us. quietly, I kept my siblings close and kept a hawk-eye on mom incase she mysteriously disappeared. (lol!)

the D-day came by faster than I wanted, eventually.

it wasn't until I saw the.. coffin and its unfortunate occupant, that reality finally dawned on me and fear gave way to anger. much of my life during and after that "anger stage" is a blur. I'd say my brain blanked out the memories from how traumatizing they were. I lost a really close friend to suicide in my teenage years and it all but sent me into a deep, month-long depression.

enough with the sob storiesss, ugh. such a crybaby right?? it's a good thing adulthood came with renewed strength and a journey towards acceptance and meaning. I had to give brief context to what I'm about to talk about, so please stick with me.

when you lose the love of your life, you... mourn.

you are mourning a reality. in the case of mourning or loss, three distinct events share this exact devastation: the death of a long-term partner or family member, the permanent dissolution of one's primary relationship, and the death of a former lover with whom threads was cut years ago. different as their external details are, these losses share one internal emotional as each one is the total eviction from a world. when that person vanishes, the physical environment remains intact but invisible infrastructures that made the environment intelligible breaks entirely. one is then left standing in the room of their life, yet every object in it has lost familiarity.

grief. such an ugly word.

the difficulty of grief is that our society only acknowledge one specific version of it. Kenneth Doka identified three primary failures of social recognition regarding grief; in that the relationship is not recognized, the loss is not recognized or the griever is excluded. clinical definitions worsen this by treating grief almost exclusively as a consequence of physical death, leaving funerals to be the solitary, fully scripted ritual where a person is legally and socially permitted to fall apart. which is unrelated, but several customs and traditions when it comes to funerals comes into scrutiny here. when a person dies, they're gone forever as much as we know. whatever grand or elaborate gestures, extravagant or otherwise, performed thereafter does not benefit the deceased neither does it bring them back. it is only for ourselves, to sate our ego and need to appraise honour to the life of the one whom the celebration of life is being made. we can somewhat agree that these cultural preparations and/or gestures can be borderline disruptive and cause more chaos than is necessary for the family of the deceased, further leaving little to no room for them to properly grieve or mourn their loved one who has passed.

but we're not here to debate whether or not the Umuada should have their carton of Maltina and Guinness stout.

the current academic work built on Doka’s concept is almost entirely a deficit model which describes at great length what society withholds from the mourner. validation, time off, permission to weep and grieve. but even so, it says almost nothing about what the griever actually does in response to that starvation. (reluctant as I am to leave the Umuada and their stout alone, they most times treat the unfranchised griever as a passive victim rather than an active, desperate person trying to strategize through an invisible exile)

oftentimes, when a loss occurs outside the boundaries of traditional marriage or a current, socially sanctioned partnership, the griever is forced to perform a self-enfranchising move like, for instance, applying superlative labels to the departed.

they may call them "the love of my life."

many of you have several "love of my life"s, but take a moment to ponder on the intensity of this romantic term. the love of your life. the one whom was destined for you.

literatures on memory distortion considers any deviation from historical accuracy an error to be corrected but the mind, in this case, distorts to protect. by raising the lost person to this supreme, unassailable rank, the griever builds a fortress around their pain. if the person was the greatest love to ever exist, then their current, paralyzing grief is not an overreaction rather an appropriate and mandatory tax on destiny.

yet, this self-enfranchisment comes with a ruinous tax of its own. looking at a past relationship through destiny beliefs casts the ending of it as an unalterable fate and further locks the griever into a permanent orientation toward what is gone. having such a ranked past is an exceptionally difficult thing to live beside because if the absolute summit of human connection, "love of life", has already occurred and concluded, then every subsequent relationship is condemned to be a pale, meaningless imitation of it. it is even harder in the death of an ex-partner; death and non-death grief collide. because the social circle views the relationship as already dead, mourning their physical death can be dismissed as sentimental or intrusive. if the "love of my life" label must apply double the labor here then, consequently, it does double the damage by freezing the griever in a historical moment that the other person had already walked away from.

so, what actually ends when a person is lost?

Jacques Derrida observed that each death is not merely the end of a single life within the world, but the total, unique end of a world itself.

whenever an intimate bond is broken, the way they say your name, your shared history of glances, their specific ritual of lovemaking.. are all incinerated. this is why Dennis Klass and his colleagues argue for the necessity of something called "continuing bonds." the psychological reality that the relationship though terminated physically, merely transitions from physical presence to internal representation.

I often watch TEDx talks, and one of them was of memory researcher Mary-Frances O'Connor, where she notes (rather soothingly, if I may add. she has such calming voice) that the brain operates on a dual-stream conflict after a loss. the neurobiology of attachment continues to trigger powerful surges of oxytocin, opioids and dopamine, like it is expecting the person to be there, while the cognitive reality confirms their permanent absence. it's necessary that the brain utilizes its neuroplasticity to slowly map out a new model of reality. but this rebuilding has to be.. specific. not ranked. it requires honoring the precise, idiosyncratic contours of the person who left, rather than flattening their humanity into an abstract title.

I understand that certain objections to this view are inevitable. the first being that labels such as "the love of your life" can be sincerely, which is factually true. some people genuinely do find their singular cosmic match, this is undeniable, but my critique is aimed at the tactical use of such labels as a social license, not the authenticity of the emotion itself. one could also insist that breakup grief is inherently lesser than bereavement because death carries a finality that separation does not. yet, the neurobiological yearning for an absent attachment figure operates via identical chemical pathways regardless of whether the person is in a grave or living in a different city. yet again, one could suggest that demanding societal and institutional recognition for non-death loss will only lead to the pathologizing of ordinary heartbreak. I don't intend to turn common human pain to a clinical diagnosis. my objective, however, is social enfranchisement and ritual validation. modern self-help advice often advocates for a "red-flag" reassessment. this means telling the brokenhearted to retroactively devalue their ex in order to ease the pain. I think that's merely swapping one memory distortion for another, and the data on defensive devaluation shows that trying to make the grapes sour still means that the tongues tastes its bitterness.

what d'you do when you lose the love of your life? you go into the granular details of what was actually shared. you strip away the word "greatest love" and look directly at them; in their entirety and the unrepeatable habits that comprised the world you built together. if the culture has withheld a ritual for your specific loss, you must build the ritual yourself.

inevitability of an external force dictating the start and conclusion of our existence is an absolute constant completely outside our individual control. it's like we're riding the waves in the waters of life, and making conscious alignment with the currents prove far more effectiveness than trying to resist it. every element within reality follows a systematic pattern of appearance and subsequent evaporation and the course of humanity is integrated entirely into this cyclical transformation. it is not an exception to it. individual self-conception artificially personalizes this transition; where we occasionally treat the self as a unique case exempt from the laws of nature, when in reality every component of the collective system undergoes continuous transfiguration and changes in form.

intellectual acknowledgment of this cosmic cycle does nothing to insulate a person from raw devastation of loss. when confronted with the actual, oftentimes sudden, unvarnished rupture of a bond, the only authentic response we can ever help is physical expulsion of grief through tears. after that, and through the passage of time, do we begin the slow, neuroplastic restructuring of a life we must continue to live albeit without them.

what d'you do when you lose the love of your life? you cry.

and you cry some more.

and then you keep going.

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the audacity of a classmate, backed by most of my department folks (men and women alike), to tell me I couldn't run for course representative, but rather assistant course representative, and for no other reason than "girls don't run for Courserep only guys," needs to be studied.

to my new and existing readers, hii and welcome again! very excited to have you here. this is the last essay of a 3-part series so if you haven't, checkout the CYKology of modern art and International thief thief.

as you may or may not know, I'm a lover of storytelling and YOU are going to loveee this one.

it was a hot afternoon at the start of the semester. I was on my way to the ICT center in school to print out some documents, and accompanying me was a classmate of mine who had also wanted to get his documents printed. he fell in step beside me and as a form of small talk, raised an offer to campaign beside him for the position of assistance Courserep, while he ran for Courserep. I've never been interested in school politics as I find them to be unnecessarily messy, but I was careful not to turn down the offer yet. in jest, I had voiced a desire to run for Courserep instead and this fellow paused briefly, giving me a weird look. "what?" I asked.

to which he responded that I couldn't do that. I thought he meant that the available slots for the position was filled already and I asked this for clarification. he responded in the negative, and told me point blank that a woman can't run for Courserep. my ears couldn't believe what they were hearing, though ofcourse I masked any facial expression that might give me away. he further stated that some other lady was actively campaigning for the position and admitted, rather proudly, to being part of a small group tasked with sabotaging her campaign (via use of bribes, threats, vandalisation/tearing off her campaign posters or equipments and the likes)

I've heard many stories about school politics, but having to be in close proximity with the supposed perpetrator of many such stories was a perplexity I would never forget. to cut the long story short, and after further discovery that only women were currently available candidates for assistant Courserep, I turned down his offer. days later, I carried out further questionnaire investigations as to whether or not what he said was true. to my surprise, many people in my department whom I questioned about it affirmed the practice to be active and true, with many of them defending it.

ironically, none of them could answer my pressing question of, "who put that structure in place?"

to the best of my knowledge and discovery, the school never placed such law neither did the head of department. so who exactly made it norm in this 21st century that I, a woman, is unfit to run for my position of choice.. simply because I am a woman?

wander through a densely populated cemetery and you'll notice, with slow, creeping unease, that half the graves are missing names. for centuries, structural absence of women from the cultural ledger has been looked at as a natural law. the human mind, lazy in its suffering and eager for simple geometries, looks at a blank canvas and concludes that the hand which should have painted it is cripple. after all, "if they had something to say, they would have said it." this fantasy assumes that expression is an absolute, internal fire that burns regardless of the oxygen in the room.

but birds do not sing in caves.

a cave, in its oppressive density, its total darkness and its lack of an echo chamber, ensures that the impulse to sing is either choked at the throat or lost to the stone walls. absence of women from artistic records gives light to the cave they worked in, and it says absolutely nothing reliable about their inherent capacity. belief that this missing output is proof of their lack of genius is an invalid inference to absolve itself of the responsibility to understand the reason behind their silence, and this invalid inference has survived by hiding behind the prestige of high culture.

Linda Nochlin asked a profound question in 1971, “why have there been no great women artists?”, thereby exposing various institutional fraud of the "genius" myth. the West had long treated greatness as a miraculous, god-given seed that sprouts regardless of soil. Nochlin dismantled this, showing that art production is an institutional reality dependent on access to the nude model, the academy, patronage system and sheer luxury of uninterrupted time that many, especially women in that era, did not have. to expect great art from a class systematically barred from these structures is akin to demanding bountiful harvest from an unplowed concrete slab. it simply doesn't make sense.

Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock took this dissection deeper, tracking distinctions between what was known as "art" (public, heroic domain of men) and "craft" (private, domestic labor of women) was deliberately manufactured. tapestry or an embroidery is not inherently lesser than an oil painting; it was categorized as lesser because of the person that held the needle. yet, even these structural critiques occasionally made silence to be a single, uniform blanket thrown over the feminine voice. when you look to the philosophy of language and knowledge, a different story unfolds. Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice reveals that a person can be wronged specifically in her capacity as a knower and a communicator; when a woman’s artistic testimony is systematically undervalued due to identity prejudice, she experiences injustice. more radically, Rae Langton’s framework of illocutionary disablement explains how a speaker can utter the correct words with correct intentions, and yet the speech act fails because the surrounding social environment wouldn't let it "count". in Langton’s formulation, structural stripping of a word’s capacity to do anything in the world is also another form of silencing.

and where I agree, I think the discourse remains fractured.

we've researched and written extensively on silencing achieved by direct, state-backed prohibition. but nobody talks about subtle, algorithmic silencing achieved by price and market valuation. furthermore, shared justification across these seemingly disparate worlds goes unexamined; meaning that, whatever the law may be, enforcement always appeals to the same phantom of "tradition," "national culture" or "authenticity."

allow me nerd out a little bit as we unpack this diagnostic failure. during research for this essay, I stumbled across four distinct mechanisms of silencing, especially in the arts industry: prohibition, prescription, valuation and custom.

• prohibition is absolute, legal eradication of the artistic act itself.

• prescription dictates and polices the borders of identity so stringently that the one who creates art is nothing but a state-sanctioned mannequin.

• valuation is the mechanism of the market, where one's work is allowed to exist but is systematically stripped of economic and intellectual authority through calculated architecture of pricing and gendered vocabulary.

• custom is the most terrifying mechanism; an unwritten, internalized norm that requires no police officer because we as a community, and often the victims themselves, enforces its boundaries out of a deep-seated dread of non-conformity.

the binding tissue across all four mechanisms is an appeal to a historical or cultural "purity." this appeal invents an idealized past to justify contemporary mutilation, while arguing that silencing the woman is not an act of cruelty, rather that of preservation.

Afghanistan

the Taliban’s Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice boasted of destroying 21,328 musical instruments in a single year; a totalitarian eradication of art itself.

for women, this resulted to a total ban on the female voice in public spaces. a woman may not sing, she may not recite poetry, she may not allow her voice to cross the threshold of her domestic confinement. the international community is yet to find the words for this total erasure.

however, in July and September 2025, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for senior Taliban figures, including Supreme Leader Haibatullah Akhundzada and Chief Justice Abdul Hakim Haqqani, for crimes against humanity of persecution on gender and political grounds. in its landmark interpretation, the ICC noted that gender persecution extends beyond direct violence to the "imposition of discriminatory social norms." yet, an immense legal gap remains, in that gender apartheid is not yet codified as a distinct crime under international law; the law hesitates to name this total system of segregation for what it is, treating these horrors as isolated acts of persecution rather than a cohesive, state-engineered cage.

Afghan women, however, are not passive bodies waiting for international law to rescue them. even within the vacuum of exile, organizations like the Nay-Negar Visual Art Center were established acts of defiance. these artists carry their canvases across borders for preservation of their sanity and historical memory.

Tajikistan

cross the border into Tajikistan where the state does not ban art or fashion, it commands exactly how said art or fashion must look. under Law No. 2048 on Regulating Traditions and Ceremonies, signed into law on June 20 2024, the Tajik state banned clothing deemed "alien to national culture." this was quickly reinforced by an August 2024 fatwa from the Islamic Ulema Council barring women from wearing black, tight-fitting or transparent garments. financial weight of this morality is staggering, with fines ranging from roughly $750 to $6,000 (8,000 to 54,000 Somoni) which is a ruinous sum for an ordinary citizen.

what makes Tajikistan a profoundly illuminating case study is its bipolar policing of the female body; on one hand criminalizing Middle Eastern hijabs as an import of violent extremism while simultaneously pathologizing Western dress as a moral pollutant. State television has routinely singled out female artists and musicians, publicly shaming them if their attire deviates from the approved ethno-nationalist costume. this control was codified even further via a 2024 culture law that forces all artists to clear foreign tours and exhibition repertoires directly with the Ministry before leaving the country. because Tajikistan is constitutionally a secular state, it completely destroys Western objection that these abuses are simply the inevitable results of religious dogma.

I must concede, for the sake of academic honesty, that Tajik women possess far greater access to university education, professional careers and public life than their counterparts in Kabul. yet, this access is granted on a condition of total compliance.

The Art Market

quite easy for Western observers to look at Kabul and Dushanbe with a comfortable, patronizing horror, believing that the democratic market is a space of pure meritocracy; this is a delusion born of wealth. in the global art market, mechanisms of silence replaces the police officer with the auctioneer's gavel. data from major industry benchmarks, including UBS/Art Basel 2025 Global Art Market Report and the ArtTactic/Sotheby’s analyses, reveals an unmistakable, systemic ceiling that completely undermines the argument that women are simply "absent" or uncreative.

at entry levels of the primary market, there is numeric parity (50%). however, as the capital intensifies and financial stakes climb into stratospheres of top-tier galleries and global auctions, their presence undergoes a brutal evaporation. women drop to 35% of represented artists at the top tier, and their work commands a mere 13% of secondary auction value! most damningly, in an analysis of $16.7 billion spent over five years, work by historical women artists accounted for a miserable 5.3% of the total.

I think the problem is gendered, critical vocabulary. when a woman produces art, critics and collectors routinely describe it as Pretty, Personal, Confessional, Emotional or Domestic. when their male counterparts produces work using the exact same thematic material, it is heralded as Powerful, Innovative, Universal or Monumental. the market illocutionarily disables them by ensuring that while a woman’s art may exist as decorative commodity, it rarely "counts" for a historic, blue-chip masterpiece.

Custom

the final mechanism is the most intimate, and therefore the hardest to indict: custom and tradition.

in academic departments within Nigerian universities, particularly in the East, there exists an unwritten, unquestioned doctrine regarding both male-female relationships and (for the sake of this essay) student leadership, like with the story of what happened to me. I'm not saying that there haven't been female course representatives or student union presidents. looking into their histories and period of leadership, I discovered various controversies and unkind obstacles that they've had to face and scale to keep the position; in most cases, many don't even go past the election phase. and this is just at the local level. looking at the federal and state level, Nigeria has never had a female president, and only 1 female governor in the entirety of Her history as a nation.

back to my premise, there is no university senate nor universal guideline that mandates this bias. there is no official memo. scholarship on gender and student leadership in Nigerian higher education confirms that these micro-politics function as a highly effective containment strategy. what makes this so terrifyingly durable is that women themselves are often its most rigid enforcers; they will pull younger female students/aspirants aside and warn them not to run for the top seat, advising them not to "make trouble" or disrupt the social peace of the department.

this "custom" relies on the victim's own dread of isolation to do the work of the State. this "custom" robs the female student of inclusion. it is an injustice.

I know a framework this unsparing must expect immediate, defensive counter-arguments from the defenders of tradition and otherwise. as stated earlier, before settling down to write this, I engaged a couple of folks in conversations concerning the issue. naturally, they raised some objections, which I'll be addressing now.

• the first objection, unsurprisingly, was claim that these laws and customs are authentic expressions of non-Western societies, and that critiquing them is merely an act of Western cultural imperialism.

I must say that this argument is an intellectual fraud that deliberately confuses the voice of the oppressor with that of the culture. we do not need to import Western theories to indict these systems, we need only look at testimonies of women themselves; the women of Afghanistan and Tajikistan especially. organizations like the activists at Tell Me Sister have consistently put their lives on the line to state that their erasure is but a violent subjugation of their culture, not an expression of it. furthermore, as demonstrated by Tajikistan's status as a highly authoritarian secular state, these clothing bans are modern, bureaucratic tools used by an autocratic elite to police civil society.

• another objection accused my framework of a lazy moral equivalence, arguing that it is intellectually dishonest to compare an auction price differential in New York to a literal execution or public flogging for singing in Kabul.

and to that, I say that critique misses the entire point of structural analysis. when I compare the logic of these mechanisms, it is not to equate their severity. a cage made of gold wire is still a cage, even if the prisoner inside it is not being actively starved to death like the prisoner in the stone dungeon. I went through the trouble of mapping these four mechanisms together to keep their vast differences in severity clearly ranked. it still exposes the fact that intellectual justification used by the billionaire collector in Manhattan to undervalue a female painter is structurally identical to the logic used by the patriarch minister in Dushanbe. they are all drinking from the same well of belief that a woman's voice, a woman, must be managed, bounded and validated by an external authority before she can be "allowed" (for lack of better term) to exist.

• yet another objection turns to economics, arguing that the market gap is not a result of systemic discrimination. they stated it was natural reflection of personal preference and the care-burden.

valid, I acknowledge that really. this perspective suggests that women scale back their artistic production due to the biological and social realities of child-rearing and domestic responsibilities. I think we must concede what the data actually supports. the care-burden is a brutal, material reality that disproportionately interrupts women’s careers exactly at the moment they should be transitioning from mid-career to established figures. however, this explanation is an exact indictment of the system. the fact that the art market refuses to build infrastructure that accommodates realities of human care, treating the unencumbered, single-minded male producer as the only valid template for an artist, is itself a valuation mechanism designed to ensure that parity at entry (50%) inevitably diverges into structural exclusion at the top.

• the final, most romantic objection claims that "true art" cannot be killed; that Afghan women are still painting in shadows, that underground movements persist and therefore the silence is overstated.

I reject this cruel form of optimism that romanticizes the trauma of creators in order to excuse various violence of the environment. of course, art continues underground; humanity is stubborn, and our restlessness cannot be easily flattened. but what the cave removes is not always the internal impulse to create, rather your audience and the archive to preserve your genius. an artist who must bury her canvas in the dirt to avoid execution cannot engage in collective dialogues that builds an artistic movement. her work cannot be preserved, it cannot be critiqued and it cannot teach the generation that follows her thereby ensuring its historical starvation.

the cave wins by ensuring that the sound of the singing bird never reaches another specie's ears.

to break this cycle, our academic and political interventions must abandon their surface-level patches. they must issue immediate creation of international, state-protected digital and physical archives for exiled and restricted artists, ensuring that the work of groups like the Nay-Negar Visual Art Center is permanently woven into global historical records before it is starved out of existence. they must explicitly recognize "silencing" is a formal, distinct category of harm within both art history curricula and international human rights law, bridging the gap between aesthetic critique and legal accountability.

they must encourage and empower their men, boys but especially women AND girls in the collective effort to keep making and sharing art in order to save and preserve art for more centuries to come.

no matter what, don't stop making art.

if the Afghan women could do it, you can too!

comments are welcome, I'd love to read your thoughts on this. ❤️

looking closely at the digital theater of modern dating shows, specifically those "pop the balloon" format types dominating contemporary internet culture, there often exists an irksome pattern especially between the heteronormative folks. I've seen a whole lot of these videos and at some point I found myself actively looking out for this pattern. allow me to set the scene: a woman walks onto the stage; poised, articulate, confident. for a brief moment, six or seven men stand holding balloons, representing individual choice and distinct identity. the woman then goes through the show's normal process of introducing herself, by somewhat surface level information if I may add. then, one man in the line pops his balloon. maybe something she is or said doesn't appeal to his taste and/or preference.

but what happens next? within seconds, a rapid-fire cascade of pops echoes through the room. men, some who hadn’t even looked the woman in the eye twice, are suddenly destroying their own chances with her. if this man didn't want a chance with her, that must mean she's not want-able material, right? right. oftentimes later, when the dust settles and they've actually had a conversation with the lady and gotten to know her to an extent, some of these exact same men sheepishly ask the producers for a new balloon, realizing too late that they threw away a genuine opportunity simply because they panicked when the pack moved without them.

this, I've noticed, is a microcosm of much deeper, more insidious psychological reality that vividly demonstrates how easily the modern male outsources his autonomy. when faced with uncertainty, many men do not look inward to their own intellect, intuition or morality, rather they look horizontally at other men to figure out how they are "supposed" to act.

unfortunately, the modern African man has also outsourced his character to his wallet.

"once I just get money like this..."

"I can bag any woman, whether she's richer than me or not."

"money go solve all my problems."

it is dismally wearisome when one listen to ambient noises in any bar on the streets across Lagos, Accra or Nairobi, or scroll through the comments of a tweet and hearing these kind of phrases repeated like a collective mantra; turns out it is the core doctrine of most modern African male. an absolute belief that financial success is a singular, all-powerful cheat code that exempts a man from the grueling work of human development. don't get me wrong, while economic survival is an undeniable reality, this toxic psychological byproduct has created a flat-profile masculinity.

in simple English, too many African men unfortunately have absolutely NO character outside of their money. I mean ZERO.

they treat wealth not as a tool, rather a personality substitute and because they exhaust all their energy chasing a bag, you're often left with adults completely hollowed-out and bankrupt in every other human metric including emotional intelligence, humor, empathy, consideration, compassion, zest and softness. most of these men operate under the delusion that a full bank account forces the world, and women in particular, to tolerate their emotional blankness, their BORING dispositions, and their psychological rigidity.

a typical example to contrast this case is our very own Nigerian & global superstar, Rema.

in the most respectful, artistic sense of the term, I think Rema is what I'll call a bad bitch. his entire public (and what is known of his private) presence stands as direct, defiant contrast to the rigid, flat-profile masculinity that dominates African landscapes. where the standard African man uses wealth as a shield to hide his lack of flavor, Rema uses his platform to completely customize his character both inside and out. Rema’s style is entirely distinct from the hyper-masculine, aggressive norm and he comfortably experiments with fluid fashion, bold accessories and casual use of makeup that enhances his features. this subversion of the gender uniform prompts lazy, homophobic slurs from the predictable, herd-minded observer, but Rema risks fragility of the male gaze because his identity is self-authored, not handed down by the boys' club. he understands that a man who is secure in his essence does not fear looking "pretty" and it's evident in how he carries himself.

standard African patriarchal playbook teaches men that women are commodities to be acquired once financial dominance is achieved, but Rema completely flips this script having consistently expressed his genuine, unforced love and a high regard for women not just as subjects in his music, but as human beings worthy of dignity

crucially, (and duh?) women love him back with an intense loyalty, precisely because women crave a man who possesses a rich internal character. his wealth exists alongside his humor, his playfulness, his softness, and his artistic zest. Rema is proof that money cannot buy a personality, but it sure enough can fund it. a full wallet can buy attention, but it cannot buy the emotional literacy required to maintain a safe, fulfilling relationship. it cannot buy wit, it cannot buy comfort in one's own skin, it cannot buy a soft heart and lastly, it cannot buy sense. by breaking out of the transactional, money-centric box, Rema embodies a healthy, multi-dimensional masculinity in the flesh.

I think the most attractive thing a man can own is a fully realized, independent character. an ultimate systemic vulnerability of men lies in this exact predictability, in that, by conditioning men to value tribal consensus over individual critical thinking, power structures seamlessly turn male aggression into blind, hyper-compliant execution. which is precisely why the forces of industry and warfare have historically found them easier to manage. studies show that men are the easiest to manipulate, which is precisely why they make the best soldiers and the most compliant industrial laborers. they seldom question authority, especially when that authority wears the face of another man. due to women being historically marginalized and excluded from the formal structures of power, they were forced to develop alternative survival mechanisms rooted in lateral reading, institutional skepticism, and interpersonal nuance.

this is a paradox I call Handout Blueprint: the very system that tells a man he has the upper hand is using that exact belief to chain him to the floor. the blueprint instructs him that dominance over women AND other men equals masculine worth. therefore, as long as he feels he is higher than someone on the social ladder, he will willingly ignore the fact that his own bones are being crushed by the corporate or state machine above him. give a man a title ("provider," "protector," "boss") and a false sense of structural superiority, and he will march into a trench with a rifle or an 80-hour work week without a single murmur of dissent.

to further prove the toxicity and insemination of this system, especially in our modern world today, I conducted a simple digital experiment which revealed terrifying mechanics of this trap and, unrelatedly, strengthened my "no phone till you're-in-university rule I would set for my kid(s. lol) if I may add that.

I had created a brand-new Instagram account with a completely blank slate, under the guise of a young male identity, and I'm not kidding when I say a disturbing pipeline activated immediately. I did not have to search for extremist viewpoints; they found me. within exactly five reel-scrolls, or let's say less than twenty minutes of passive viewing, the recommender system began feeding me what is known today as "Red Pill" content, alot of which were hardcore messaging aimed at teaching men and young boys to h@te, disregard and disrespect women, and oftentimes, themselves. tier 3 misogyny, if there ever was a thing, and this is what the young men of our generation are being exposed to. what could be an innocent search for fitness advice, financial tips, or self-improvement would rapidly morph into an algorithmic rabbit hole of deep-seated misogyny and gender/tribal resentment.

when young African men look at an icon like Rema, who comfortably rejects the hyper-macho uniform to embrace fluid, androgynous fashion and visual prettiness, the algorithm doesn't teach them to appreciate his creative autonomy. the manosphere frames this self-authored character as an existential threat to manhood, telling the insecure boys and men that to be safe, he must double down on a rigid, aggressive performance of dominance. by exploiting their deep-seated fear of being stigmatized or labeled outside the tribal norm, being called "gay" as a slur or "weak," the digital herd successfully grooms these boys to reject a healthy, multi-dimensional character. they are tricked into believing that being "macho" and subduing others under their heel is the only way to belong, completely blind to the fact that they are just trading their unique souls to become compliant, identical sheep in a toxic online flock.

scholars monitoring digital radicalization have tracked this precise pipeline and discovered that social media algorithms actively target male vulnerabilities such as loneliness, economic anxiety, or natural awkwardness of adolescent development, and exploit them for maximum platform engagement. harmful ideologies are packaged neatly and shipped off as entertainment, using slick editing, high-end cars, and aggressive motivational speeches to mask their poison. this is digital grooming on an industrial scale. tech companies have recognized that male psychology is a highly lucrative, entirely predictable market, and by offering young boys a ready-made enemy; women, progressive equality, "the system," they insulate these boys from ever having to look inward, at themselves.

the algorithm herds them into digital enclosures where independent thought is systematically bred out of them, and they are trained to think, speak, react, and hate in perfect, synchronized harmony, all while believing they are part of an elite, "enlightened" brotherhood.

many call it, "herd mentality."

herd mentality requires both conformity and a common scapegoat to keep the hierarchy intact. this is where modern digital misogyny, perfectly encapsulated by trending social media discourses like the "settings babe" phenomenon, serves its structural purpose. if you're reading this, you may have come across this term which began trending during the past week or so. on the surface, the term is weaponized by these misogynistic men to humble and categorize women.

Netizens define a "settings babe" as a lady who is always available to pull up to social gatherings, allegedly for free food, drinks and clout, used as a new-age slur to reduce the woman's presence to transactional opportunism. and I think it's all bullshīt. realistically, the very men generating this discourse are entirely incapable of hosting or enjoying a "setting" without the presence of women. you wouldn't call that woman up if you didn't need her.

notice when a guy invites his friends to a lounge, the very first question the male herd asks is, shey babes go dey? "are women going to be there?"

these men desperately rely on the presence of women to validate their masculinity, fuel their status, and cure their internal boredom because the male ego cannot handle the vulnerability of admitting this dependence, therefore it resorts to defensive manipulation.

this dynamic is truly insidious because the target of this online vitriol is rarely a distant, abstract entity.

often, the woman being labeled, dissected and dismissed as a "settings babe" is a man’s actual friend, classmate or long-time homegirl; someone who has offered genuine camaraderie/real-world support. yet, the moment she steps into a public arena where the male herd is gathered, individual loyalty evaporates. you would expect that closeness, history or basic human decency would grant a man the intellectual sovereignty to say, "wait, I know her. she isn't what you're saying." you would expect these men to call out this behavior, especially after being the direct benefactors of her kindness or presence.

but they don't.

herd mentality acts as an anesthetic to conscience that, to any man operating under this handout blueprint, a real-world ally is entirely disposable if sacrificing her buys him ten seconds of cheap validation from other men. I've witnessed this on many occasion.

within the landscape of modern African masculinity, this betrayal is enforced by highly specific linguistic and cultural weapons. and incase you haven't guessed it by now, and since many like that the distinction be pointed out, the men who are being addressed in this article are men who, in a faux show of authority, ascribe to lifestyles/beliefs/mentality/actions that are deemed oppressive/harmful/demeaning/derogatory to women and other men. if a man dares to break rank, stand up for a woman or protect his female friend from the collective vitriol of the group, the herd immediately deploys their localized defense mechanism by labelling him a "woman wrapper."

you see, some of us Africans think that shame is probably the worst thing to happen to a person. fear of this label, the absolute terror of losing approval of your fellow men and being expelled from the tribal boys' club, is enough to make most men abandon morality entirely. while a small handful of African men attempt to "decentralize" themselves from these misogynistic takes, the conditioning runs so deep that even some self-proclaimed progressive men still harbor and portray these exact biases when tested in private. if a concept benefits men, it is defended fiercely as an unassailable, sacred "tradition." polycentric control, systemic male privilege, and the emotional servitude of women are justified by a simple, lazy retort that it's "how it has always been." but if a concept does not benefit men, or requires genuine accountability, the herd stands unified, kicking and fighting vehemently against any progressive shift that threatens their comfort.

when men are called out for their lack of emotional depth, their inability to maintain safe boundaries, or their complicity in the abuse of their female peers, they abandon the "protector" archetype entirely and hide behind a pathetic myth of simplicity.

I'll tell you a short story.

while doing my basic program as a pre-fresher in university, I had a.. very lousy roommate. it's a long story, that one, but bottom line is we had our misunderstandings.

now, I'm very wary about keeping male friends. aside from the obvious horrors, oftentimes guys do not want a lady around if they aren't going under the sheets once in a while. other times, there's great misalignment in views and they turn out to be one of those. (ifykyk)

few months in, I met someone through a class presentation and we hit it off decently. I was hanging out with this guy-friend in school one day and because he asked, I had confided in him about the issue I was having with my roommate. I had set a boundary which was crossed many times, and I felt gravely offended which resulted in the fall out; I made sure to concisely explain my side of the story. next thing my guy hit me with was, "na so una women things dey always be."

pause.

I was irked, confused and stunned at the same time. irked, because I detest me expressing myself being labeled as "women talk." confused, because I wonder what he meant by that. and stunned because, after all I had said, that was the first thing he thought to respond with which showed me the lack of emotional intelligence. I have heard people, mostly men, often use those wordings but I nevertheless asked him to explain his retort. the male observer shook his head and declared that "women are too complicated." when I pressed on why, his response was a well-worn cliché: "men are simple beings. if it was me and my guy, we no dey reason am," and that was all.

this phrase, "we no dey reason am," was passed off with a casual shrug but to me, it is actually a profound indictment of character. it is a confession, not the virtue he made it sound like. to me, you're basically saying: we do not possess the emotional literacy to process boundaries. we do not have the courage to interrogate why we hurt people, or why we allow our friends to hurt people. we would rather let our boundaries be trampled on and call it "simplicity" than do the hard, uncomfortable work of self-reflection. it turns out he was indeed one of those and that was, undoubtedly, the end of our friendship for me.

men are simple beings, you see.

that's why, as a man, my guy could do me the dirtiest betrayal.. but we've been friends for 3 years and after all he's my bro, so I keep the friendship. because as a man, I'm a simple being yunno. (this actually happened to someone I'm familiar with, which is funny because he broke up a 5-year relationship because his lady started seeing someone else. where I do not support cheating at all I often wonder, sarcastically, why said simplicity did not apply to her, why he "no reason am." but I guess I'm not much of a man to know)

by framing emotional intelligence and self-respect as "complicated," the blueprint tricked this young man into celebrating their own psychological stagnation, allowing them to remain intellectual adolescents, nodding along to the group consensus because thinking for oneself requires a level of emotional labor they have been conditioned to despise. which brings us to the ultimate tragedy of the engineered male mind that forces a man to trade authentic, high-value loyalty for superficial, low-value alignment. when a man steps out of this loop, when he looks at a friend who does not wish him well and decides that he will not smile, nod along, or remain complicit in his own disrespect, the system and often the people around him in turn tells him he is too sensitive and that he is failing the test of masculinity.

an ultimate tragedy of the engineered male mind is the total loss of the self, where he needs other people to tell him how to walk, talk, eat or when to fuck his wife. he stands in line, fidgeting, looking at other men on a dating show to decide when is right to pop his balloon, he looks at other men on an app to decide what slurs to use against his own friends, he looks at the men above him to decide who to kill, who to exploit, and who to like or hate. he must break this vicious loop, and to do that we must continue to encourage a radical, uncompromising shunning and disapproval of the herd mentality.

real measures of strength, for ANYONE really, is not in their capacity to blend into the flock nor is it their formulaic, predictable aggression, but their willingness to stand entirely alone. we've previously discussed this extensively. (read Being A Man here)

Men must find the courage to go on an internal journey of accepting and knowing themselves fully. not the superficial "self-improvement" peddled by manosphere hucksters selling fitness courses and crypto schemes, rather the grueling, solitary work of psychological and moral decentralization that requires a man to look at his thoughts, his biases and his reactions, and ask himself if it is actually his own, or he is just parroting the algorithm.

"who drew this map I am walking, and why do they want me to stay on it?"

when one reclaims his autonomy, the pack will call him a "woman wrapper," they will tell him he is complicated, and they will try to exile him from their tribal sandbox. please let them. loneliness of a strict moral boundary is infinitely more honorable than cowardice of shared delusion. the modern man is left stranded in a culture that rewards compliance and punishes character, left to look at his own integrity and wonder if he's got it all wrong. I tell you today that the man who chooses loneliness over the cowardice of the herd, he is not less of a man. he is an actual individual who has seen the puppet strings attached to it and finally had the courage to cut them.

if you know what is right, do it. ciao

it was devastating.

this was the petroleum-gilded giant of Africa that should have made everyone rich. instead, modern Nigerian State introduced itself as a structural bottleneck where abundance went to die.

and a time of hardship and uncertainties, music became our balm of Gilead.

1975 Udoji Award artificially inflated public salaries, triggering a hyperinflationary spiral. this culminated in the surreal absurdity of the 1975 "Cement Armada," where hundreds of ships jammed the Lagos port, choking the harbors with millions of tons of building material that nobody needed and the infrastructure could not discharge. the State was literally drowning in unmanageable, misdirected capital.

by the time Shehu Shagari’s Second Republic took power, economy had curdled into a kleptocratic lottery. the administration’s Presidential Task Force on Rice, helmed by Umaru Dikko, transformed distribution of import licenses into a highly partisan patronage tool. when the 1982 Economic Stabilization Act introduced austerity, basic foods became elite leverage points.

Major General Muhammadu Buhari's ascension in 1984 institutionalized economic anxiety. the state then deployed War Against Indiscipline (WAI), using whips to enforce order at "essential commodities" queues for milk, sugar, and rice. to catch currency hoarders, the State ordered a sudden currency color swap, sealing land borders entirely and trapping legitimate traders in immediate ruin. this state-engineered panic was bookended by two cultural displacements:

1. 1983 "Ghana Must Go" decree, which expelled over a million West African migrants to purge domestic anxieties.

2. an iconic 1984 NTA "Andrew" advertisement, starring Enebeli Elebuwa as a suitcase-toting citizen declaring, "I’m tired men, so I’m checking out," the undeniable psychological ancestor of modern Nigeria's Japa movement.

   

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when General Ibrahim Babangida introduced the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) in 1986, the final anchor broke. driven by the Second-Tier Foreign Exchange Market (SFEM), Naira collapsed from a position of relative parity ($1 to ₦0.89 in 1985) to an official average of ~₦22 by 1993, resulting in 1989 anti-SAP riots, a total ideological rejection of a State that had systematically priced its own people out of existence.

cut off from State support, the marginalized populace, particularly in post-Biafra southeastern Nigeria, built a parallel, completely informal economy. also, then military regime's devastating £20 policy of 1970 had left the Igbo mercantile class financially castrated.

from this deliberate deficit emerged the igba boi apprenticeship system, a brilliant, decentralized human-capital incubator that built empires across Onitsha, Aba, and Alaba International Market. and because the State constantly weaponized import bans to protect elite monopolies, traders had to become master smugglers. border towns of Seme and Idiroko grew into fluid micro-economies where federal authority and market forces shook hands under the table. here, "settlement" became the only predictable tax, and the State an obstacle you negotiated with.

as documented by development economists Kate Meagher in Identity Economics, these informal clusters survived precisely because they substituted state legal frameworks with highly organized internal social networks.

I know by now you're thinking, "so why does any of this matter ??"

well.. it would interest you just how deeper this story goes, especially around music and art produced around the time. the soundtrack of this resilient, self-made mercantile class was Igbo Highlife.

if you grew up with your grandparents like I did, or maybe grew up in a deep Igbo traditional environment, you've probably come across pieces from Osadebe or Oliver De Coque. most don't understand the importance these two had in the music industry back then.

you must understand how much psychological trauma the 1970 Banking Decree had. following the civil war, Nigerian government declared that regardless of how much Biafran or Nigerian currency an Easterner held in their bank accounts before the war, they would only receive £20. this was institutional financial castration designed to ensure the total economic displacement of the Igbo people. but instead of collapsing, the society responded with the Igba Boi (Imu Ahia) apprenticeship system. I'll explain how it worked.

since there was no formal bank credit available to them, they built a decentralized, informal venture capital network, where young boys served masters for 5–7 years in places like Main Market Onitsha or Ariaria Market Aba, and were then "settled" with a lump sum, a shop and a supply chain network. by the late 1970s and 1980s, this system had produced a brand-new, fiercely autonomous millionaire class. they had no connection to government contracts or state patronage. they built their wealth entirely through international trade, shipping containers of auto parts, textiles, and electronics into Lagos, and navigating the hostile federal customs gates at Apapa, Seme, and Idiroko.

understand that in traditional Igbo sociology, wealth must be socially validated and ethically cleared. because this new merchant class was young, self-made, and aggressively ostentatious, they faced a cultural crisis: how do we prove that our wealth is legitimate and clean, especially when the formal state views us with suspicion?

and this, my friends, is where Highlife stepped in.

Highlife entertained these men, baptized them. Osadebe and Oliver De Coque were cultural judges, and by naming these traders in songs, linking them to honorable ancestral lineages, and praising their hard work (ife si na mgbamgba — wealth from personal struggle), they transformed raw cash to legitimate societal prestige.

Chief Stephen Osita Osadebe was a philosopher of the "Container Class.”

if the trading floor was frantic, Osadebe’s music was the ultimate antidote, an undisputed master of Oywoyo Highlife characterized by his slow, undulating, hypnotic tempo, heavy reliance on smooth brass sections, and extended instrumental solos. in the 1980s, Osadebe’s tracks routinely clocked over 15 to 20 minutes long (e.g., Osondi Owendi, Makojo). this length was an intentional economic flex. for an international importer whose livelihood depended on frantic phone calls, customs negotiations, and fluctuating exchange rates, listening to a 20-minute slow groove was radical luxury.

it was music for the living room of a mansion, not some chaotic market floor.

in Osondi Owendi, Osadebe sings: "Agiga kpaa onye o ga-atoka, ma o kpaa onye ozo o ga-aba mba" (when a needle pricks one person, they may endure it; if it pricks another, they scream). he taught a class of hyper-competitive traders how to deal with market volatility, with his lyrics constantly warning that wealth is cyclical, and envy (anya ufu) is fatal, and contentment is the only way to protect one's sanity from the jaws of a predatory economy.

Osadebe specifically targeted the upper echelon of the mercantile class, those logistics moguls, shipping magnates, and elite members of social clubs. his music was the velvet glove that smoothed over the rough edges of a life spent battling state border bureaucracy.

Oliver De Coque was a heavy-artillery PR machine. fronting his Ogene Sound Super Power band, Oliver blended traditional Igbo Ogene (metal gong) rhythms with flashy, Congolese-inspired high-life guitar pickings and heavy, rolling basslines. his music was faster, driving, and celebratory.

Oliver De Coque perfected the art of the panegyric marathon. in tracks like People’s Club of Nigeria, Identity, and Onye Aghana Nwanne ya, he would spend 10 straight minutes calling out the names, nicknames, and titles of specific traders. to the uninitiated, this seems like mere flattery but in reality, it was informal corporate branding. being named on an Oliver De Coque record was the 1980s equivalent of a verified blue checkmark on your social media accounts or being featured in Forbes.

it also meant, to customs officials, foreign suppliers, and domestic competitors, that your credit was good and your capital massive.

The People’s Club of Nigeria was founded in Aba in 1971 right after the war. this club became the ultimate economic fortress for self-made Igbo men. Sir Oliver was their official laureate. his songs for the club celebrated triumph over poverty. when he sang about these men, he deliberately highlighted their philanthropy, their building of community infrastructure, and their roles as employers, explicitly framing their capitalism as a form of community defense against a State that had abandoned them.

sir Oliver's signature massive beard, designer sunglasses, and custom traditional robes mirrored the psychological state of his audience. he combined raw, village-square Ogene instrumentation with highly sophisticated Western electric guitars. he was telling the world that the Aba or Alaba trader might speak broken English and operate in an informal market, but he was globally connected, modern, and unbendable.

these two artists ensured that the post-colonial State could strip the Igbo trader of his political capital, but it could never strip him of his cultural joy, his financial autonomy, or his human dignity.

when the post-colonial State withdrew its care, leaving a vacuum of infrastructure and accountability, most people took to music to seek redress. music as testimony was an act of aggressive reportage that requested change and mapped crime scenes of State failure in real-time, functioning as a parallel press when the actual media was choked by military decrees.

and no figure wielded this investigative blade more relentlessly than Fela Anikulapo-Kuti.

you know him. I know him. love him or hate him, he's HIM. through prolific, rapid-fire succession of vinyl indictments, Fela built structural anatomy of Nigerian's corruption.

• "Zombie" (1976) unmasked the robotic, unthinking brutality of the military apparatus that held the citizenry hostage.

• "Shuffering and Shmiling" (1978) diagnosed the paralyzing psychological sync between religious docility and material deprivation.

• "ITT (International Thief Thief)" (1979) and "Authority Stealing" (1980) aggressively re-centered the definition of criminality, shifting it from the desperate pickpocket in the market to the suited executives and military generals plundering the central bank under institutional cover.

• "Original Sufferhead" (1981) provided a grim, baseline index of the average citizen’s material reality, explicitly naming the basic triadic scarcity: "No water, no light, no food."

• "Army Arrangement" (1985) laid bare the systemic, deeply entrenched financial maneuvers underpinning the transition from military to civilian rule, exposing the geopolitical scams that bled the nation dry.

  

beyond Fela’s Shrine, other genres weaponized the song as an archive of grievance. in 1983, Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka partnered with actor and musician Tunji Oyelana and his band, The Benders, to release the brilliant, criminally under-examined satirical LP [Unlimited Liability Company released via Ewuro Productions, the record was a direct, devastating lampoon of Shehu Shagari’s Second Republic. posing as a shareholders' meeting for a failing firm, Oyelana’s lyrics bitingly noted how directors "chop all we money" while the chairman "sabi waka" from Tokyo to New York, shaking hands with presidents while the domestic treasury was shaken loose. subsequent military takeover modified the testimony with Sonny Okosun’s "Which Way Nigeria?" (1984) transforming pop hook into haunting, existential questions that became the thesis statement for the era.

as austerity deepened under Buhari and Babangida, popular music were composed into resilient survival anthems.

Veno Marioghae’s "Nigeria Go Survive" (1985) blended synthesized pop with fierce patriotism, offering a defiant, defensive claim on the country from citizens who refused to let state negligence drive them into exile. concurrently, Mike Okri’s "Time Na Money" (1988) translated the psychological pressure of a collapsing naira into a frantic, street-smart ethos of economic survival. by the late 1980s, as the Structural Adjustment Program shattered the middle class, sonic testimonies shifted to the heavy, biblical judgment of the Reggae Wave.

Ras Kimono’s "Under Pressure" (1989) used roots reggae to broadcast raw, claustrophobic reality of a populace squeezed by inflation and unemployment. the Mandators’ "Crisis" functioned as a prophetic, moral alarm, while Majek Fashek’s "Send Down the Rain" (1988) transcended mere music to become a spiritual, elemental cry for relief over a scorched, mismanaged landscape.

even within regional traditional frameworks, artists like Bright Chimezie engineered the Zigima Sound, using highlife satire in tracks like "Because of English" and "Okoro Junior" to mock the absurd cultural alienation of a post-colonial elite that prioritized colonial mannerisms over ancestral grounding.

call it philosophy for the Poor if you may. if testimony was to confront the oppressor, consolation was written to preserve the sanity of the oppressed. when the state offered no safety net, music stepped in as a psychological shock absorber. these songs were an attempt to provide the existential scaffolding required to outlast suffering, where they tell us endurance is an advanced art form.

in the Igbo-dominated Southeast, dealing with structural scars of the civil war and whims of an unpredictable trading economy, highlife masters offered a philosophy of profound metaphysical equanimity.

Chief Stephen Osita Osadebe’s masterpiece “Osondi Owendi" (1984) was an exercise in radical stoicism, reminding a hyper-competitive, anxious marketplace that what brings joy to one person brings grief to another, and that contentment is the ultimate shield against madness. his track, and one of my favourite, "Nwannem Ebezina" is a direct, sonic embrace for the broke and grieving, anchoring the soul against despair. this built upon the melancholic genius of Celestine Ukwu, whose timeless tracks "Ije Enu" and "Money Palaver" treated life’s tribulations as cyclical, inevitable cosmic weather than permanent, crushing defeats.

and let's not forget Nelly Uchendu’s "Aka Bu Eze" similarly re-centering human dignity, asserting that one's personal industriousness, rather than the fickle favor of the State, was the true crown of human existence.

as e dey sup for east, na so e sup for west. in our Yoruba-led West, the sonic consolation took the form of melodic, paternal pragmatism by good men lime Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey who specialized in instructional, proverbial folklore. his classic "Ketekete" illustrated sheer impossibility of satisfying human opinion, relieving the listener of the crushing weight of societal expectation, while "Aimasiko" offered a gentle, syncopated treatise on divine timing as an antidote to frantic, modern anxiety. another of my favourite by Christy Essien-Igbokwe "Seun Rere" (1981) layered sweet, accessible pop melodies over deep moral treatise on righteousness as its own defense against a chaotic world. most tellingly, Apala icon Ayinla Omowura used his percussive, fierce urban poetry to ground his listeners through terrifying structural transitions of State economics; his tracks addressing the 1973 decimal currency switch from the British pound to the Naira and Kobo functioned as crucial public service announcements. he broke down foreign, state-mandated arithmetic into accessible market-woman logic.

the North was not left out in this fight. a place where the state was often represented by remote military elites or traditional hierarchies, court musicians and griots provided a vital philosophy of dignity for the working underclass.

Dan Maraya Jos composed "Wak’ar Karen Mota" (The Song of the Bus Conductor), a brilliant, empathy-driven track that humanized and validated the honor, labor, and sharp wit of the lowest tier of the transport sector. Alhaji Mamman Shata’s vast discography acted as an epic oral history, praising the virtue of honest work regardless of scale. concurrently, Barmani Choge revolutionized Hausa women’s music by using the Amada rhythm to explicitly urge women to pursue financial autonomy, engage in trade, and refuse to be crushed by domestic or economic isolation.

where, at the time, these songs did not demand a revolution tomorrow; they ensured that the human being (like I would say) survived the day.

yet, when the burden of the state became too heavy for either testimony or philosophy to bear, Nigerian music activated its most potent, controversial valve which was.. escape; an engine of the legendary Owambe culture and sweat-drenched fuji floors. they believed that if the state has chosen to turn the country into a graveyard of ambitions, parties transformed weekends into a temporary kingdom of pure, unadulterated sovereignty.

which gave us Juju titans like King Sunny Adé engineering hypnotic, glittering soundscapes defined by swirling pedal steel guitars and interlocking talking drums that could stretch a single groove into an hour-long hypnotic trance. simultaneously, Fuji pioneers Sikiru Ayinde Barrister and General Ayinla Kollington constructed raw, percussive, street-level energy, transforming urban anxieties into communal, ecstatic motion. in the middle class nightclubs, several 80s disco-boogie wave led by Kris Okotie and Dizzy K Falola offered sleek, glossy break from the grim news cycles of military tribunals and essential commodity lines. this hyper-hedonism, however, drew sharp ideological fire.

in "Shuffering and Shmiling," Fela launched a direct, blistering critique against this tendency, arguing that religious ecstasy, and by extension relentless culture of partying, was merely an opiate. for Fela, the sight of a man dancing while carrying a heavy bucket of water on his head was rather a tragic, self-inflicted anesthesia.

State Strikes Songs

post-colonial state may have been incompetent at logistics, but it possessed a precise, hyper-sensitive ear for subversion. even before the general public recognized any track as a historic record, the State thought it an existential threat. whenever the song threatened to break out of parallel institution and disrupt formal structures of power, the State struck back with totalitarian violence.

one most visceral manifestation of this clash occurred during the 1977 Kalakuta Raid when over a thousand armed soldiers targeted Fela’s commune, burning it to the ground and brutally assaulting its occupants, a literal state-sponsored attempt to silence an alternative sovereignty. and in cases where brute force failed to contain the message, the State weaponized its legal machinery. in 1984, Muhammadu Buhari’s military regime arrested and jailed Fela on a highly suspect currency trafficking charge, punitive move that tied directly back to the state’s paranoid, border-sealing currency color swap. this repressive instinct did not stop even with the arrival of the Fourth Republic. many of us know this track (attach song) but not the history behind it. in 2004, Eedris Abdulkareem released "Jaga Jaga," a raw, unvarnished hip-hop portrait of a nation in shambles. the track so deeply stung the State apparatus that President Olusegun Obasanjo personally launched a public, televised tirade against the artist, leading to informal broadcasting blacklists.

continuity of this anxiety reached into the digital era when, in 2018, the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) officially banned Falz’s "This Is Nigeria". The regulatory body fined radio stations and declared the song "unfit for radio," specifically citing the piercing lyric, "This is Nigeria, look how we living now, everybody be criminal," as "vulgar".

proof that the Nigerian state has always feared the truth-telling capacity of music far more than it ever respected citizen's rights.

decades later, the structural landscape of Nigeria remains instantly recognizable, even as the analog tape has been replaced by streaming algorithms. post-colonial economic chokehold has simply been upgraded for the twenty-first century. instances like the devastating 2016 recession, or sudden 2019 land border closures, compounding impacts of 2023 petrol subsidy removal, and sudden Naira float pushed the economy into uncharted precarity. by 2024, headline inflation skyrocketed past 34%, the highest level recorded in nearly two decades. daily friction at the borders has shifted inward, with Customs service maintaining its predatory economic warfare against importation of Tokunbo (used) cars, basic rice, and essential technology, turning every consumer choice into an expensive battle.

even street vocabulary adapted to this updated hardship. modern terms like "Sapa", denoting a state of structural, bone-deep financial castration, is the direct grandchild of Fela’s Original Sufferhead. meanwhile, ubiquitous words like "Japa" (to flee across borders) serves as literal lexical heir to Andrew, the 1984 NTA character who wanted to "check out."

further transition of this pain into sound moved through an intermediate era of street grit. in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Ajegunle Galala movement, led by icons like Daddy Showkey and Baba Fryo, used dancehall and reggae to document ghetto survival. early 2000s maintained a fierce commitment to conscious testimony, examples like Sound Sultan’s "Mathematics" in year 2000 used a brilliant nursery-rhyme metaphor to break down the formula for Nigerian governance; African China’s "Mr President" released in 2006 issued direct, unvarnished warning to the political class from the perspective of the slums; and 2Face Idibia’s 2006 hit "E Be Like Say" leveraged acoustic pop to dismantle the empty rhetoric of election campaigns.

by the late 2010s and 2020s, a profound change occurred.

true, modern figures still offer moments of direct political confrontation, such as Falz’s conceptual catalog, or Burna Boy’s searing "20 10 20" and "Monsters You Made," which documented the trauma of the EndSARS protests.. (controversies aside)

however, dominant contemporary canon of Afrobeats underwent a radical, aspiration-driven shift toward what I call Hustle Canon.

• Zinoleesky’s "Kilofeshe" champions an autonomous, self-reliant hustle that owes nothing to the State.

• Seyi Vibez’s "Chance (Na Ham)" treats acquisition of wealth to be a mystical, urgent, and deeply individualistic victory.

• Bella Shmurda’s discography is also one of many raw diary of street-level survival, balancing existential dread with lavish ambition.

you could see this evolution replicate itself across regional soundscapes. in the East, Umu Obiligbo successfully resurrected Osadebe’s highlife philosophy, providing an updated, guitar-driven soundtrack for a new generation of Igbo traders navigating modern inflation. in the West, superstars like Asake and Portable injected the raw, frantic, percussive street energy of Fuji into mainstream pop, turning hustle into an ecstatic, secular religion. while in the North, artists like Naziru Sarkin Waka and Aminu Ala continue to preserve the potent tradition of Hausa political commentary, using their poetry to critique state actors and document civic grievances within the contemporary political landscape.

all this and yet, within global Afrobeats phenomenon, testimony has visibly shrunk, while escape and hyper-aspiration have grown. modern Afrobeats finally became the ultimate manifestation of Fela’s Shuffering and Shmiling, but with a crucial twist: this generation chose luxury because they realized that building a parallel institution of global, dancing prosperity was the only victory available to them.

the flex is their ultimate, arrogant survival strategy

in 1985, when Veno Marioghae sang "Nigeria Go Survive," her lyrics were a statement of defiant, institutional optimism, an assertion that nation-state possessed a baseline durability that would outlast the economic vultures at the helm. four decades later, history has delivered a complicated, bittersweet verdict. Nigeria, as a legal entity, did indeed survive.

but did Nigerians survive?

if you enjoyed reading this, checkout what I covered last week here.

modern listeners encounter music as a weightless, ambient digital transmission. and I am proud to announce that inspiration for this historical inquiry sparked from a single file path: sonic blueprints of Nigerian independent creator artistically cataloged as Luwa.Mp4.

Luwa.Mp4 represents the cutting edge of West Africa’s contemporary underground alternative scene. a self-styled "Cyberphunk" movement born out of urban youth networks in Ibadan and Lagos that weaponizes hyperpop distortion, punk non-conformity, and fragmented Yoruba storytelling. many artists like Luwa.Mp4, alongside the broader Alté and indie-fusion waves (echoing early movements by Cruel Santino, Odunsi the Engine, and Lady Donli), operating within this sphere do not seek the formulaic, radio-ready validation of mainstream commercial Afrobeats. they're instead constructing deeply insular sonic worlds online.

as counter-culture subverts physical constraints through digital channels, thus the logical conclusion of a thirty-year macroeconomic and technological metamorphosis.

New Beginnings.

to understand how a decentralized artist in Nigeria can drop an algorithmic-defying project like punKstA* directly to a global, hyper-niche audience, I was forced to trace the historic evolution of the web.

in the early 1990s, the World Wide Web was not the streamlined corporate marketplace it is now, rather a vast, uncharted digital frontier.

for artists and creators, this nascent network offered a radical alternative to the traditional, exclusive gatekeepers. sharing art in the dawn of the internet was a highly decentralized, slow-paced, and deeply personal endeavor, characterized by hand-coded HTML pages, experimental web rings, and tight-knit virtual communities. while our modern platforms prioritize passive consumption through algorithmic feeds, early internet transformed the act of sharing art into an interactive, collaborative ecosystem where the network itself became both the medium and the destination. consequently, looking back at the early web reveal unique and historical moment where digital art was defined by a shared spirit of open experimentation and grassroots connection.

before the digital network shattered physical space, to create in the pre-internet era, one had to navigate a landscape dominated by strict gatekeepers: gallery owners, museum curators, art critics, and major commercial publishers, and each held an absolute monopoly over what was seen, validated, and preserved. and side note, these institutions operated as high-walled citadels. for an artist to even be considered for an exhibition, they had to engage in the exhausting, expensive ritual of the "portfolio drop."

this required compiling physical photographic slides or prints of their work, formatting physical résumés, and mailing or hand-delivering them to galleries, only to face months of silence or standardized rejection letters. because physical spaces faced immense overhead costs and limited square footage, curators could rarely afford to take risks on non-traditional, avant-garde, or marginalized creators.

as a result, some underground artists created "zines," which are photocopied, hand-stapled booklets of their art and writing. they distributed them by leaving them at local comic book shops, record stores, or mailing them to people listed in alternative classified networks (like Factsheet Five). artists also maintained physical address books. they paid out of pocket to print color postcards of their new artwork and paid for postage to mail them to potential collectors, critics, and friends.

before the internet, your artistic community was limited to who you could physically meet. if you were a surrealist digital artist or an avant-garde creator living in a small rural town, you were completely isolated. you showed your work to friends, family, or local art fairs, often receiving little understanding or relevance in return.

this institutional barrier was deeply compounded by a general crushing limitations of physical geography. the art and music worlds possessed distinct, highly centralized capitals, in cities like New York, Paris, London, and Tokyo. if an artist did not live within commuting distance of these cultural epicenters, their chances of achieving broader recognition or finding a sustainable market were practically nonexistent. creators living in rural areas, small towns, or developing nations were trapped in a state of deep cultural isolation, largely limited to showing their work at local county fairs, regional craft markets, or community libraries, where the audience was small and rarely aligned with niche or progressive artistic movements.

furthermore, geography severely restricted an artist's access to inspiration and community. unlike how easy it is to spot and follow up events nowadays, discovering new art movements back then meant waiting months for international art magazines to arrive at a local bookstore or traveling long distances to see a museum retrospective.

so if an artist was creating radical, non-traditional work in isolation, they had no way of knowing that a peer three continents away was experimenting with the exact same concepts. the pre-internet art world was, by design, localized, exclusive, and top-down, leaving the vast majority of human creativity hidden away in private studios, unseen by a world that lacked the infrastructure to reach them.

until what we now know as the internet was born.

The Wild West of the Web

lifting commercial restrictions on the internet between 1991 and 1995 permanently dismantled these geographic monopolies, opening the floodgates for public Internet Service Providers (ISPs). for the young creators, artists, and musicians of this pivotal moment, the early internet was a boundless, lawless playground and an experimental frontier where the rules had yet to be written.

definitive catalyst for this creative awakening was the release of the Mosaic browser in 1993.

before Mosaic, navigating the web was a deeply hostile, text-only experience involving clunky protocols like Gopher. Mosaic changed the digital landscape forever by making images viewable directly alongside text on the exact same page. suddenly, the internet evolved from a gray, institutional database for computer scientists into a vibrant visual medium. for young creators, Mosaic transformed the browser into a living gallery, sparking an unprecedented wave of DIY media experimentation.

this architectural shift changed the very psychology of art sharing.

arrival and implementation of personal homepages allowed creators to bypass gallery systems entirely, converting their own web space into a self-curated, globally accessible exhibition. platforms like GeoCities, Tripod, and Angelfire, alongside independent web hosting, allowed an artist in a remote town to occupy the exact same digital real estate as a creator in, say, downtown Manhattan. at long last, artists were now their own publisher, curator, and archivist. instead of relying on a curator’s approval, artists connected directly with audiences via early web infrastructure like hyperlinked networks of independently owned sites dedicated to specific niches and digital guestbooks.

once it was online, there were no instant notifications, likes, or algorithmic boosts. you refreshed your self-installed "visitor counter" manually. seeing that counter tick up from 00004 to 00005 brought rushes of genuine excitement; a real human being somewhere in the world had actively typed in your URL and looked at your work. feedback arrived days later via a text-only Guestbook message or an email, making every interaction a treasured letter.

these guestbooks functioned as raw, unmediated spaces for peer review, where an artist could receive feedback from a viewer thousands of miles away just days after uploading a piece.

an early internet user comments on this experience:

this grassroots connectivity fostered a deeply collaborative, egalitarian ethos, transforming the act of sharing from an exclusive commercial transaction into an open, warm community dialogue.

the next question is, "who even was online?"

Demographics of the Dawn.

despite it's liberating potential, early internet was an incredibly exclusive club, defined by rigid geographic and socioeconomic boundaries that heavily influenced its initial culture. early web was populated primarily by those who could afford expensive home computer rigs or had access to elite university computer labs.

in 1995, the Pioneers dominated the internet, roughly 39.2 million users worldwide (a mere 0.7% of the global population). this minuscule audience was overwhelmingly Western, highly educated, affluent, and heavily male. by the year 2000 (the Dot-Com wave), user base surged tenfold to 361 million users (6% of the world) as dial-up reached middle-class suburban households. 2010 became an era of mobile shift, the population boomed to 1.91 billion users (27% of the world), rapidly globalizing due to the advent of smartphones and mobile networks. the internet is much bigger now and is open to everyone in all parts of the world.

I would mention that however, because of these socioeconomic constraints, early 1990s web naturally inherited a deeply entrenched, patriarchal tech-bro architecture.

early digital spaces were designed mostly by men, for men, viewing the internet as an engineering puzzle rather than a communal space. this, unsurprisingly, created an unspoken cultural gatekeeping where online discourse was frequently hostile to women, and early digital art circles often celebrated "hard" computer science coding over intuitive design or traditional artistic skill sets.

when women and marginalized creators did claim spaces on the early web, they often had to fight through layers of online sexism, carving out independent enclaves away from male-dominated hubs of the early network to protect their creative agency.

Architectures of Scarcity

sharing art on the early web meant entering a brutal war against hardware constraints of dial-up modems.

today's artists enjoy instantaneous cloud uploads while 1990s creators were completely starved for bandwidth, because connections topped out at a crawling 28.8k or 56k bits per second, standard JPEGs or GIFs had to be compressed into tiny, grainy files. this meant that a single image could take five to ten minutes to load line-by-line down a user's screen.

artists had to intentionally restrict their canvas size to tiny thumbnail dimensions to keep pages functional.

furthermore, they had to operate within the web-safe color palette, which was a restrictive spectrum of just 216 colors that standard computer monitors could reliably display without distorting the image. compounding these technological barriers were exorbitant hosting costs. unlike today's free media servers, web hosting in the 1990s was a premium commodity sold by the megabyte. if an artist wanted to host a portfolio of twenty compressed images, they faced mounting monthly server fees. Running out of allocated megabytes meant their digital gallery would go offline instantly!

but because code and alphanumeric characters consume almost zero bandwidth compared to heavy media files, early internet was fundamentally a textual landscape. forums, email newsletters, and basic code were fast, cheap, and reliable. this forced a fascinating aesthetic trade-off where early net artists frequently abandoned traditional imagery altogether. they instead manipulated the layout of raw HTML code, text characters, and hyperlinks to make the written language itself the core visual art.

navigating the early internet was an exercise in patience and intentionality, where every pixel shared was a hard-won victory against slow connections and primitive browser code. think about how lucky we are!

From Code to Commerce

as the internet matured past the turn of the millennium, structures of both digital art and online business underwent a tectonic change: the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0.

while Web 1.0 was a static "read-only" landscape populated by isolated, hand-coded homepages, Web 2.0 introduced the dynamic "read-write" web, and suddenly, the technical barrier to entry dissolved. artists discovered there was no longer need to maintain expensive server hosting or write custom HTML to be seen. the internet shifted into a centralized ecosystem dominated by participatory, template-based social media platforms and dynamic marketplaces. this evolution democratized global distribution, transforming the early internet from an insular, experimental sandbox into a massive engine for global commerce and user-generated content.

mid-2000s saw an explosion of foundational platforms that fundamentally changed how art was packaged, consumed, and shared. few of them include: (drumroll please)

Myspace (Launched 2003)

being on Myspace was The Shit.

it became the definitive cultural staging ground for underground music and visual style. crucially, it retained a hint of Web 1.0’s DIY spirit by allowing users to use custom HTML and CSS to completely redesign their profile pages, allowing musicians and visual creators to circumvent record labels entirely.

Flickr (Launched 2004)

Flickr solved a massive hurdle for the visual arts world by providing cheap, reliable image hosting. it also pioneered the use of "tags," interactive comments, and photo pools, creating the internet’s first massive, communal, high-fidelity visual archive!

YouTube (Launched 2005)

I use it, you use it, our mamas use it.. YouTube was IT. YouTube democratized video distribution, a medium previously gatekept by multi-million-dollar broadcast networks, giving independent filmmakers and animators a free global stage.

Etsy (Launched 2005)

long before Temu and Jumia, Etsy emerged as the ultimate digital antidote to mass corporate e-commerce, providing a beautiful marketplace tailored specifically for independent artisans, crafters, and fine artists.

before these platforms institutionalized the "creator economy," mid-1990s witnessed its very first experimental blueprints of making a living purely online. when Jeff Bezos launched Amazon in 1995 out of a garage, it proved that niche physical media could be cataloged globally and shipped efficiently. simultaneously, Pierre Omidyar launched AuctionWeb in May 1995, which we know today as eBay. eBay revolutionized distribution by inventing a peer-to-peer marketplace built entirely on trust and feedback loops.

and trust me, those early business cases on eBay were highly bizarre and historic. the very first item sold on the platform was a broken laser pointer for $14.83. when Omidyar contacted the buyer to ensure they understood it was broken, the buyer famously replied, "I'm a collector of broken laser pointers."

this transaction perfectly summarized the power of the early internet proving that its network could instantly aggregate an ultra-niche audience that could never survive in a local, physical economy.

Other Feats:

historically, video game distribution required massive publishing plants to print cartridges and discs, alongside global retail contracts with chains like GameStop. the internet birthed digital marketplaces like Steam and Itch.io. small, self-funded teams or single developers could suddenly launch games, mostly indie games, worldwide. masterpieces like Undertale or Stardew Valley were created by solo individuals who bypassed multi-million dollar studios, monetizing their projects directly via global downloads.

before the internet, a journalist or essayist required employment at a legacy newspaper or printing press to distribute their words. platforms like Substack revolutionized the media economy by marrying old-school email newsletters with direct payment infrastructure, where writers can build an independent media company overnight, sustained entirely by a few thousand dedicated, paying monthly subscribers who read their unedited, unfiltered commentary.

in traditional retail, launching a shop requires massive upfront capital to manufacture inventory and secure warehouse space. the internet decoupled marketing from physical inventory through dropshipping. an entrepreneur can build a digital storefront using e-commerce platforms, market to targeted global subcultures and route orders directly from international manufacturers to consumers' doorsteps without ever holding the physical product. the business exists entirely as a digital layer of curation and logistics management.

soon, independent artists, writers, and collectors began utilizing early discussion networks like USENET and email listservs to find patrons, transforming their dial-up modems into literal storefronts decades before modern crowdfunding platforms were ever built.

Rise of Platform Capitalism

good things don't quite last long.

the macroeconomic ripple effects of this e-commerce revolution eventually formalized what we now call the "Creator Economy," a term evolved through distinct regulatory, venture capital, and macroeconomic phases.

according to extensive financial evaluations from Goldman Sachs Research, the total addressable market of the Creator Economy has entered exponential scaling territory, with analysts projecting the ecosystem could near a valuation of $480 billion. driven by the proliferation of multi-platform monetization and advanced content-management software, what was once considered an informal digital hobby officially matured into a recognized, highly capitalized macroeconomic asset class.

ironically, this scaling was mathematically predicted by media theorist Chris Anderson in his 2004 thesis, "The Long Tail."

Anderson argued that pre-internet economics were dominated by the tyranny of physical shelf space; a brick-and-mortar store could only afford to stock the top 20% hits (the "head" of the demand curve) due to real estate costs. the remaining 80% of niche, avant-garde, or localized art (the "tail") was actively suppressed.

the internet flattened the marginal cost of storage and digital distribution to essentially zero. by moving the inventory from physical storefronts to digital servers, the web unlocked the economic value of the Long Tail, aggregating isolated, niche audiences across thousands of cities globally. a collective volume of millions of hyper-specific niche products could now equal or exceed the total revenue of the mainstream hit market.

however, transition to a platform-centric internet introduced a punishing array of hidden costs and structural risks.

this precarity is acutely demonstrated by systemic platform risks, where entire creative livelihoods can be erased overnight by sudden corporate pivots, policy overhauls, or infrastructure shutdowns. history of the social web is a graveyard of creative communities displaced by platform decisions, such as the abrupt discontinuation of Vine in 2016 decimating an entire generation of video artists, Tumblr’s sweeping 2018 adult content ban instantly fractured a massive ecosystem of alternative digital illustrators, and the turbulent corporate restructuring of Twitter into X completely derailed organic promotional networks for independent writers and visual artists.

when creators invest years building an audience within a single platform's walled garden, they don’t own their data or their distribution lines. any change instantly sever their connection to their audience, exposing the fundamental instability of building a business on rented digital land.

compounding this structural instability is the crushing crisis of market saturation. what happens when EVERYONE can post?

on an internet where the technical barriers to entry have dropped to zero and absolutely everyone can post, the digital landscape has devolved into an over-saturated, hyper-fragmented noise machine. while this open-door policy was heralded as democratic triumph, it created severe signal-to-noise dilemma.

in the sphere of alternative and underground music, which historically thrived by separating itself from mainstream radio formulas, sheer volume of daily uploads makes organic discovery nearly impossible. despite this dense forest of content, a few fiercely unique artists manage to pierce through the noise by delivering uncompromisingly original, raw soundscapes that reject algorithmic compliance.

in the West African alternative ecosystem, pioneering figures such as TOBi, Santi (Cruel Santino) and the enigmatic Dojaxxl stand out as profound case studies.

TOBi masterfully balances a rich, soulful fusion of hip-hop and Afro-jazz textures, leaning heavily into complex lyrical vulnerability that resists the quick, viral-dance-challenge architecture of modern streaming feeds.

Santi, a founding architect of the Alté movement, treats his musical output as an immersive audio-visual universe, drawing deeply on grainy, nostalgic Nollywood aesthetics and obscure anime tropes to construct a distinct cult following that values cinematic depth over streaming volume.

Dojaxxl operates on the radical fringes of sound design, weaving highly experimental, ambient electronic pads and distorted lo-fi alternative elements into his production. by prioritizing high-concept world building and sonic unpredictability over standard radio templates, these creators manage to carve out fiercely dedicated enclaves, proving that genuine, uncompromising originality remains the ultimate antidote to digital dilution.

early internet promised a pure, peer-to-peer utopia where artists dealt directly with fans, completely eliminating corporate middlemen like A&R executives and gallery curators. but while the old institutional middlemen were successfully dismantled, the internet experienced an intense corporate consolidation, giving rise to Platform Capitalism where old gatekeepers were replaced by new digital gatekeepers: Alphabet (YouTube), Spotify, Apple, and Meta.

modern platforms provide structural utility, offering advanced analytics, community hosting, and global payment rails. however, they control the parameters of visibility. the artist, unreliant on a gallery owner's whim, are now subservient to an opaque algorithm that rewards high-frequency output and user retention, fundamentally shaping the types of art that survive online.

contemporary digital landscape bears almost no structural resemblance to the open, relational web of the early 2000s. I think we have entered an era of deep fragmentation, characterized by a transition from social networking to pure algorithmic entertainment.

for modern artists, this means that foundational concepts of the internet (distribution, community, and "reach") have been completely inverted.

Short-Form Video Dominance and the Post-Follower Era

I think we can all agree the most tectonic shift in modern art distribution is absolute dominance of short-form video platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. this format has fundamentally changed what reach means. historically, an artist’s reach was an equity metric built on their follower count. it was slow, cumulative asset representing a group of people who had actively chosen to subscribe to their work.

follower count is a legacy metric today and can no longer guarantees distribution

necessity of staying visible within this saturated environment exerts an immense attention economy pressure, inflicting severe psychological burnout and an endless expectation of constant output. to keep platform's recommendation engine happy, creators cannot afford to retreat into quiet periods of deep reflection, research, or artistic experimentation, forever trapped on a fast-moving content treadmill, required to supplement their core art with a endless stream of short-form videos, promotional reels, lifestyle updates, and direct fan interactions. frantic paces like this strips the artistic process of its natural incubation periods, replacing creative mindfulness with mechanical manufacturing and leading directly to widespread mental exhaustion, creative stagnation, and structural burnout.

platforms changed from a "Social Graph" (showing you content from people you follow) to an "Interest Graph" (showing you content an AI predicts will keep you scrolling), making discovery entirely transient.

a single post by an unknown creator can achieve millions of views overnight if it catches the algorithmic wave, while an established artist with hundreds of thousands of followers can be rendered virtually invisible if their content fails to immediately convert short-form viewer retention metrics.

this further forces visual artists, musicians, and writers to become short-form video editors and lifestyle influencers just to get their actual art seen, turning the act of sharing into a hyper-fast, content-driven lottery.

Psychological Crisis of Posting Online

systemic strains like these are further intensified by a widening motivation gap, where the promise of vast digital "exposure" rarely translates into sustainable, livable income. while digital platforms frequently trumpet total view counts and stream tallies as markers of success, the actual financial payout structures are micro-fractional. artists would routinely clock millions of plays on music streaming networks or social feeds while receiving checks that fail to cover basic rent or studio overhead, thus creating an exploitative dynamic where platforms leverage free creative labor to maximize their own corporate valuations and ad sales, leaving the vast majority of independent creators in a state of chronic financial precarity, struggling to convert abstract internet fame into tangible financial stability.

finally, the modern digital landscape has become increasingly predatory due to rampant intellectual property theft, data scraping, and the controversial training of generative artificial intelligence models on unprotected creative work. every time a contemporary visual artist uploads an illustration to Instagram or a musician drops a track on a public forum, their work is ingested by web crawlers to train commercial AI models without their consent, compensation, or attribution.

yearly rise of generative artificial intelligence has fundamentally altered the psychological contract of posting art online, transforming public platforms from spaces of self-expression into hyper-efficient extraction engines. this has created a paralyzing paradox for the independent creator; to build an audience and survive financially, an artist must maintain an active online presence... however, maintaining that presence means actively supplying a technology infrastructure designed to automate their own creative skill sets.

an environment like this forces artists into a defensive posture, radically changing how they interact with the web. creative communities are actively deploying software tools like Glaze and Nightshade that subtly alter pixels to "cloak" images and poison AI training datasets if scraped. I call it "digital fortifying,” and to do this, artists are deliberately lowering the resolution of their uploads, adding heavy watermarks, or hiding their primary portfolios behind password-protected paywalls.

Case Study: the World of Luwa.Mp4

philosophers all over the world (me) have often pondered on the ongoing tension between algorithmic utility and artistic safety, which will explain major philosophical pivot in contemporary global underground art; which is the complete rejection of mainstream success metrics.

rather than chasing "streaming-farm" manipulation, mass play-counts, or the standardized 2-minute runtime designed for TikTok virality, underground artists are choosing to build insular, hyper-niche audio-visual worlds. unlike the pathways mainstream artist use as promotional bait to be fed to an engine, they use digital artifacts that preserve counter-culture agency.

nowhere is this defiant structural retreat more vibrant, urgent, and complex than in the contemporary alternative youth spaces of West Africa.

born Ayooluwa Akindeji, Luwa.Mp4 is a rising producer, singer, and rapper who serves as the self-described pioneer of "Yoruba Cyberphunk," a radical sonic evolution emerging out of urban youth networks in Lagos and Ibadan. operating far outside the polished, multi-million dollar infrastructure of commercial Afrobeat, Luwa.Mp4 uses music as an intentional, holistic exercise in digital world building.

his career trajectory provides an excellent contemporary case study of how underground artists navigate the platform era.

released on August 11, 2025, Luwa.Mp4's debut album, punKstA*, is a 12-track, 26-minute riotous statement of intent. it is a chaotic, genre-blurring collision of hyperpop synth distortion, aggressive punk urgency, frantic rap cadences, and distinct Yoruba cultural rhythms.

working alongside a community of underground producers like TOPSY, Emyboi, JTRN, 3CB, FVKK, ANDI, and Jeremy Cartier, the album represents a deliberate rejection to sit cleanly inside a standard commercial playlist category. its lead single, "pUNK FANTASY," relies on aggressive electronic noise, while "Pure Water" (previously teased on Cruel Santino's Subaru Live Stream) directly bridges him to the established foundations of the Nigerian Alté movement.

on the album's standout track, "pEEP MY RIDE," Luwa.Mp4 forces a direct confrontation with the systemic anxieties that accompany a non-conformist lifestyle in urban Nigeria. over a more laid-back production layout, he unpacks literal and psychological toll of creative non-conformity, highlighting daily hazards of profiling by local authorities simply for dressing or creating outside traditional societal expectations.

I personally love the visual digital ethos mirroring the custom HTML and visual experimentation of the Web 1.0 homepage era. Luwa.Mp4 crafts his digital footprint as raw, handmade archive.

by combining grainy, low-res formatting, counter-culture streetwear iconography, and an intentionally fragmented typographic layout (e.g. o-YO¡, ataKO, strm*), his visual output rejects platform homogenization. this aesthetic identity was consolidated on February 8, 2026, with his sophomore project, punkstA specimen*.

across another 12 tracks, he continues his fiery exploration of experimental punk rap, utilizing tracks like "MEGAPHUNK" and street favourite, "YORUbrat" to cultivate a fiercely dedicated enclaved audience on platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and SoundCloud.

The Sovereign Creator

if you are starting as an artist today, navigating the modern web requires moving from a passive user to a tactical operator. this playbook to scalability is split into a strict binary: owning your audience versus renting it.

1. oWn yOur auDience (sovereign strategy)

relying entirely on corporate platforms is a structural liability. to build a resilient artistic practice, you must construct an independent backend. treat email lists (via Substack, Ghost, or Mailchimp) as your most critical asset.

a follower on Instagram or TikTok is data point rented from an algorithm; an email address is direct, unmediated communication line that cannot be throttled by code updates. build a self-hosted website. even a basic landing page functions as your digital estate. let it be a place where you control the lighting, the commerce, the presentation, and the data, mirroring the autonomy of the 1990s personal homepage.

2. reNt yOur platfoRms (discovery funnel)

do not abandon social media, just change how you use it. see public algorithms as purely a top-of-funnel discovery engine designed to capture attention and instantly route it to your owned ecosystem.

Niche-First over Mass Appeal:

instead of diluting your art to please a broad demographic, aggressively lean into your specific cultural and stylistic nuances. this thing called internet excels at aggregating highly fragmented, micro-communities globally.

a dedicated group of 1,000 true fans who deeply resonate with your specific world will sustain an artistic career far better than 100,000 passive scrollers.

Strategic Cross-Platform Repurposing

do not create separate content for every platform. create one high-fidelity, uncompromising core artifact, it could be an album, a long-form essay, a massive painting, and then systematically slice that core asset into micro-elements that can stand as isolated audio stems for TikTok or a text fragment for Substack or a process video for Instagram Reels. let the algorithm do heavy lifting of distribution while you protect your creative energy.

Direct Monetization Loops

now this is the hard part. financial sustainability is achieved by shortening the distance between production and payment. according to research, leaning heavily into direct-to-fan monetization tools such as digital Bandcamp downloads, premium newsletter subscriptions, limited merchandise drops, and gated community memberships can produce mass results. by commanding a higher margin from a smaller, deeply dedicated audience, an artist can achieve a livable income without ever needing to go viral. this takes time but eventually it does happen.

in the mid-1990s, when the very first artists sat before clunky cathode-ray monitors, listening to screeches of a dial-up modem, and uploaded their first digital file path to an unmapped World Wide Web, the feeling was configurationally weird. it was an act of profound, terrifying vulnerability; imagine flinging a piece of one’s identity into a dark, silent, electronic void. there were no guidelines, no templates, and no guarantees that a single human soul would ever look back.

decades later, that fundamental feeling hasn't changed. the modern teenager uploading an experimental track like FIRE onto an open network experiences that exact same mix of thrilling exposure and deep isolation.

(btw check out this album by my friend, he's really talented 💗)

technology has evolved from raw HTML tags to predictive artificial intelligence networks, and the digital landscape has evolved to an over-saturated corporate enclosure.. yet, that core, human, impulsive, defiant, beautiful desire to forge a connection across network, bypass the gatekeepers of the physical world, and declare, "I made this, and I am here!" remains the same.

Internet began as an open canvas, and despite the algorithms, corporate monetization, and increasing slop, it remains a space where an uncompromising voice can still disrupt the entire world.

as we look toward the future of digital expression, will you continue to rent space inside the corporate algorithmic enclosure, or is it time to log off the timeline and build a digital home of your own??

If you like media breakdowns like this, also read:

• Predestination

• Hedgehog Dilemma

• Rain and other people

track of the day 🔗

also checkout, by the same author:

• your twisted perception of perfect.

• how (not) to strike (ironically, my school administration has embarked on a strike. I suspect they must've read my article hehe)

• they don't have to get it.

now to the present, enjoy.

I was at a church two Sundays ago, and I won't disclose the name for privacy sake. honoring an invitation by a friend, it turned out to be the week they were running a program for singles and married couples. the presiding pastor got up to advertise it, and somewhere in the middle of that, started telling the story of how he met his wife. their eighth anniversary was coming up, he said, and he lit up describing how much he still loved her even after all these years in.

turning to the young people in the room, he encouraged them to attend the program. then he added, almost as an aside, that nobody should come to him personally looking for marriage/relationship advice or counseling. "leave me to enjoy my marriage in peace," he said.

I was surprised, and it got me thinking about a post I'd seen online that same week. it seem, though, the people with the most to show for their marriages are often the least interested in talking about them. (I suppose the same apply to courtship/relationships as well, as so does this post.)

"happily married couples should speak up more,” the post read. a hopeful plea, to counterbalance the flood of stories online featuring bitter divorces, infidelities, and broken homes.

oh if more couples would just share their happy stories, if the media highlighted the love that lasts, perhaps we would all believe in marriage a little more.

right??!?

right.

news flash, listening to happy couples alone won’t change much if the individuals themselves aren’t willing to change. gasp, shocking!

before I continue: if this is your first time here, thank you and welcomeeee. if it's not, it’s lovely to have you here again! consider supporting my publication by sharing this post or buying me a coffee :) mucho gracias.

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it's no secret that social media favors drama and heartbreaking stories, conflicts, crises that capture attention and engagement. even here on Substack, I can count how many articles I've read just this week discussing personal experiences around the same topic. this creates what psychologists call "negativity bias," where negative information often weighs more heavily on our minds than positive. according to research by Baumeister, bad experiences and negative stories have a stronger effect on our psychological state than positive ones. so, when you scroll through your feeds, you see a disproportionate number of unhappy marriages, why? because those stories spread faster and wider.

happy marriages, on the other hand, often stay in the background, steady and unremarkable, even overlooked.

But It's Not The Answer.

I think encouraging happy couples to speak up presumes that exposure to positive narratives will inspire change in others. experience has taught me that change is born from internal motivation, self-reflection, and sometimes, discomfort. true change comes when people are willing to embrace vulnerability and face uncomfortable truths about themselves and their relationships.

sure happy stories can inspire one, but won't move one to change if that person isn't ready or willing. marriage and family dynamics involve complex, deeply ingrained behaviors, and change would require personal accountability, where one recognizes one’s own role in relationship challenges, and becomes willing to adapt.

for example, John might hear from his friend Bob about how Bob and his wife make sure they consider each other's feelings by open communication. it's sweet and touching, but if John isn't willing to examine his own communication patterns or emotional availability, the positive story remains just that.

a story.

this isn’t to say that happily married couples shouldn’t speak up. ofcourse, positive narratives provide a necessary counterbalance to the dominant discourse of failure, by offering models for what is possible. seeing examples of successful relationships can improve one’s outlook and intentions, and exposure to positive relationship stories correlates with higher relationship satisfaction and commitment.

So, What Actually Helps?

change, growth, and successful relationships stem from a combination of factors:

• personal willingness to reflect and change.

• open and honest communication.

• shared values and goals.

• support systems that reinforce positive behaviors.

happy stories can light the way, but the journey requires active steps by individuals. while I've explored the limitations of positive storytelling, there's an even deeper layer to consider, one that happy couples themselves often fail to articulate.

I call it, "the ambiguous myth of ‘effortless’ happiness."

(eh.. lengthy but you’ll get the gist)

when happily married couples share their stories, there's a tendency to frame their success as something that "just happened" or was "meant to be." this narrative, while comforting, can be dangerously misleading.

happy marriages/relationships aren't effortless.

happy marriages/relationships are built on thousands of small, deliberate choices made daily.

happy marriages/relationships choices that aren't glamorous enough for the glamour of online storytelling.

Dr. John Gottman, renowned relationship researcher, found that successful couples maintain a "magic ratio" of 5:1 positive to negative interactions, achieved not through grand romantic gestures, but mundane moments of connection. the daily "tell me about your day," or remembering small preferences or, my favorite, the gentle touch in passing.

routine compromises, the quiet forgiveness, difficult conversations that don’t make for viral posts, these are the foundation of lasting relationships and they require patience, empathy, and vulnerability... something not a lot of people are willing to give.

if we only hear the polished highlights or dramatic breakthroughs, we miss the reality of what love demands. our hope needs to be matched with realism. so, yes, let happy couples speak up. let us also remember that the story's power lies not only in telling it but in living it.

References:

• Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K. D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology

• Brown, B. (2012). Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead.

• Johnson, M. P., & Bradbury, T. N. (2018). Positive relationship narratives and their impact on relationship quality. Journal of Marriage and Family.

  ---

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(p.s: individual change is important but, in Nigeria, the masses cannot attain complete happiness until we've changed the political systems that keep us in strife. get your PVC armed and ready!)

each generation believe it has FINALLY told young people the truth about sex that their parents were too embarrassed to tell them. ours is no different, except this time the claim are evident in diagrams, and a curriculum. sex education.

one can be proud of how thorough it is.

and it is thorough... about one half of the subject. an entire generation was taught exactly how their body works, what it can safely do, and how to protect it while doing so. what we are not taught, what they have in fact gone out of their way to avoid teaching, is what any of it is for. young people are handed this manual for the mechanism and the one chapter that would have told them why the mechanism exists at all is torn out. I call it the best-funded, most detailed education in pleasure any one has received, delivered to people who have almost no education... in love.

Aristotle drew a sharp line between hedone, (pleasure) and eudaimonia (the fully lived life,) arguing that pleasure is a genuine good only when it is the by-product of something rightly ordered. chase it directly and it has a way of dissolving in your hand. the paradox of hedonism: pleasure you go looking for is rarely the pleasure you find, and the pleasure you find is rarely the one you went looking for.

Sigmund Freud, who is usually cast as pleasure's great defender, named this drive the pleasure principle, spending the rest of his working life explaining why no durable life, no marriage, no civilization, can be built on it without the reality principle to discipline it. then Viktor Frankl, writing from inside a place that had stripped him of everything except the freedom to choose his own response to it, went further by distinguishing the will to pleasure from what he called the will to meaning, and argued that pleasure pursued as an end in itself tends to recede the harder it's chased, while pleasure that comes from a meaningful life feels, almost embarrassingly, more than enough.

a person may never be treated merely as a means to another person's satisfaction, only ever loved as a gift, willed for their own sake. one can be violated with total consent, and no unkind word spoken at all. pleasure, unaccompanied by the will to give oneself rather than simply enjoy the other, has a way of converting a person to an object, however warmly that object is held.

none of this is new information to the tradition the young are being handed instead of it. Genesis reads the union of man and woman as two becoming one flesh. Song of Songs is unembarrassed about desire, filled with love poetry, physical and unashamed, sung by two people who belong to each other and say so, repeatedly, by name. scripture does not shy away from the body but it makes sure not to separate the body from the covenant that gives it meaning. Paul's blunt instruction to the Corinthians states that our bodies are temples, not merely a tool for the self, and so sexual union cannot be as small or private an act as the culture wants it to be.

put all of this together and the modern promise is more like a shortcut that doesn't lead anywhere.

so what, then, is chastity, if it isn't the wet blanket it's been advertised as for a hundred years?

the freedom to want rightly the other person as a whole person. it is, in the truest sense, the only kind of desire strong enough to actually see the person standing in front of it, rather than the use they could be put to. a love that channels desires in its right direction.

lust in one's heart, Christ says, is already the deed embryo. the actual war is fought in what a person has trained themselves to want.

what do you want?

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I swallowed the cup of tea unhurried. it was.. hot enough. any reasonable person would have drawn back, hissed between their teeth. I did neither.

where did I learn to hold fire in my mouth?

endurance is something spectacular in many ways; picture mountaineers climbing impossible peaks, soldiers returning from dreadful wars, or marathon runners collapsing at the finish line. the word perseverance, is mostly reserved for people whose suffering are visibly witnessed. endurance is learned elsewhere, especially in ordinary places.

you could most likely relate to a few as follows:

conversations where we had to swallow the words that would only make matters worse.

homes where raising one's voice would solve nothing.

classrooms where the lecturer's humiliation is answered with silence because there is still an examination/project to write.

friendships that require restraint, or grief that must be masked because there are guests to entertain. lastly, hospital corridors where a one's panic would only burden the already frightened.

patience has always been undramatic than we imagine.

anger as an emotion is synonymous with strength, because it is visible. slammed doors, clenched fists, sharpened tongue; anger shows immediate attention. it's intoxicating. one shows their anger and feel they're courageous, because their wound deserves an audience. yet anger is, unsurprisingly, impatient and cannot bear discomfort. like steam trapped beneath a lid, it aches for release believing escape is it's only salvation.

patience, however, makes you think if your every feeling deserves expression. there is a difference between unexpression (patience) and suppression. suppression buries your anger alive, where it ferments into resentment. with patience, one's anger is acknowledge and the embers put out, before the fire scalds somebody. the most patient people I have known were simply unwilling to let emotion become their master. that is discipline, and it is learned overtime.

you've probably seen a movie/movies about a kid who's always angry and feels misunderstood, and there's almost always one older person that often gives them advice and tells them they'll understand with time. age often softens people because they have discovered that very few battles are won by immediate reaction. time teaches what youth rarely believes: not every offense deserves permanent residence in the heart. some victories are invisible and never receive applause. they leave no monuments yet mould our characters more faithfully than the public displays we so readily celebrate.

tsk tsk tsk, but do not romanticize suffering either!

pain has no inherent nobility, and anger is not always unjustified. I agree there are moments when outrage is the only honest response to cruelty, oppression, or betrayal. feeling anger is profoundly human. but fire destroys whatever feeds it. anger behaves similarly. every time we surrender ourselves entirely to rage, we stand to lose something; our friendship, marriage, trust, even merely our own peace of mind. we imagine we are throwing flames at another person, forgetting that we must first hold them in our own hands.

an oak that survives storm is admired, but its roots that held it in place are never seen.

hi there, if reflections on faith, literature, psychology and the ordinary things that shape our lives are the sort of work you enjoy reading, consider subscribing to my publication. It lets you know whenever a new piece finds its way here. ♡

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when Christ rose from the dead, He went looking for Peter.

strange, isn't it? He sought not the beloved disciple that stayed at the foot of the Cross, nor those lowly women whom had remained faithful until the end.

Peter.

the man who, only days earlier, had sworn with absolute certainty that he would die before denying his Master, only to crumble before the questions of a servant girl. Peter who, when the charcoal fire was lit, denied even knowing Him three times. After the Resurrection, Christ did not return to settle scores.

He cooked some fishes for breakfast, and then He asked Peter one question, three times.

"Peter, do you love me?"

when we were taught this as kids, I used to wonder why He never asked, "why did you fail me?"

one spends too much time answering some questions and others that God never seems interested in asking until, along the line, we must've mistook Christianity for a performance review. picture a person, every night, counting the things they did wrong that day; it could be that they forgot to pray, or they're still carrying a grudge, or even the habit they're trying to break. we carry these receipts around, convinced they'll eventually amount to a verdict. how then are our sins (verdict) forgiven? by confession. but confession is simply not enough. confession is a nudity of the soul, stripped of all false pretenses, and presenting ourselves as we truly are.

when Adam and Eve were in the garden, they were naked but not ashamed, because they were covered with the glory of God. when they fell short, they covered themselves with fig leaves which wilted, revealing their shame. God covered them up with clothes made from animal skins.

my point is that, Adam and Eve were naked and ashamed because they had lost the grace of God. in this present age where people are bringing back nudity, confession is a different kind of nudity where we reveal ourselves as we are, our sins as they truly are, our anxieties and cares as they are, to God.

but when you confess and have your sins forgiven, there is still a residue of that sin. if one is to put a nail on the wall for every sin committed and take out the nail for every sin forgiven, what remains is the hole on the wall. that's why, in the Catholic faith, one is given what is called Penance after confession. penance is the act of closing up the holes in the wall, making reparations for your sins.

on realizing his sin, Peter had wept so much that, it is said, crevices ran down both his cheeks from how hard he cried while pleading to God for mercy, because of the betrayal of his master.

Christ appears remarkably difficult to scandalize.

indeed, Jesus came to redeem those in sin but people who seemed to exhaust Him most were not always the sinners, rather those who had perfected the appearance of never needing mercy.

holiness doesn't mean you'll never fall. (Provers 24:16)

the Gospel tells of a fisherman who speaks before thinking, boasting beyond his strength and falling when the pressure rises. then it had the audacity to call him the rock upon which Christ would build His Church. and build His Church Peter did!

if the first Pope had been chosen for having the cleanest record, most of us would conclude that sanctity belongs to another person entirely.

instead, we were given Peter.

Grace is admirable.

one of the saddest things I hear people say is, "I'm trying to (be) (make it) perfect."

no, you aren't. you may be trying not to disappoint.. yourself? others? who knows.

those are two different pursuits, where one draws you towards God and the second traps you inside your own reflection. perfection, as we commonly imagine it, is a life that never slips. Holiness stands back up after it does.

confession & prayer never made much sense to the world because it's somewhat repetitive. but love has always been repetitive.

no mother says to her child, "I told you I loved you last Tuesday." no good husband grows tired of saying, "forgive me." when he offends his wife. the deepest things in life are repeated because relationships are kept alive through returning.

Christ's first conversation with Peter after the Resurrection was about Peter's love for Him, the bringing back process.

we keep bringing God our report cards.

He's asking for our hearts

If reflections on faith, literature, psychology and the ordinary things that shape our lives are the sort of work you enjoy reading, consider subscribing to my publication. It lets you know whenever a new piece finds its way here. ♡

I write because I'm trying to understand the world a little better. If these essays happen to help you understand yours too, I'd be glad to have you around.

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p.s: I'm currently available for commissioned writing. if you're looking for someone to write essays, long-form articles, thought pieces, scripts, newsletters, or other carefully researched and deeply human work, I'm open to collaborations. 📩

hi.. how've you been? it's a long time since wrote anything here. unfortunately, I'm not ready to… just yet. occasionally, however, I might drop excerpts of musings, notes or conversations I've had with my channel members which I think are too precious to be left unsaved in such an unreliable app as Whatsapp.

that being said, I'm dropping them here, to be among all the others, so I can always come back to read them, like all the others. and also, for anyone who may find this, and find it interesting, readable or debatable.

the question that inspired today's drop is “Are We Predetermined?”

(also, the title happens to be that of a book by C.S Lewis which I've got on my current reads. Its beautiful)

okay, enough intro

muchas gracias :)

I haven't sent this in for the period because I didn't know what to say. and I still don't 😅 but I'll just type out the thoughts as they come.

months back, I watched a Jubilee YouTube clip of Jordan Peterson. and where I agree that it was a total waste of time, one thing he brought up stuck with me.

and it's that atheist reject the idea of God.. without really understanding what they're rejecting. albeit, those who had come to debate with him were mostly from christian homes, had grown in faith, studied theology or various other faith studies and raised very solid points, but that doesn't constitute understanding still.

I’ve come to see atheism not a doctrine, but a cry of wrath. there are various types of atheists; ones who deny God, ones who denounce & reject him, ones who are agnosts and skeptics, ones who read a little bit of science/philosophy and conclude that there is no God. but they're all one and the same. we've seen em, who know em, maybe we are them. but stay with me.

there wouldn't be prohibitions unless there was something to prohibit. there wouldn't be atheism if there was nothing to atheit. I believe skeptics, try as they may, don't really deny the existence of God, they challenge Him. it is the very idea of God that gives them a REAL object to which they may project whatever feelings they have.

we often suit our philosophy of life to our day-to-day actions, and that is bad. I believe no one is born an atheist, just like no one is born a skeptic. these attitudes are made; more so by the way one choose to live than by how one _thinks._

which leads me back to Mr. Peterson's first point. to understand, you just first know.

when we try to investigate the knowledge of God, we find that we humans KNOW things by looking at things; observing them, touching them, feeling them, trying to make sense of them. we get external inspiration even for our most original ideas.

God, however, knows by looking at Himself. why is this? because he is the creator and cause of all things. all ideas came from within Him, and hence, we can only know successively or chronologically what God knows at once, for He is all knowing. there is no future or past with God, only the present.

it then follows that all things were created in an idea that exists in the Divine mind. whatever pattern/form anything take is already wrapped up in the matter of things, which further enables science to unwrap it into the idea which God intends for it.

and that inspired the question; if God knows all things and everyone, are we predetermined?

the answer is no.

let me give an example: I believe some of you are forex traders or have an idea of the stock market. let's say you analyze the entire market for a bullish Xau today, and your edge tells you that the market would change direction to bearish by Tuesday NewYork session.

you mark up your POIs (point of interests) and start observing. then Tuesday comes, and as you called it on Sunday, the market did turn bearish by noon.

would you say it got bearish because of you and your POIs?? it did not, it only followed the pattern which you had seen earlier and freely observed.

so in like manner, God knows all things, but still leaves us with freedom.

that is foreknowledge, which is different from predetermination.

“but Nenye, if we are free to choose, what purpose did God intend when he built this world then? and why does evil exist in God's 'perfect' world? "

I can't fully explain the basis of evil existing in the world in this one text. but the Word teaches that God's intentions was to build a moral universe, in order that by the right use of our gift of freedom, great characters may come forth.

morality implies responsibility and duty, but these exists only on the subtexts of freedom. whoever is free to love, is also free to hate. God gave us a chance to break allegiance with Him in order that there might be meaning and worth in that allegiance when we freely choose to give it to Him. a reverend once said, "if God destroys evil, he destroys human freedom. for a Saint can only be a Saint in a church where there is a possibility of there being a devil."

and Jesus said that there is great joy in heaven among the Angels and Saints when a soul repents.

it is because of our ability to say, "no," that instills the joy that comes when we say, "yes." praise and blame can only be bestowed on those who are masters of their own will.

take freedom away from life and we are no different than the bread nylon we watched get strewn about by the winds on stormy days, going whatever way the wind leads it. it is due to the abundance of God's love that he chose _not_ to rule over the earth with force, but with love, and freedom.

therefore, the ball has always been in our court. but we love blame games.

I used to have a classmate in Junior secondary class 2 named David. I remember him for his terrible hand writing and genius brain. the boy was a guru at Math and sciences, but his handwriting wasn't one you could trust to copy from in the exam hall. I would wonder why he was so smart and yet didn't apply it to his written notes, and thought it was the teachers' fault for not correcting it early. but the teacher's job is to make sure you're getting your lessons and being provided sound education, which they had been doing, they're not responsible for making your handwriting flawless.

so also is the objective of God the development of souls, not the production of biological entities. that job is ours, for we ourselves are creators.

there are two kinds of influence:

1. the influence of a visible thing on another visible thing. like a person pushing a car to start it.

2. the influence of an invisible thing on a visible thing. a farmer plants a seed on the ground, but that alone doesn't make it grow. the influence of the wind, sun, rain and other catalysts acts on the seed to germinate it.

it is this same way God works in our soul. God is a perfect embodiment of love, and His love as well as love for Him influences us to be what we are meant to be; which is, a free person in every sense of the word.

I've heard people say, "if God knew this would happen, why would he let it? If God knew I would sin and go to hell, why did he create me?" and the likes.

but my dear, God did not create ANYONE a sinner, we make those ourselves. for we are creators afterall.

but the more you are influenced by God's love, the more you become your true self.

and you can do all this without losing your faith.

the greatest gift of God to man, aside life, is freedom.

and so he values our relationship with Him when we freely choose to love him, just as He loves us.

thank you for reading.

God be with you all. take care and goodnight!

❤️

it is a common misconception that voyeurism is, by definition, looking without permission. but that is not true. voyeurism can and, I'd argue, should be a consensual act. it is, ofcourse, possible to film scenes (even voyeuristic ones) where characters look at each other in consensual ways, but cinematic depictions of consensual gazing are not anywhere prevalent as scenes where permission has not been given.

Cinema, by its very nature, is voyeuristic, as film offers the audience a window into the hidden lives of others. watching people's stories on the big and small screen can indeed be fascinating and exhilarating, but the act of looking can also feel uncomfortable, invasive and even violating. underpinning these uncomfortable moments, we can find some alarming messages about the role of consent.

to explain, I'll start from the normal bedroom of a normal looking boy doing normal-boy stuff (and that is spying on the girl next door), in the movie Disturbia. popular culture is filled with scenes in which one character spies on another character, usually a woman, without that person's knowledge or consent. we're talking about secret surveillance of a person while they're alone, on various stages of undress or engaged in sexual activity.

this is invasive looking that violates a person's reasonable expectations of privacy.

in a staggering number of movies and tv shows, this type of spying isn't done by villains, but rather perpetuated by nice-guy characters. these are straight men who are otherwise presented as decent or at the very least, harmless. this media pattern is so perversive; for instance, all of the boys in the sitcom, “That 70s Show,” casually participate in this spying behavior, however the character of Fez is the quintessential example of a typical peeping Tom. there are years-long running joke about how he's always spying on women, often hiding in their bedroom closets, and yet this pattern of intrusive behavior is just considered a minor nuisance on the show. (and Fez even ends up in a romantic relationship with one of the woman he spied on for over 8 seasons of the show.)

scenes in which boys secretly spy on girls was a staple of the so-called teen-sex comedies in late 1970s and early 80s. A. Hitchcock was famously obsessed with voyeurism and included peeping scenes in several of his most notable films. since then, we've seen harmless-peeping-Tom's pop up on practically every genre; from action movies to horror films to romantic dramas to scifi adventures. even video games present players with interactive peeping opportunities. the troupe has always been a mainstay on tv sitcoms, usually as a one-off gag in a handful of episodes.

while we may typically think of peeping Toms as a stranger hiding in the bushes, spying can take many different forms.

spying is occasionally presented as part of a man's job; like a police officer on a stakeout for instance, but in many of those scenarios, the peeping troupe still applies. in espionage-themed media, the guy might even have access to hightech spy gadgets. in superhero stories or supernatural plotlines, the guy's powers may be used as a way to gain access to the woman's body. Superman, for example, is often upheld as a paragon of good, decent manhood, and yet even he steals a quick peek from time to time. peeping toms aren't always the hero, but they're not the villain either.

in media, even when the protagonist has, let's say, questionable morals or is involved in other criminal activities, the spying itself isn't framed as a strike against their character. critically, the audience are still made to identify with him as he is peeping. it is not unusual for invasion of privacy to be framed as endearing, or just the innocuous behavior of a guy with a crush on a girl. even when peeping is called out as pathetic, annoying or a little creepy, his actions are more often than not quickly forgiven and forgotten.

a good way to illustrate the deeper problem here can be found in the "no peeking!" plot cliché. it's a familiar set up we've seen a lot of times; a woman needs to change clothes for some reason, but her guy friend is standing there. so naturally, she asks him to turn around or close his eyes while she undresses. sometimes, the women characters will explicitly ask not to be looked at, while in other examples it's just implied that the guy shouldn't be staring.

does our protagonist respect her wishes? ofcourse not!

most of the time, he peeps anyway, facing rarely any consequences for violating her trust. infact, his transgression is likely to be rewarded. it's incredibly rare in media to see a man who, given the opportunity, doesn't peep. if it's a romantic story, the transgression is often presented as a sign that he's really attracted to her. in reality though, if a man demonstrates a deliberate disregard for consent for a woman's boundaries, it should be a major red flag.

even though invasive spying is often considered just a nuisance crime by law enforcement, being spied on isn't a minor inconvenience for the victims. it can cause real, lasting emotional harm. sometimes, peeping scenes are filmed in a family friendly way, while in other media, it can be much more explicit.

despite what some conservative groups would have you believe, the problem here is not the depictions of sëx or nudity on screen; depending on how it's framed, sëx and nudity can be represented in all kind of ways.

the thing with this "peeping Tom troupe" stems from the lack of consent between the characters in the story, and how those violations are taken as no big deal.

up until this point in the essay, I've been discussing the perspective of the characters on screen, but there is another critical perspective I haven't yet considered. and that is the perspective of the camera.

let's return to the normal boys bedroom from earlier. although, it's not a normal bedroom now, is it? it is a movie set. and that's not really a normal boy either, that's an actor working from a script. infact, everything we see is a deliberate choice by the film makers. the woman is being put on display by the director who is careful to position her body so the protagonist can get a good look. so, these shots are also designed in a way that the audience can peep along with them. this then makes the viewer an accomplice to the peeping.

we are made to vicariously participate in the act of nonconsensual looking.

this is true incidentally, even when the character doing the peeping is clearly meant to be a creep. another important conversation to be had is about what film theorists, Laura Mulvey called "the male gaze,” especially as it relates to how the camera moves and frames women's bodies in a sexualized way, independent of the protagonist's point of view. for the sake of my purpose here, I'm mostly focusing on the perspective of the characters in the story.

the audience for movies are, ofcourse, made up of people of all genders, but the male character's perspective is the one we are sharing. and therefore, it is his lurid excitement we are meant to identify with. just to reiterate this, narratively speaking, these women don't know they're being watched and therefore haven't given consent. not to put too fine a point on it, but the reason these scenes are supposed to be so titillating to the viewers, is because the looking is being done WITHOUT permission. all the actors involved in these media productions have (presumably) agreed to be represented in the ways that we see on screen, but fictional representations still help normalize nonconsensual behavior.

it is worth knowing the particular type of actresses that the filmmakers like to cast as the object of men's voyeuristic intentions. usually, she's young, thin, and conventionally attractive. it's such a well established pattern in Hollywood, that whenever the victim differs from that very specific expectation, the scene is used as a gross-out punchline, or a transphobic joke.

scenes where boys surreptitiously spy on girls or women are especially common in coming of age stories. in these type of narratives, spying is often presented as a right of passage; an inevitable part of young men's sexual awakening. the boys may be initially presented as shy, awkward or cowardly where women are concerned. and it is through their peeping behavior that they're able to gain self confidence.

according to the visual language of cinema, spying on girls is a formative experience for boys. so much so, that it takes on an almost spiritual significance.

in this way, the transition of boyhood into manhood is built on the violation of women's bodies. sometimes, the boys are presented as melancholic loners. but in other scenarios, peeping is put up as a social activity. the act of objectifying women then becomes a bonding experience for young men. an experience that also enforced this shared sense of male dominance.

don't get me wrong, sexual curiosity is completely normal. however, nonconsensual behavior should never be confused with healthy sexual exploration. the default should always be an expectation of privacy.

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in his 1972 tv show, John Berger observed that the act of looking isn't passive, but active.

“men dream of women. women dream of themselves being dreamt of. men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at. I don't want to deny the crucial part that seeing plays in sexuality, but there's a difference in being seen as oneself naked or seeing another in that way, and a body being put on display"

Berger was talking about society as reflected in European Oil Paintings, but his observation could just as easily be applied to media and cinema. the male characters are active and fully dressed, while the women are passive and exposed. unprepared to be seen, and therefore vulnerable. it sets up an automatic power dynamic wherein the man has the upper hand. the common message these scenarios send to women and girls is that being spied on should be taken as a compliment, because men's sexual attention is always supposed to be flattering, regardless whether or not those feelings are to be reciprocated.

in her essay titled Intrusions, Melissa Febos explain this better, she says

"just as the productions encourage men to believe that stalking and peeping are acceptable forms of courtship, likely to resolve in a love match, so do they prescribe to women a desire to be the object of such behavior."

in movies and tv shows, it is not uncommon for the women being spied on to indicate to the audience that she secretly ENJOYS this violation. the underlying implication is clear; to be desired by men is what gives women value. that dangerous message is compounded by another idea baked into these scenes. that when it comes to sexual desire, men and boys just can't control themselves; as if men are compelled by some invisible force of nature to infringe on women's bodies. the myth is not true ofcourse. men and boys CAN, infact, control their urges. still, media reenforces that myth, that men aren't responsible for their own actions. occasionally transitioning the peeping Tom into a hapless victim of "women's seductive trap."

Melissa Febos says further in her book,

"it is a narrative that exonerates men. the more plausible it seems that women are always performing, the less indictable the watching."

it is ludicrous on its face to blame women for men's illicit spying, but cinema consistently leave us with the impression that it's the woman's fault for allowing herself to be seen, even when in the privacy of her own home. everything I've discussed in this essay is part of a larger culture of people pushing an agenda for male entitlement. too many men in our society have been taught that women's bodies should always be available to them; available to be evaluated, judged and compared, to be used as fuel in their personal fantasies.

by this twisted logic, any woman who then chooses not to put herself on display is taking away men's right to look. at the end of the day, the peeping Tom troupe is anything but harmless, as it works to reinforce a sense of entitlement by telling us again and again that nice guys, or guys in general, deserve unrestricted access to women's bodies.

and that, therefore, permission isn't strictly necessary.

in recent years and modern cinema, I have seen a rise in gender-flipped variations of this troupe. while these spying moments do invert the expected object/subject power dynamics, simply switching up the genders when nonconsensual behavior is concerned, does not magically fix the problem, because it still reinforces that worldview where respecting someone's wishes in regards to their own body isn't important. as the old saying goes, "two wrongs do not make a right."

learning about consent as it relates to looking and not just touching is essential. especially given the reality of social media, and the growing problem of intimate images being shared without permission. in today's digital world, the private photos or videos of women can be a social currency among boys and men. a currency that can grant a guy status among his peers; by providing evidence of a woman's submission to your sexual desires. again, we see how the act of exposing women's bodies without permission, becomes a way for most men to bond with each other, over their shared sense of entitlement. tv shows like Euphoria, Sex Education and Star Girl, have all attempted to address the issue of unauthorized image sharing.

unfortunately, some movie writers just can't resist adding a big plot twist where it turns out that the culprit is the "mean guy/girl," rather than the far more common situation in real life, where the perpetrator can be a current or ex romantic partner.

the series, Normal People, includes a scene of a guy showing off naked pictures of his girlfriend. rather than being impressed, the protagonist of the series responds by saying it's not okay to do that. this moment is brief but notable for two reasons; first, it's a rare example of a man calling out another guy for nonconsensual behavior. and second, because the producers chose not to show the nude images to the audience.

which is another point.

even in media about how it's wrong to share private images, media makers often make sure that the audience gets a clear view of the photo or video in question. the inclusions of these shots are unnecessary and again, make the viewers complacent in nonconsensual behavior.

just as peeping is not the fault of the person being spied on, it is also not the fault of the people who's intimate images are being distributed without permission. the blame rests entirely with those sharing, or looking without consent. it's still very rare to see male characters in media who honor women's privacy, it's even more rare to see men or boys intervening to prevent their peers from nonconsensual looking, but those are the types of representation we need if we are to build a culture of affirmative and enthusiastic consent. gracias

Bill drops his keys on the counter and stood there staring at them, suddenly thinking about all the times he's thrown his keys there before, and how many days of his life were wasted repeating the same tasks and rituals in his apartment over and over again. but then he wondered if, realistically, this was his life. the unusual part was his time spent doing other things. imagine the soul-killing horror that most of your life is meaningless instrumental suffering, and labour, aching for those rare moments of respite and meaning.

— excerpt from "It's Such A Beautiful Day" by Don Herzfeld

her name was Jobu Tupaki, a word that was supposed to be without a meaning, a signifier without a signified, epitomizing the nihilism that comes with the radical relativism of postmodernity. if everything is relative, then it seems totally random which life decisions you make. this might make you believe that whatever you do is meaningless. the youth these days are not only tasked with the despair of cleaning up an impossible mess that they did not make, but they are also faced with the dawning realization that we live in a quantum universe where anything is possible.

for some, what they did was fight the fight their own way. others, however, not very much.

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when I go on my daily evening walks, am I doing it because it's a beautiful sunset outside and I want to stretch my legs, smell the fresh air and look at the birds I see perched on the treetops? or am I doing it because I desperately need to get in shape and become the hottest person to ever walk the face of the earth?
in the first circumstance, taking a walk can be regarded as a fundamental value. why? because I'm doing it for fun. walking is, however, extrinsically valuable in the second circumstance in that it slowly leads to me being the most hottest person alive that, when I walk into a gathering, everyone within a 2 mile radius relinquish all their body liquids on sight!

how does one distinguish between a fundamental value and an extrinsic value? I'll tell you

fundamental values are those things that are valuable in and of themselves. for example, you don't buy a sweet because it makes you live longer or solve world hunger or give you power over others. you buy a sweet to lick it because it tastes good. extrinsic values, however, are things that are not valuable for it's own sake, it is valuable because they lead to valuable things. as a citizen of a country, you do your taxes so that you don't get arrested, and also to contribute to society, enjoy certain amenities that comes as a result of, and to have a say in how said society is being run. remaining free from prison and reaping the benefits of society while contributing to that society are fundamental values. and so we do taxes as an extrinsic value, understanding that it leads to these fundamentals.

there's a difference between studying heard at school because you are passionate about the course you are studying (fundamental), and studying hard at school because you want to get good grades (extrinsic), because you want to graduate (extrinsic), because you crave your parents' approval, and most time they don't give it to you (fundamental). you might notice that a life that is constructed purely of extrinsic values does not seem valuable at all. when you live a life lacking fundamental value, you run the risk of becoming unstable. like the person who live their whole life trying to win the approval of their parents, and peradventure the parents d!e before they could do it and whoops! you feel you've apparently wasted your life. it's happened before, it will happen again.. and it can happen to you.

Aristotle once said that there is some end to most of the things we do, which we desire for it's own sake. which begs the question: what thing in life can you say you desire FOR ITS OWN SAKE? what acts, experiences or relationships do you find fundamentally valuable without reference to some.. ultimate goal in the near future? are the extrinsic actions you're taking actually leading you towards an achievable and final end?

food for thought, right?

thank God for daily bread.

now, allow me dialectically explain :)

it's pretty obvious when looking at these two things, that the fundamental values are the real ones. extrinsic values are fungible. if all I care about is making the orifices of everyone wet, it doesn't matter how I achieve it; I could work out, and eat well and go on walks. or I could do a surgery that just makes me gorgeous without having to do all that extra work. the problem with thinking like this is that it pits you against reality. you adopt what they call The Antagonistic Mindset, where everything gets categorized into things you care about, and the burdensome stuff in-between you and the things you care about. that's not an uncommon way to think, as alot of "motivational" wisdom on the internet sings this tune.

picture a bigger, buff-looking dude,l talking into a podcast mic, and being like, "you know what we always say here, my bro's. if you want it, you have to work for it. everything worth doing is hard! you've got to make sacrifices!" bla bla bla

that works for most, and that's great. I mean, it's clearly a natural way to think, it works for a lot of people... but, I do not wish to uphold that anymore. the antagonistic mindset doesn't so much motivate me as it makes me want to k!ll myself. that's because it accidentally implies that most of life is terrible and undesirable. if the meaning of life is to transverse all these extrinsic values towards the fundamentals that I actually want, then life is a lot of suffering in-between islands of relief. most action is an, unfortunately, necessary suffering we must endure.

"if you lock in, you can do anything motherfvcker!", doesn't motivate me at all. "successful people are just better people," makes me feel like life, reality itself, is against me, unless I defeat it. I don't want to fight reality; my grip on my mental health is already flimsy as it is. if that's the case, I'll just see myself out. (with a gün to the trachea)

well, good news!

the antagonistic mindset is fundamentally flawed in two ways, with two major assumptions. the first faulty assumption is that fundamental and extrinsic values are truly separate. the second assumption is that you can tell the difference between them. they are not and you can't. when you think you can, what you're actually doing is robbing yourself off the richness of existence, hence the consequences of holding a dichotomy too staunchly.

fundamental values are basically goals. you've got your fundamental goals, and then there are extrinsic obstacles to achieving said goal. but the adversarial mindset says we all wish we could live in goal-world but we have to "pay the price" to "get the goals.”

Harry G. Frankfurt observed that goals and fundamental values are not synonymous with each other, and that our goals are not only fundamentally valuable, they're also extrinsically valuable; in that they give shape and substance to our daily lives.

the fundamental things that you supposedly value for their own sake, and you undertake instrumental acts to achieve, are also extrinsically providing you with something else that you cannot live without.

they give you a life to live.

when a goal is accomplished, one doesn't just rejoice, and then just sit there, and sit there, and sit there, and sit there, and si-

no, you get bored and eventually want to do other things. we are alive, and so to live means to do things, to live is to grow. when you stop growing... you d!e. the paradise that you yearn for instructs what you create, manifest, and absorb in this limited time that you have on earth, final ends that are valuable in and of themselves, colouring your whole life with activity, direction, and purpose. the "goal" is an excuse to experience the process.

refraining reality like this snaps you out of your resentment for life as it is, and your yearning and longing for a heaven that could be. it throws you back into yourself, into the actions that make up your daily life ... and they welcome you, because they were waiting for you.

extrinsic values are not obstacles between you and your goals. it is your life. "the goal" gave you life.

you've heard people say it's not about the beginning or the end, but the journey, the process to get there. by all means then, fix your eyes on all your fundamental values and goals that are meaningful for their own sake; things you know that the achievement of could be very much valuable to you. but then turn your eyes away from that goal to the process, and realize that this is now going to be the fundamental values that you are actually experiencing in your life. engage in that process, in the extrinsic, for their own sake as well.

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a bit of a generalizational anecdote, but I think there are two kinds of people I've come across. there's the very extrinsic people, who tend to exist in their own imagination, and are always planning, conceptualizing and making goals. and there's the very fundamental people, who are good at appreciating the small things. the problem with the first is that they're really bad at sitting down and just feeling at peace with the world as it is. for the second, it's that sometimes their life lacks coherence, because they're not always subjugating all the events in their lives into some grand arc narrative that leads to somewhere spectacular. death-instinct people, and life-instinct people; yin and yang. that's okay, you can be this person or that or just the right mix of both.

as this death-instinct, goal setting, most-times-unable-to-appreciate-process, impatient and distracted person, my mission in life is to stretch to the earth and just chill for the sake of it. saying that is scary, having to actualize it is even scarier, but I have a lot of work to do, and all of life to grow. I had to write this mini-series so I can figure all this out and it'll be a win if someone actually followed it all up.

the antagonistic mindset splits my body from my spirit, and saps me of all eminent power that I organically run on. it drives me inside of myself, inside of my petulant desires; what I want, what I don't want, what I like, what I don't like, what feels good, what feels bad, etc etc, making my life worse without necessarily motivating me more. it transforms all reality, making it transactional, instead of relational.

as difficult as it is, even for me sometimes, enjoy the process FOR IT'S OWN SAKE. thank you ❤️

— Somni 451, from Cloud Atlas.

well to be fair, you didn't exactly miss.. anything.

but this story has been told many times before, and I am going to tell it again. this time differently, from a perspective you probably haven't thought about; which is the perspective of the character, Waymond Wang. the one who brought back a true example of empathetic manhood rarely portrayed, that I can't help but feel glad for being alive in the right generation.

the idea that Waymond could be an avatar for positive masculinity would seem a little off to you, and that's understandable. when Waymond is first introduced to us, he appears to be sweet and almost childlike, but somewhat naive. we even hear Evelyn say in one scene that she doesn't know what he'd have done without her. Waymond is a goofy, silly, bumbling father, whose marriage is in the process of falling apart. he is timid, averse to conflict and absolutely okay with letting his wife, Evelyn, run the family business.

his traits are often associated with a range of familiar subordinate male archetypes in Hollywood media.

the directors of EEAAO, collectively called The Daniels, said in an interview that the idea was to turn a beta male character into a hero. that, in and of itself, isn't unusual as most movie heroes begin their journey as someone unremarkable and un-super, who then grows in power over time. just like in the anime franchises milking this storyline over and over again until it becomes predictive... too predictive.

Waymond, however, is different.

in that the filmmakers managed to turn him into a hero without giving him his own character arc. he doesn't gain any new powers or skills, nor does he learn to fight. we watched all of the other characters evolve in transformative ways over the course of the film, as one would expect, but Waymond doesn't change. he is essentially the same character at the end of the movie that he was at the beginning, which shouldn't work on a fundamental storytelling level. incredibly, The Daniels managed to make Waymond and his worldview the anchor point around which everything else in the movie ultimately bends.

before I talk about how they manage to pull off this impressive narrative, it is important to note that the entire concept of alpha and beta males, as relating to human male species, is pure pseudoscience nonsense.

the very idea that pure animalistic behaviors can be neatly mapped on to the complexities of human society is common, yet absurd. erroneous myths of alpha and beta men persists and is often perpetuated in popular media culture. I'll show very briefly how terms like beta male are typically used, because I think that's what the filmmakers were trying to subvert in the character of Waymond.

now, in fiction, we expect these kind of characters to be a doormat or pushover; a man (typically) who let's other more dominant men walk all over him. if there's a wife involved, the guy usually falls into the old Hen-Pecked-Husband troupe, wherein a long-suffering man submits to the whims and demands of his overbearing and controlling wife.

this subordinate, beta man is often a comedic figure, and he's been around for as long as Hollywood itself. when men, like Waymond, are presented as too nice, too vulnerable, or too accommodating, it is framed as a significant obstacle to him being taken seriously as a "real man." this media pattern has been especially common in stereotypical depictions of meek, often desexualized Asian men. they are male characters who do not fight, or refuse to fight back, and are almost always mocked as weak, effeminate or cowardly. ofcourse, these subordinate male characters only exist in relation to the equally fictional myth of the "alpha man." you see it everywhere, even in our beloved media for which this piece is being written.

in Everything Everywhere All At Once, our original Waymond is juxtaposed with another version of himself from another universe. Alpha Waymond is shown to be assertive, domineering and aggressive. initially, I am just as enamored with this new Waymond as Evelyn seemed to be. it turns out, however, that Alpha Waymond isn't exactly all that; he is controlling, impatient, quick to violence and distrustful of others. he convinced and builds Evelyn up, tells her she's the most important person in the multiverse then abandons her when she doesn't live up to his expectations. Alpha Waymond just wanted to use Evelyn, as well did all the alphas, in their attempt to make the alpha-verse great again. (huzzah! I reframed MAGA)

if Everything Everywhere All At Once were a normal movie, with normal character arcs, our original Waymond would have essentially turned into Alpha Waymond by the end of the story. he'd have learnt to temper his sensitivity with (probably) an unhealthy dose of aggression, thus transforming from the sweet, naive guy who wouldn't even kill a fly, to a very pushy, domineering dude who takes out a room full of bodyguards to protect his childhood sweetheart. he might have even been given a nauseatingly cathartic "finally grew a spine" moment where he loudly demands a divorce from Evelyn. this type of sudden, hyper-masculine transformations is a super troupe in storytelling. this is how pop culture reinforces the myth that the correct way to be a man is to be aggressive, intimidating and most importantly, to dominate others.

it is not an exaggeration to say that that kind of power fantasy underpins the origin story of most male heroes in media. but Everything Everywhere All At Once is anything but a typical movie.

as the story progresses, the audience experiences an epiphany; we realize our initial impression of Waymond was completely wrong. I, myself, shared this revelation with Evelyn, as she suddenly sees her goofy, nice-ass husband in a new light. Waymond, it turns out, isn't actually passive, nor submissive, but rather quietly proactive throughout the movie. he was constantly striving to smooth things over with the tax auditor in order to save their laundromat. he was not getting what he wanted out of his marriage, so he took steps to change it; the divorce was his idea after all, part of his plan to salvage their relationship. he does all these things while also expressing vulnerability, and attempting to balance his needs with the feelings of others. infact, he knows exactly what he wants and he never stops trying to get it, he just doesn't do it in a domineering way.

Waymond's worldview is articulated in a powerful speech about halfway and a quarter through the film. "..please, be kind. especially when we don't know what's going on", Waymond says.

if you heard it in real life, Waymond's plea to be kind could come across as a little cliché or at best unrealistic. so it is useful to break down exactly what he meant when he said, "be kind."

for him, kindness is not putting on blinders, nor is it ignoring the negatives of life, nor being fake nice. Waymond manifests kindness through patience, communication and empathy, and the movie presents all of those traits as useful and pragmatic skills. which brings us to business Waymond, a version of the character from a divergent timeline where he and Evelyn never got married.

this Waymond also defends our original Waymond's worldview, even without knowing that's what he's doing since he's unaware of the multiverse.

"you think I'm weak, don't you?", Waymond asks. he is speaking directly to us as the audience as much as he's speaking to Evelyn, where he admonishes us for our previous assumptions about him.

"when I choose to see the good side of things, I'm not being naive. it is strategic and necessary. it's how I've learned to survive through everything... this is how I fight"

in reality he's not naive, he understands the oppressive nature of the world, but chooses to fight back in his own way; with empathy, joy, kindness and hope. it's interesting that although business Waymond represents the pinnacle of success, I don't envy him at all. instead I pity him for what he never had, which is doing laundry and taxes with Evelyn as his wife in a distant universe.

Waymond is the ultimate anti-cynic, an antidote to nihilism, and his worldview is represented in the film through the visual motif of googly eyes. when Evelyn finally adopts his perspective, she affixes a third eye, a googly eye, to her forehead. in this moment, the action movie genre flips on his head. Waymond's worldview runs counter to the underlying message in almost all action movies; a reductive notion that violence can solve all conflicts regardless of the circumstances. Waymond understands that the way to ultimately win against the stronger oppressive force, is to create a situation where the foot soldiers of the powerful refuse to keep fighting you.

the book, The Dawn Of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, states:

revolutions are rarely won in open combat. when revolutionaries win, it's usually because the bulk of those sent to crush them refuses to shoot, or just go home.

this is precisely what happens. Evelyn uses her new powers to learn why each of her opponents are hurting inside, then she gives them what's missing after which, one by one, they all lost interest in trying to fight her. violence didn't solve this conflict, simply because it can't. humourously, the enemy is a cynical, nihilistic bagel devouring love, meaning and everything else.

empathy is what solved it, as it must.

notice that even though he is pivotal to the film's resolution, Waymond's masculinity doesn't require him to become an action guy. he doesn't need to take center stage nor fix the problem himself. he is rather content to inspire his wife and then stand back to support her while she wins the day. it is particularly important that this depiction of transcendent masculinity is embodied by an Asian man. as a critic, pointed out in his article about the characters,

"it is a rare depiction of an Asian male lead that not only rejects and deconstructs Hollywood's usual stereotypes about them, but also serves as a necessary revolution for Asian representation in cinema."

at the beginning of this essay, I said that Waymond doesn't have a character arc. and it is indeed so.

by the time the credits roll, it is us who have been given the character arc. over the course of the film, my perspective shift was so dramatical that I've come to understand Waymond, and more importantly to understand and embrace his revolutionary worldview. this shift in perspective also reframes the social expectations that Hollywood so often places on masculinity; kindness and empathy and compassion, can occasionally be exuded as naive or ethereal. just a pretty empty word with little to reinforce it, especially in difficult times like ours.

I'd argue though that what Waymond advocates is empathy that you don't sit around waiting for to happen, you make it happen. the kind of radical empathy that we can all take and use to fundamentally change our reality.

I'll talk more about this in my next essay, which would probably be the last for this mini-series.

thank you for reading, and once again, remember to be kind! ❤️

when you're told to imagine a billboard, you definitely can. try it now. you see the billboard in your mind's eye; a weird hallucination somewhere in your consciousness. you see it, you who might be reading this in any random place in the world right now, even though none of your senses perceive it. yet, you are somehow astral projecting out of your body into a shadow-type dimension… isn't that cool?

your imagination allows you, also, to transcend time. how did you imagine a billboard? you've seen one before, and you're going to see one again. so even though you don't see one right now, when you imagine one, you are (theoretically) travelling into the past and into the future (stay with me now)

one never can perceive the future in the past, you're only ever perceiving the present, the now; always reconstructing the past or simulating the future based on what your senses once perceived, but don't anymore. everytime you anticipate something that would happen in the future, or remember things that happened in the past, your consciousness is somehow floating in a weird hallucinatory mind's eye space. it's like powering the brain battery with the juices from your mind's fountain

and we do it all the time!

imagine your next doctor's appointment; you're simulating the future. imagine your classroom from primary 1; you're reconstructing the past. now, imagine that teleportation technology somehow has been invented by an American startup company and Amazon quickly acquires it and starts distributing it to the general public through an Uber clone app, so everyone can teleport anywhere, but then it costs an arm and a leg per location. imagine that this occasionally causes you to spend your entire month's allowance because you hit the snooze button many times, and in your shameful sleep-in panic, you log in to Amazon Poof! for help getting to that interview you have by 7 am.

imagine that!

what you've done is use your mind's eye not to simulate the future nor reconstruct the past, but slip into a parallel reality. it's like you can time travel, but can also venture the multiverse and interact with them separately. reality and fantasy are not clearly distinguished from each other, in that they use the same muscle; which is the imagination. remembrance, creativity, fiction, anxiety, these are all transcendental imagination game theories. it seems by all accounts that human has a particularly overpowering imagination in comparison to other animals, and this imagination fused with our ability to connect it to the material plane of existence; through tool making for instance, allowing us to domesticate wolves, overfish the oceans, and create and watch movies like Everything, Everywhere, All At Once.

humans remember better than any other species because we built the reconstructed last until the physical material objects… like books, or even verbally transmitted stories and commonly shared language. humans predict the future with a starting degree or accuracy, and modify our behavior in the present based on our foresight of the future. It's as if we can live through a week, and then reset the week like a video game, then act the week out knowing what will happen in that week.

thats basically what PLANNING is!

oftentimes, we use our ability to slip out of reality and into fantasy, to grab things that we see through the line and back into reality. this is called having an IDEA. people who are very good at multiverse travel are the ones we call creatives or inventors.

the relationship between transcendent imagination and embodies material reality is exactly why so many mythologies describe human beings as half God and half animal that have some sort of relationship with the gods. in ancient texts, some old gods of certain demographics often are depicted as literally being half of both worlds. we are half spirit, half flesh; we are definitely animals though, and we know it, trapped in time and space inside of our bodies. we are our bodies, beating and bleeding hearts, yet we are also fantastically able to taste infinity that we are not fully here in our bodies in the present moment, in this physical space at this point in time.

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at some point in evolution, we ate of the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, now we are locked outside of the amoral, ignorant prison of instinctual animal existence; banished from the paradise of the flesh and also unable to fully transcend into the paradise of the heavens. we are both profane and sacred… yet, neither fully; locked in-between yearning to be purely animal or purely God is not the answer.

humans beings are most actualized when we are most ourselves, when we unite our natures in glorious interplay. when you have ideas and express them through action. we bring the heavens down and raise the earth up the heavens when we use our transcendental capacities to imagine a better world, and use our bodies to build that better world here. we celebrate our animal and god-like nature's by participating in creation. this is our gift, our burden, our blessing, our responsibility… and our honour. animals exist in the eternal present, the gods exist in the eternal Everything. we, however, get to experience process.

and hence, the premise of this essay is born. as a sort of film-lover myself, lately, and since I started seeing enough medias to be a self-proclaimed cinephile really, I've found it hard to just watch and enjoy a movie for the sake of “watching and enjoying a movie” so, I've decided to just go along with it and I've found tremendous joy in analyzing the synopsis, symbolisms and cinematography of film in contrast to the modern and past world realities. i’ve done a few of these in past essays, and I'll be exploring the same with this movie, which was absolutely awesome by the way. it is empirical that I put this first draft out as a sort of prologue to other parts of this essay.

if you made it to this part, thank you for taking the time to indulge in my psuedo-nonsense. I'm absolutely certain you might find it, and the remainder of this essay which I'll try to put out as soon as possible, quite interesting. ciao! ❤️

the strike, scheduled for January 12, 2026, was paused to allow for continued negotiations and implementation of agreements, avoiding further disruption in public hospitals, although a court had earlier ordered them to suspend industrial action in 2021, following the strike of 2020 COVID era.

while the rest of the world battled the COVID-19 pandemic, tapping into and pulling in all their resources, including medical staff, the Nigerian Government failed to prevent doctors under the aegis of the National Association of Resident Doctors (NARD) from going on strike on Monday, June 15 2021. It would however seem that the Federal Government made some progress, as the association suspended its nationwide strike with effect from Monday, June 22 2021.

recall that following the expiration of the ultimatum given by the association to the Federal Government to meet its demands, resident doctors commenced strike action. negotiations that ensued between the association and the Federal Government were reported to have ended in a deadlock. however, the Federal Government announced that it approved N9 billion as group life insurance for all health workers and over N4 billion as special hazard allowance for aggrieved employees in several hospitals across the country. in a statement by NARD President, Aliyu Sokomba, he disclosed that the leadership of the association decided to call off the strike in order to give the Federal and State governments time to meet its outstanding demands, highlighting that the association will continue negotiations with stakeholders and review any progress recorded.

Nigeria’s efforts to contain the spread of COVID-19 was affected by a shortage of facilities and medical equipment, as well as lack of adequate manpower. you'd think that with medical workers all over the world on the front line in the fight against COVID-19, their welfare should be of utmost importance, as they continue to put themselves at risk on a daily basis. presently, we are not battling COVID anymore, (for the most part) yet the problem remains.

this back and forth reminds me of an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, where similar events had happened. the episode is titled Squid on Strike (season № 2, episode № 40a), and hence, the premise for this essay is born.

even if you've never seen an episode of SpongeBob, you've seen the memes. off the top of my head, I probably could name a dozen templates, and most of them highlight the reason why SpongeBob is so popular. SpongeBob SquarePants is, and would be, remembered as a 90s cartoon, alongside other great 90s kid shows, and you gotta absolutely loveeee the way its memes elicit an emotional response regardless an in-show context.

Squid On Strike is one episode that effortlessly stands out, and I love it because of its relatable adult themes; as it circles around conflict in the workplace. the average Nigerian youths can most likely relate to one or a few unforgettable working experiences/conditions, which includes falling out with bosses or people in high authority over work rights infringement. the episode touches on organized labor culture that many of us were too young to understand then but relate to now.

SOS (Squid on Strike) starts with an old-fashion harmonica theme opening. although, you'd wonder what difference this makes from the other theme openings in all seasons of SpongeBob SquarePants, but the harmonica-tune is actually a reference to the songwriter, Joe Hill and to folk music in general. they both had a strong connection to the labour movements back in the day.

after finding profits to be slightly lower than usual at the Krusty Krabs (by 3 dollars, lol. yeah, business owners can be that petty), Mr. Krabs starts billing his employees for doing the most normal things like talking, chewing, breathing, lollygagging, and even existing. if you've worked a (perhaps, low) income job, you've probably heard the words, "I'm not paying you to do-" whatever task is related to your comfort or survival. which, surprisingly, includes sitting down for most work places. they call this "time theft," the false notion that employees who are on the clock but not completely working are stealing from the company, because they are still being paid.

Mr. Krabs goes all in on this concept, by adopting the extreme form of "pay docking," the reduction of a worker's pay as punishment for something. an even more widespread problem like this is "wage theft," which is failure of an employer to pay wages according to the law. historically, bosses deducted wages for lateness, poorly done tasks/manufactured goods, or whenever they wanted to, really. other forms of wage theft includes;

• paying less than minimum wage

• not paying overtime

• not allowing workers rest/meal breaks

• mandatory off the clock work

• and tip theft

another crime employers commit is "time theft," an idea that cooperations rob people of their entire lives in exchange for a meager restitution, just for someone to accrue more wealth than they could ever spend. only in retirement do most workers get to live their lives, and many never make it that far.

the passage of the Fair Labour Standards Act in America, and The Trade Union Ordinance in Nigeria, in the year 1938 gave workers right to minimum wage, overtime pay and added some limits of pay docking, among other things. although, employers can still dock-pay some employees on grounds of damage or loss of property and safety violations. (we'll get to that later)

Squidward finds Mr. Krabs' actions outrageously unfair and uses a labour organizer's most important tool; a one-on-one meeting, to convince SpongeBob that they should go on strike. the purpose of a one-on-one meeting is to form a relationship with the person involved by having them disclose their specific needs, ideas and solutions in a secure settings, while emphasizing why collective action is needed to achieve any goal. though Squidward takes the right initiative, he makes two grave mistakes here.

first, a one-on-one meeting should never be done in the work place, because it risks the boss getting wind of the discussion. and once the boss finds out, disbanding the union starts immediately. this could be in form of applying stricter rules around the workplace, or worst case scenario, firing the worker(s).

secondly, Squidward doesn't properly educate SpongeBob on what strike action is, neither does he explain why one shouldn't be talking about it in the work place. and especially not with the boss.

SpongeBob, not knowing what it means to go on strike, runs his mouth about it to Mr. Krabs in his excitement. the last statement, and most angering part about the strike for Mr. Krabs was the fact that SpongeBob and Squidward were demanding respect, which he enunciated by exclaiming, "and you're gonna demand me respect?!"

this happens to be a common problem employers have with workers' unionization, even more so than increasing wages. they despise how unions generally "challenge" their authority by forcing the employer to treat workers with even a modicum of the respect that they demand for themselves.

as is usual, disbandment occurs and SpongeBob, who is new to the whole thing, is devastated when he is fired. Squidward, however, assures him that he will have his job back "and more."

he tells SpongeBob that Mr. Krabs would realize eventually that he needs them more than they need him. which is a real slogan, by the way. the National Labour Relations Act of 1935 gave private sector workers the right to strike. but sadly, Bikini Bottom isn't under this jurisdiction, so tekneeeeklly, Squidward and SpongeBob don't have the legal right to strike. and even if they did, it doesn't mean they won't be permanently replaced in the case of an economic strike. in the case of an unfair labour practice strike, the employee may not legally fire nor replace strikers.

I should mention that there are legally protected and unprotected strikes. one example of the latter is the FCTA Workers' Indefinite Strike of January 2026.

engaging in an unprotected strike presents unions with the risk of legal consequences. in Nigeria, an unprotected strike (often referred to as an unlawful or illegal strike) is an industrial action that fails to comply with the mandatory dispute resolution procedures outlined in the Trade Disputes Act; such as failing to give required notice, engaging in a strike while negotiations are ongoing (hence, NARD calling off the strike) or violating a court order. such actions can lead to "no work, no pay" penalties and potential liability for the union.

but, workers have successfully struck regardless of legality.

the uniforms were a symbol of their oppression. they seem to be intentionally designed to make employees standout, as they are often uncomfortable, and some are almost humiliating. Squidward starts their strike action off properly by making SpongeBob throw his hat on the ground, but SpongeBob couldn't do it. and since SpongeBob refused to let go of his own hat, Squidward gets a ticket for littering from the police. police, and most law enforcement authorities are almost never on the side of workers who strike. their job is to protect capital, their bosses, and they will do so by any means necessary. including engaging in all out warfare with strikers (not a strike, but for instance in respect to this context: the End SARS Protest)

think twice about bringing violence to a picket line, though. strikers will fight back just as hard. throughout history, picket lines were often scenes of violence, as strikers threw everything from insults and fists, to bricks and broken bottles.

picket lines are one of a striker's tools, because they are used to convey why the workers are on strike, and why the public should avoid the employers for it's duration. Squidward makes a sign stating "Krusty Krab Unfair," but SpongeBob writes his as "Krusty Krab Funfair," making the restaurant more popular and pleasing Mr. Krabs on that part. over the years, there have been some creative pocket lines. there are also been some really vulgar one. one picket line goal, however, is to keep away customers for patronage reduction, disrupting profit inflow just enough to pressure the boss/employer to negotiate with the union and end the strike.

chants are another important element of a strike because media coverage can carry them far beyond the picket line. when considering what to chant, strikers take simplicity, rhythm, any group inclinations and The Message into consideration.

in the show, Squidward has SpongeBob memorize derogatory slogans about Mr. Krabs and the restaurant, though their meaning flies over SpongeBob's head. he draws the attention of an eager young teenager who thinks of SpongeBob as a living legend. rather than joining him in the strike, however, he heads inside the restaurant to take SpongeBob's job, since Krabs was now hiring. (in the labour market, these are called scabs)

Squidward then attempts to give a speech to the people of Bikini Bottom, going full Eugene V. Debs on them. organized labour has often curated and created it's own channel to communicate with the public, because capitalist-owned media coverage of strikes most times gives an anti-labour angle. as he begins to talk, a crowd gathers around him:

"the gentle labourer shall no longer suffer from the noxious greed of Mr. Krabs! we will dismantle oppression, board by board! we will saw the foundations of big businesses in half, even if it takes eternity! with your support, we will send the Hammer of the People's Will crashing through the windows of Mr. Krabs' house of servitude!"

Squidward's speech denotes radical and vaguely anti-capitalist sentiments, even by non-children media standards. although it highlights a trend where labour leaders use this kind of rhetoric while not actually supporting the strikers' cause. would Squidward fall for this? lets find out!

(also, now would be a great time to subscribe to the newsletter if you haven't, I'd appreciate the support. many thanks!)

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after Squiddy's speech, the masses grow so excited by his words that they build up an appetite and rush over him to eat at the Krusty Krab. unfortunately, many patrons care more about their comfort than worker's struggle. but many more will respect picket lines and support strikes and boycotts however possible. Mr. Krabs thinks he's got them beat and rightfully so. the strike has done nothing but attract more customers and increased profits giving him no reason to rehire SpongeBob and Squidward. however the combination of Squidward's speech and Mr. Krabs' gloating radicalize SpongeBob who, still a little confused, proclaims that they will strike forever until his unfair pay deduction policy is abolished. the word "forever" accidentally strikes a nerve with Squidward, who realizes what he has done.

traditionally, striking forever would scare workers because long-term strikes can be extremely stressful. while strikers might receive strike pay for the duration of their strike, this might only be a couple of stipends a week depending on the copiousness of the union strike fund. but in this case, Squidward is traumatized by the idea of being stuck on the picket line for an eternity with SpongeBob. fair enough.

unable to sleep with this thought, Squidward runs to the door to beg Mr. Krabs for his job back. on opening it, he is surprised to find Mr. Krabs, who begs him and SpongeBob to come back as things haven't been going as well as he's led on. he wails that the literal children he hired are ruining the restaurant and won't leave him alone.

that's what children do, mate.

child labor was common in the 19th and early 20th century, because children could be paid less and were less likely to organize. this awful practice is unfortunately not uncommon today in some industries and will further make a comeback unless organized labor and children stop it. it's worth mentioning that scabs are poor quality workers and often ruin work, sometimes intentionally. (just ask Kellogg's, lol.)

like Squidward predicted, Mr. Krabs has realized that he, indeed, needs his workers more than they need him, and Mr. Krabs is willing to grant them any concession they want to get them back. Squidward uses this as an opportunity to make decisions without the approval or knowledge of the union.

much like in real life, this failure is going to have serious consequences.

meanwhile, SpongeBob is still awake listening to folk music and feeling empowered by Squidward's speech (twin.) SpongeBob then decides to take Squidward's speech more seriously than Squidward meant. he sneaks into the Krusty Krab and commits a Luddite-type felony.

Luddites were English textile workers who destroyed mills to protest how capitalists were using technological developments to undermine their job security in the industry. they weren't opposed to new technology in general, but the effects that technology was having on their trade.

the next morning, as they walk to the Krusty Krab together, Squidward relishes on how the tables have turned and begun discussing the terms of their return with Mr. Krabs. after seemingly tense but constructive negotiations, Mr. Krabs and Squidward have negotiated the end of the strike, presumably a tentative agreement.

a tentative agreement is a proposed collective bargaining agreement that has not been ratified by the rank and file or union leaders. once it has been approved, it then becomes a "collective bargaining agreement", a legal contract between the union and the employer outlining pay, benefits, and working conditions for a set amount of time.

when Squidward and Mr. Krabs return to the Krusty Krab, they are horrified to see SpongeBob has literally dismantled the establishment, while standing proudly among the wreckage. it turns out Squidward didn't actually believe everything he was saying. (don't adopt radical rhetoric if you don't actually mean it!! no, I'm not subtly calling any one out.. maybe)

in the end, Mr. Krabs literally falls to pieces and furiously remarks that in order to pay for the damages, Squidward and SpongeBob will work for him forever. SpongeBob jumps in joy, formulating his own meaning of "forever," while Squidward suddenly once more takes in the full meaning of it. and that's exactly what happens. but atleast they won job security, right?

back in Squidward's imagination, SpongeBob and Squidward are shown as nothing but a (literal) skeleton crew, still working at the Krusty Krab, one eternity later.

that's why it's one of my best episodes from the SpongeBob SquarePants show, even though it is a satirical representation of unions and vaguely anti-capitalist stereotypes meant for children, it's still entertaining and contains numerous real notions, and easter eggs and depictions of organized labor action and animated programming, to the point that some labor organizers reference it in organizer training.

imagine that! people have used this silly piece of adored children's media to educate workers about how to form a union, an endeavor that is one of the most difficult and life-changing experiences in a person's life. and it's for the same reason that people make SpongeBob memes: nostalgia, the worldwide notoriety of the series, and emotional response we feel re-watching its content.

if you remember this episode as a kid, you most likely identified with SpongeBob; the young, happy-go-lucky kid who hadn't realized the horrors of the workplace yet. at least, that was mainly the case when I was a kid. although, I was pretty much exposed to the labour market quite early myself. again, kids today are working and there are actually politicians and groups out there trying to expand child labor. today, most of us identify with Squidward. we're older, some of us hate our jobs, and we're underpaid and overworked. we would all rather be at home playing clarinet or doing some whatever thing that we like.

some people work with actual SpongeBobs, people who love their meaningless jobs and love going to work no matter what condition. the type that skips breaks just to do the workload of two people, and mostly annoy you to death. I understand that some people have no choice or alternatives and often resort to their fates, but just like Squidward intended with SpongeBob, one should educate these people on unfair practices of the workplace, if they aren't aware already.

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NARD has been striking since 2021, this is 2026. they'll most likely strike again, as our government have the habit of not keeping to collectively-approved agreements. sadly, I commend them, and other labour organizations, on their strife to dismantle oppressive establishments, and I encourage that we should do the same. board by board, until we restore proper workplace ethics and conditions to it's former position.

thank you for reading. ❤️

15th Dec. 2025

11:24 am.

It's December, and I'm here again, stuck between the loop of what I thought would be and what was.

I'm beginning to like this little practice of self reflection prior to the new years celebration, not that I'm loving the context of it all, but the action. feel me? I go through the whole year with a dedication to duty, academy and other people, December seem to be the only time I ever get think so far into the places I avoid going to whenever I sit down to think.

I'm currently sitting in a crowded GST class, and I know this note would take a span of many days. this I don't mind, as the intention is to concisely write down my reflections on this passing year and, most likely anticipations for the next.

I don't think I'm god anymore.

I don't even know if I'm fully human.

actually, sometimes I feel like everyone else has some functional nucleus or nodule somewhere in their body that enables them enact the rituals and tendencies of being human, and I was not given that. a year of many experiences and not-so-sober reflections and most of the time, failing will. I am in my twenties and I cannot believe that childhood is over. the last memory I have of it was crouching in a corner of the bed, holding my mother's phone, with my siblings flagged around me, while we scrolled through her feed. we didnt care about data charges or brain rot then, only the eagerness to fuel our dopamine. to have fun. it all ended so fast and I am lost inside a dark silent room, grabbing at nothing.

fun.

fun has become a leisure which, if care is not taken, comes with dire consequences that I would now definitely pay for. unlike childhood, where your mistakes would be overlooked with the excuse that you don't know better. I am in my twenties and I realized early this year that my circle still discuss and enforce topics surrounding hanging out and doing things that slowly steal away life from a person, in the name of fun. perhaps, that was why I, as well, slowly cut them off. I just didn't realize that was why I did it at the time.

the only downside is that it seems like everyone else is living while I'm simply... existing, working my ass off trying to succeed when the odds are pitiably stacked against me. self-made rules are not fun. there is no joy in discipline, only obligations. and where it is a right track to follow, especially early on in adult life, it's not the most fulfilling. atleast, presently.

like school, for instance.

I came into this prestigious place with hopes of meeting my people. that's the fantasy they sell you online and everywhere, am I right?

be yourself and one day you'd find someone who's gears just seem to align with yours. it's the 2nd year and I'm still rolling lone. it's almost pitiable, how prolong isolation shapes one's attitude towards other people. I wouldn't go into details here, as I've already done that before, but I'm still in GST class, sitting by a corner beside the window, a bunch of empty seats beside me.

don't get me wrong, I enjoy my solitude, a lot.

like I have a choice, am I right? hehe.

well. I do have a choice. I could choose to stand up and walk up to a random person and ask for their name. follow it up with the necessary conversation starters, probably get their number and chat them up. boom! you've met someone new. but it's not exactly that easy, and believe me, I've tried.

the problem I have with "finding your own people" is that they are always interested in other people.

and this is selfish of me.

I've only met a hand full of people actually interesting in the things I would waste time on. the rest all seem bent on following a pattern, the majority of society who's sole concerns are heavily centered on other people's lives. other people that they envy, or wish to covet what they own or be like, or maybe that's the way I see it. there's that or we simply have a disconnect due to differences in interests. for the former, I find people like this to be copycats; having no individual opinion of their own, they cannot even imagine a thought for themselves, rather they prefer regurgitating other people's belief and values, sometimes speaking on what they have no idea on rather foolishly.

I don't see people like that as people I can learn from, as that is one attribute I look for in a person. I want to be able to see a discourse and know that if I present it to you, you would be sensible and critical in your thinking and analysis of said discourse. I want to be able to hold your opinion in high regard. and sadly, I haven't met much of any one like that here.

or maybe it's me.

they seem happy, in their twos and threes, discussing topics I'd never know what. they spur each other on, and share notes and lip glosses. and I'm just sitting in a lone corner like a goblin, eyeing them and saying "jeez! thank God I'm not like that", but I'm the one who feels lonely. so who exactly is the problem here?

perhaps I don't even know who I am, so how then do I go about finding "my people"?

in that regard, I rejected society and faced my books. and now, I think I'm starting to feel an onset of burnout. can life please give me a break? it's like you're given options, and even when you forego the favourable one for the other, you still face problems regarding that not-so-favourable option. I can't understand it.

If I don't focus on school, I'm going to fail.

however, when I do focus on school, it starts feeling like a burdensome chore on some days.

such is the case of Jack. all work and no play.

I need to work hard, but I need to have fun too. but hasn't working hard, especially in this economy, with all the odds against a budding yout, eliminated the possiblity of having fun?

they said if you work hard, you will achieve your dreams. perhaps, it's also one of those fantasies sold to us online and off. can we say the same for the people who ended their lives only for the sole reason of failing even when they worked hard? every now and then, I come across the unfortunate news of a young person commiting suicide because of a failed exam, failing mental health or lost financial account, and I sigh. It's even worst when you realize these people are the same age group as you are. and perhaps, they've been given a fairer advantage than you are, but this is where they ended up though.

talk more I whom less is given. can I really do it?

that was my most asked question this year. a constant process of "can I really do this?”

and doing it anyways.

my will keeps starting and failing and its really hard to stay consistent when the results aren't the way you'd think. but these are very much expected. perhaps, I'm just looking for an opportunity to complain about things. I think I'm very much allowed to. I'm allowed to say, "hey universe, fuck you for dealing me this hand!", but at the end of everything, I'll still pick up the cards and play. that's just life for us who choose to continue even when all else fails. we rant, and rave and cry and shout, and bemoan our woes.. but we keep going. Albert Camus deduced that the meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself.

and so I have chosen to complain.

I say let the fun be damned! I'm still in GST class, functioning on 2 hrs of sleep and the half morsel of fufu I managed to swallow with my remaining egusi soup this morning. tired, and hunched over a 40 mins video of The Organic Chemistry Tutor (bless his soul!) teaching me Cross multiplications of Vectors, because Nigerian lecturers has made it a habit to make bench warmers out of student, I gave out a deep sigh and realized that I must rest. I must rest if I still want to continue later. I must rest if I don't want to keep dozing off mid-video.

but I cannot rest, simply because throughout the course of my life, I have always been required to prove myself, even as smart, hardworking and beautiful as I am. the "privileges" ascribed to these qualities never seem to apply to me. I still find myself struggling at every point. and ofcourse, I wasn't expecting special treatment! but you'd think you'd get some leeway, or breakthrough simply because you have what it takes. I never seem to get it easy at all.

would this be a case of God giving his toughest battles to his strongest soldiers? what then can be said of those who are no longer with us? would that eventually be my fate?

I'll end this here for now. the next class is starting.

17th Dec. 2025

It's 1:09 pm

and heaven feels like a place I might never go. I thought about it now and I think that's the most honest I've been with myself since this year. ofcourse, other time would be anytime I said "I love you" to him. I was going to walk back home and have a blñt or two, while listening to Ballonerism by Mac Miller. I've been particularly fond of the album since it dropped. but I changed my mind about going home. right now, I'm sitting on the pavement of an ugly statue at the Love Garden in school. I wonder why they ever called it "Love Garden" when hardly any romance goes on in here. infact, this place is my own shadow of contemplation, and ever the thorn in my own flesh, I picked the pavement because available seats would require me to sit beside someone. and I don't want that. which is funny, because I had just complained about that earlier, but atleast now you see the problem.

again, not to be an asshole about art, but this statue is indeed ugly. it's one of those sculptures where they stack an object of weird abstract shape on top of another object of similar figure. until you've got a stack on stack on stack of ugly looking figures. ART! ✨

it doesn't look like a real thing, doesn't make sense. but someone made that, and someone bought it and set it up in this lovely place to assault my eyes.

point is, it was real to the maker and that's all that matters.

like now, right above me and the sculpture, is this big, rooty mass of tree. it's a Moringa Tree I think. I can see the dried up pods hanging down from branches. the architecture of the universe was quite the artist. imagine explaining this tree's features to a blind person. how do you explain that it's leaves dry up and fall so delicately like tiny droplets of snow? how do you explain snow? a small, soft, white ball that falls from the sky, and doesn't hurt people when they fall on them. how do you explain that the smoke from a bush burning nearby circulates around the area, giving it this foggy, haunting look? they'd assume you're crazy! but you see it and what you're explaining is real to you. I think I can say the same for this sculptor and his ugly statue of abstract objects. perhaps, I won't understand the things he sees, if any, in this masterpiece but it feels real to him, and for that reason, it lives because he's given it life.

and that's all that matters.

it's the same thing when I try to explain how I feel about Ballonerism to the average person. the sheer abstractness of it all, the masterpiece of it all. they might hear, "oh, suicidal person who does drugs and contemplates life", and that's exactly what it is. but it goes even deeper than that and I think it takes a certain level of relatability to understand. I tried quitting weed again. I started reading books again too. I've been particularly happy about one and not so much the other. they're both the least things I'm good at that doesn't turn around to tell me just how bad at things I am, no matter how much effort I put into them. everything else, even though are my interests, just seem like I'm wasting my time. be it trading, video games or whatnots, things I love and put all my heart into, yet it's like I'm floating on the margin of "almost" and "not quite enough"

it's painful because it feels like being stripped of things that once defined your persona, and when that happens, what are you left with?

I am tossed in the Samsara of existential madness. yet, I charge towards it like a deer to headlights.

if you fail consecutively at something, the best thing to do, they say, is find something else. it's never that easy, I don't think I have what it takes to take on anything else, I don't even want to. I told myself it was these things or nothing, and it breaks my heart every single time I fail; even when I put efforts into learning and developing my techniques, there's always a better gamer, there's always a bad trade, there's always someone else that people would rather waste their attention on, than me.

and still Mac Miller said, "the best. is yet. to come."

I'm working towards asking, "what is there to learn from this? " when I'm faced with hardship, instead of "why is this happening to me?"

my goals and dreams doesn't seem possible at the moment. sometimes, it doesn't even feel real.

maybe if I choose to believe it is, then...

point is, heaven doesn't feel real to me. but to the person who constructed it, and the person who've chosen to believe it, it does. so I would respectfully let it be, undisputed.

besides, if there's indeed a heaven, and everyone wants to go, knowing me I'm sure I wouldn't be in attendance. perhaps, I'd just find a place with funny looking sculptures or a crooked tree and lie down there.

18th Dec. 2025.

5:56 pm

I could end my l!fe today and tomorrow will never know. but the very beauty of life is that it stops. you have to go sometimes, don't you think? imagine a celebrity whom people describe as "way past their prime." you're convinced this person probably should have quit celebrity-ing and retired or something. but they don't, they keep doing whatever it is they do, and it keeps repulsing us who are forced to be audience to such madness.

such is life too.

people are always pining and reaching for more, their desires are never satisfied. this causes them to suffer greatly. where this desire cannot be extinguished, atleast not really, the suffering perhaps is what makes life.. life.

in its own way, misery feels like living. the very fact that we can feel life in all it's extremes, kind of makes living worth it, don't you think? the bad days kind of make the good days more valued. imagine if scientists managed to write some genetic code that ends up taking away the emotions which we despise, like depression for instance, do you think people would be ultimately happier? more productive? wouldn't it make robots of human beings?

I wouldn't want to start asking, "is this Ai?" when I hear a person talk, to be honest.

but ofcourse, speculations.

24th Dec. 2025

3:54 pm

for an earth sign, I'm very much drawn to water, emotionally and physically. it's shimmering surface, and boundless depth compels me a great deal and I know nothing to make of this feeling, this calmness I feel, whenever I see a great body of water.

I'm back in Yenagoa and decided to go downtown to the riverside for a stroll. (I once went into details about this place in my channel one time.) this has always been my favorite place to be, and I never bring anyone here for that sole reason. here I sit under the wooden shed overlooking the river bank, watching older women ferry old, worn out canoes and others haggling fishes by the river bed.

the men folks sat around the shed and outside it, entertaining themselves with bottles of local gin, or mindless and mirthless jokes about the country or, once in a while, themselves.

bouts of laughter, and insults, erupts occasionally from their guts and reverberates around the shed but I am not bothered. I'm listening to Clams Casino and in this moment, as it always is whenever this song comes on, I am oblivious to the various lives, the numerous worlds forming and breaking all around me. I, alone, am the sole audience, and curator, of this mild breakdown which I'm experiencing. I would try my best to explain just how the song, I'm God makes me feel.

imagine a battlefield.

the sky is grey and cloudless, with vultures circling above, their eyes preening and peering curiously down to earth for any unfortunate carcass to feast on. and there are many. all around me, in this vast field, lie a mass of bodies, all lifeless and unmoving. and there I am, kneeling in the middle of it all. I'm leaning against my sword, tired and my joints ache from exhaustion. the fight is apparently over, and I, alone, am the sole survivor of this great victory.

but, instead of relief, I feel.. grief. sadness.

I look up to the heavens, up to the vultures flying above my head, and in a moment, the skies break forth and torrents of rain pour down, as if in acknowledgment, an accolade to my woes. I do not get up from my kneeling position. I remain like that for a while, letting the rain seep into my hair, armor and clothes, letting it wash over me. it feels cool and refreshing, and I thought maybe somehow, it might wash away this guilt, this grief I feel in my heart.

the battle is won, indeed, but only a fool rejoices over war. what's the point of being God if there is no one to rule over? the war is won but the people are lost and hence, it is a war lost.

I am brought back from my reveries into the present by an old man's increasing cough. I watched him double over and crack out his lungs, and then lean back in the same instant and emptied the remaining contents of his cup into his stomach. he probably should get that cough checked out, and should probably check his drinking as well.

dismissing the old man, I take a look around me, taking in the absurdity and simple-mindedness of the people around me. do I feel like I am better or worse than them merely because I suffer psychological problems which I alone bear upon myself? can I even say that when I do not know what burdens they themselves carry upon their chests? I do not know. all I know is that coming here makes me feel a certain humility, and calmness, to which I still cannot explain what reason for.

maybe, it's a projection of my childhood fantasy of wanting to live in a penthouse by the riverside faraway from civilization, maybe it's the simple and basic living conditions, or the slow and steady nature of the people, which is a big contrast from the loud boisterousness in our way of living in the main town. everyone wants to feel important, want to be associated with importance, want to be important.

but here, perhaps their sole concern is having enough to eat for the day. I do not know what to make of it. what I do know is that for one to live fully and well, perhaps they must first strip themselves of the burdens of titles.

I am not god, I'm nothing.

26th Dec. 2025

10:43 pm

I'm at a party I don't want to be at.

I think it's become really obvious by now that I am not a woman of my words. but let's not get too much into who said what.

graced by the presence of the same people I subtly despise, I wonder what to feel about myself. I wonder what I even feel at the moment.

loathe? resentment? or just simply... lost.

I realize I've carried the sense of loss throughout the whole year, but it's only become apparent while I sit here on this staircase, listening to the low sighs coming from the human sleeping beside me. I've just been going through the days, more an observer than a participant in this thing called life.

it makes me feel like an imposter of some sorts.

I'm at a party, surrounded mostly by people I used to call friends, people I used to care about, and I can only think of exiting, of going home. but I know that if I were home, I'd probably beat myself up for not attending. so indeed I am not a woman of my words. such is the dilemma, but which would I rather face? the curiosity of wondering what happened... or this?

what is this?

we arrived at the function, not really knowing what to expect. and by we I meant my sister, I and a friend. let's call her Tina (real names would be withheld for privacy),

when I walked in through the door, I was first hit by the cold air circulating the apartment and a dozen pair of eyes. I felt my heart sink to my stomach. bright light filled every corner of the room, laminating various faces; some recognizable at the moment, and and most were not.

I felt my head spin a little bit as we went through the ritual of shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries with the people that were kind enough to welcome us. and by the time I had snaked my way to the kitchen, Tina's small hand clasped firmly in mine's, I had damn near broken in half from anxiety.

I needed a drink, I thought.

luckily, my sister had come prepared; a tall, shiny bottle buried under her lady-essentials in her bag. it wasn't really habit, but the occasion had demanded it and we simply obliged. I grabbed a wine glass from the top shelf, etiquette be damned, and poured myself half a glass.

it's smell first assaulted my nostrils and I was reminded that I don't drink. but what can you do? tilting my head back, the liquid hit me hard and soft (sorry Billie), burning my throat and warming my belly for a while. I felt grounded in that single moment, and subsequently made the corner where I had been standing a little safe haven until the main event eventually started.

I won't bore you with details of what we happened between that time; it was simply a string of people coming by and saying hi, but I would mention that it made me feel involved in things.

the games started, the first being Charades, and I tried my best to participate as much as I can. cooperation from the other players made this really easy, and I would say I enjoyed it. the second games started, and more people joined in and that was when I started feeling it. like the walls were beginning to close in on me. my inner voice asked if I was overreacting or if it was the drink, but I knew I needed to get away.

first thought went to the bathroom, and I headed for it immediately. twisting the handle, I barged into a group of people in the middle of a sesh in the bathroom, and I felt disappointed I wouldn't be allowed to be alone. never did I know this moment in time would mark the beginning of the outburst on this most-repressed existential crises I've been hiding since I came back home.

they welcomed me with open arms, oblivious to the turmoil raging inside me, which surprisingly calmed after I sat down with them for the few minutes that I did. sometimes, you need a second opinion before a bad decision, and mine came with the passing of the J. we listened to music, and caught up on our various life experiences while we were apart. the more I listened, the more I realized and recognized the feeling the speaker was having. it was one I know all too well, it was one I was even feeling in that moment.

a state of idleness.

lost.

we sat there solemnly for a while, when suddenly one of the guys looked us all in the face and said he loved us all. "well, see you all in 2026!", he said with a smile and I almost shed tears.

I felt that warmth in my chest again, that feeling of belonging, but did not really know what to make of it and so I refused to acknowledge it still. we spoke some more and listened to music some more, but I was vaguely conscious of this. my senses were too heightened and I felt too aware of the feelings, both inside and around me.

I excused myself eventually, scrambling to my feet and leaving the now-hotboxed escaladizzy (bathroom,) with eyes darting around the place for a quiet place to sit. my eyes glanced at the mirror, and I almost nodded at how fly I thought I looked. someone said to not necessarily look like our problems, and I took that personally. while I was still checking my fit out, I heard a voice behind me. turning around, I beheld a familiar face.a little surprised and taken aback because I thought him an introvert and never expected to find him here, we still exchanged warm pleasantries. I mean, someone else could say the same for me so that's fine. I wouldn't go into too much details, because of privacy ofcourse, but one pleasantry led to another and we found ourselves talking about him.

that's the thing with these introverts, they may act nonchalant and quiet, but when given the right opportunity, and a listening ear, they'd gush their guts out. not to forget the fact that he had probably had too much to drink, so I offered to go get him some water. later, he spoke so much about his life experiences and that he had really just wanted to come here to unwind.

I nodded.

I saw that same feeling inside him too. at this point, I was feeling both glad and sad at the same time. glad I wasn't a total downer since I wasn't the only person feeling this way, and sad that we all were feeling it at all. it's overwhelming, going through life, watching your mates advance further or not, while wondering if you're even on the right path. it's like we are all searching for a person or thing to just tell us what to do, and how to do it. alot of people say what we are to do, but they never say how such a thing can be done.

and then one is left feeling nothing, but lost.

I left our drunk friend since he had lay down a bit on the available space on a couch, next to snuggled-up lovers, to calm himself. and after a quick check with my sister to assure her I'm okay, I went outside to sit at this stair case. it's a starless night and outside the apartment is so quiet, save for the for constant beep of what I guess is the sumo. wafts of music filtered through the slightly opened door, along with voices that I couldn't make out what they were saying.

I had already gone halfway with writing this when the host joined me. I figured he was tired of playing bop daddy. pleasantries were exchanged and he sat down beside me and we got talking about.. basically everything. the party, school, life, religion and God. I can't really go into details (yes, again!) so I'll do what I can. he told me about his deconstruction, and I told him about my struggles with it. it felt like a heavy topic and so we switched back to talking about life, which wasn't even the better option either. he admitted to me about not really having a new year's resolution. he just wanted to put in effort, he said, seeing himself having so much potential but being nerfed quite alot of times by laziness or a loss in will. I could hear the crack in his voice when he said that, and I felt sorry for bringing it up. we sat in silence for a while and after some time, he put his head on my shoulder, and a few minutes later, was snoring away in light sleep.

one way or the other, the youths feel lost.

only a hand full would be aware of this, and only a hand fewer would ever come out of it.

30th Dec. 2025

10:56 pm

I got the news today.

and grief is a motherfvcker.

Mother is out and almost full tonight. clustered around her robust figure are her children, little specs of light that twinkle now and then. cool air blows across my face and I am vaguely aware of the mosquitoes flying around my ankle. I wonder if she's among those stars. they're really similar to the ones that were in her eyes, eyes that I'll never get a chance to behold ever again.

do people really go to a better place when they die? if there's a heaven, I really wish she'd get the chance to be there, although it'll be sad that I won't get to see her again. grief is a motherfcker. but it is a familiar fcker, probably fcked me over so much that I recognize it's feel and it's taste. I recognize the familiar rhythm as it moves in and out of me, hacking at my heart, tossing it to the floor and stomping on it. grief is a motherfcker, because at first you're grieving for one thing, until it spills over to another, then another, and another, until there's no heart left to hack at.

I feel so hollow now..

in my mind's eye is me from the past, reaching out to the insatiable answer at the bottom of the bottle, dragging the ganja bud until it bears responsibility for the fact that my eyes are actually bloodshot red from crying my heart out.

but that was before. way before I started losing people so much, and so fast.

I've been painfully sober and I sit with my grief.

the grief that I got better at getting better, and the people I did it for aren't here to witness any of it. that kind of defeats the whole point, doesn't it?

I miss her so much. I miss them. I really never got to be better for them.

she always reviewed and gave feedback on everything I posted on Substack, and I appreciated the fact that she took the time and effort to do so.

this is the one post she'd never get to read, and it's about her.

directly above me, is the brightest among all the stars.

perhaps that's you, D.

looking down and winking at me, while I talk and think about you. to me, you'll always be the brightest shining star.

I just wish I told you that more when I could. I'm so sorry

adieu.

adieu.

31st Dec. 2025

3pm

in a couple of hours, shouts of jubilation coupled with the sound of knockouts and sickly smell of gunpowder would fill the air, ushering a restart of the good old calendar. I'd have been submerged in a pool of people, shouting and singing in the house of God. the house of God would not have amounted as much crowd as it would today in all it's services this year, but such is the habit.

a year of many experiences and not-so-sober reflections, indeed. I'm glad for the growth I've got to keep.

people tend to act like it's not a big deal, but there was a time when it was and we have to acknowledge that. I really don't have much else to say about big '25 anymore, aside that I've got one more lock in left in me. I don't know what the future may bring, but I choose to do my best, yet again. I could decide to give up tomorrow, but that is a decision for December 2026 me to make. since I'm making a decision to stick around still, bearing personal cause for my own inexistence is out of the table. I can only hope the forces of the universe keeps me around till then.

if anyone ever gets to read this (as I'm still at a crossroad if I should make it public or not) I wish you the very best in life. and if that's too big of a wish.. then I wish you a very good year. thank you.

and goodnight.

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[23rd May, 2025. 1:38 am]

I have loved a man more desperately than I have loved God. I have looked at a man more reverently than I have the sky. there, in the sulk of his lips, I have found myself talking about a heaven that only exists when he is looking at me. Father, I feel like I have not been forged between the dip of his teeth, I feel I am not his rib. but I want to be his entire stomach, and I want to be his spine. I have been searching for prayer, Father.

but I find that I can only say his name, "dear God, let me have him. dear God, let him rest with me. dear God, let the sky turn red with how we burn in passion."

I have been worshipping at the footstool of his existence, Father. I do not know how to turn unless it's towards him. I do not know where to run to if not in his direction. do not judge me, Father, although, your jurisdiction forbid you to. I talk to you but I'd rather if he talks to me instead. because it is midnight and I miss him and I don't know where to put these feelings. I want him to talk to me because I've been listening to Lana del Rey and Bon iver and Daughter, trying to make sense of the spaces between us. I want him to talk to me because I've been guzzling caffeine like they have all the answers to why I'm coming up with words that rhyme with the stars in his name. I want him to talk to me because I'm the kind of person that writes love letters to a person who deserves it.

do you understand this, Father? it's almost midnight and I want to be lying next to him, with our hands locked together and our fingers intertwined. I want his face buried in the soft folds of my neck and I want to hear him breathing softly. I want him to stir and try to wake because I want to whisper, "go back to sleep" and I want to hold him tighter when he does. I want to lie in bed with him at the early hours of the morning, Father and probably read a book while he drifts in and out of sleep. I want to be simple with him and I want to be whatever he needs me to be.

for where else could I find this? where else could I find hands that kissed hymns up my side while he confessed how long he's looked for a place to worship? oh Father, how I put him on his knees! when he sinks to the floor and moans like he can't help himself, I wondered if other Angels fell so lovingly.

forgive me, Father. for he has haunted my thoughts and my dreams from the very moment I laid eyes on him. I have memorized the feel of his hands, the slants of his lips, the waves of his hair and the rhythm of his steps. I would know him blind, deaf, numb, in this world or the next and I would love him in all of this. there's a light in his eyes and darkness in his soul and I would not change a single thing. his very existence is a paradox, a contradiction I could spend centuries studying without a thought to understand.

I'll tell you what? I'm afraid. of God. eternity. oblivion. crowded rooms. authority figures. and him. I'm terrified of him because he has the power to destroy me and he might not even know it. I'm much less afraid of dying sometimes than I am of losing him and when I am six feet underground with bugs eating my brain, they will get visions of him. they will smell what he smelt like and they will hear him call my name through moonlit nights. they will experience unimaginable wonders as they feast on the part of my brain that houses him and they will be the only evidence left of a love well felt.

forgive me, Father, for I want to consume him. I want to live inside his skin like a beast. I want to be his birth and his death and his beginning and his end and his undoing and his Armageddon and his Divine creation.

I want to eat him whole and I want him to love me and loathe me and love me and love me, love me as the worshipers love the temple and as the lamb loves the knife. I want to create worlds out of him and call him pretty. I want to brush his hair and crack him up and make him bleed and kiss the blood from his skin. I want him buried deep inside the wound of my desire and I want him to be my best friend. Father, I want to be his favorite girl and his favorite villain. I want to make sure he's alright and I want to be his worst fear and I want my finger in his mouth and I want to be the only thing between him and death.

I hope my sins can be forgiven, Father, for I want and I want and I am so full of wanting.

a favourite pair of shoes I own is a black All-Stars Converse. It's an old pair I got from thrift and getting a bit wrinkly at the soles but I love it. it still feels comfortable and matches most of the outfits I wear, which is academia-themed, so it's alright.

speaking of outfits, during my one year basic program, I remember somethings that happened.. quite a lot of times. the first happened on the first week of school, while I had gone to the Admin block to grab a couple of textbooks. on my way out, I got a call from a friend of mine and while we were talking, I passed by a group of students, about 6 or 7 people, and next thing I heard behind me was stifled laughter. I paused for a bit and turning around to know what the commotion was about, I spotted two of them pointing at my shoes. the lady among them made a comment on how I was "dressed like an old teacher" and this caused even more laughter among them, less subtle now.

I got that a lot, so to this, I smiled and went on my way. my friend on the phone had overhead the commotion and asked me what was happening. I explained to him, beside myself with laughter but he didn't find it funny one bit.

It was my first week of University, you see, and having previously expressed my anxiety about it to him, I understand why he was concerned about me "being bullied" by older students. although, I appreciated his concern, bullying isn't new to me, and in this case, I honestly wasn't perturbed by what had happened. I told him so and we managed to move on from the issue.

subsequently, the same thing happened quite a lot over the course of my program, by fellow classmates and other students. if it isn't a comment on the medias I watch or listen to, it's on the way I'm dressed or the way I talk/things I talk about, which (because of the whole thing) wasn't much at all. I felt a great disconnect between myself and the people around me because they were both in awe and in disagreement about the things I do, and so I was unanimously the outcast of the class.

a funny event that happened one day was when a girl in class was going around asking for movie recommendations from people in class. she eventually got to ask me, and I was surprised and quite glad she did. at the time I had just seen Emancipation and thought it would do, being a true life story too. I had even just made some research about the protagonist of the movie and written a review about it on my notes app that morning, so I thought it was a good recommendation. I gave her that and a few other old movies I had seen over the weeks.

few days later, she had come back with news that they were boring and she "didn't even go past the beginning." this stung me a little, I'd admit, even more so when she proceeded to ask if I didn't have any Korean movie recommendations. I told her I didn't watch K-drama and the uproar in class that day was one to be forever remembered. It was just like my roommate being dramatic when I told her I'm not on TikTok (which made her start using TikTok references when talking to me, then laughing because I'd always tell her I didn't understand. the wimp! 😂)

I would go into more details about these series of events, but I already covered some of it on another newsletter I'll be posting some other time. but bottom line is that I found it hard making friends because people thought I was rather old skool, and in University, especially Year 1, where almost everyone wanted to be associated with what was popular and in trend, that wasn't cool at all.

we live in a time where everyone thinks they have taste just because they know what's trending.

but knowing what's trending is not taste, but merely an awareness of marketing, an algorithmic fluency, and not the artistic curiosity. we see it all the time; with people dressing the same, posting the same and even talking the same way. yet they'd still think, and argue, that they're being original. that's what's wild about the modern era, conformity is now mistaken to be individuality. people don't say "I want to fit in" anymore, but "I just like the vibe", but "the vibe" in this case would be whatever is currently being mass produced. interesting people though, do not need to choose any vibe, they mostly create their own world out of the fragments they have found; like cultural archeologists digging through the dirt and collecting the relics and trinkets that no one really notices or sees value in, but it resonates deeply within them, and somehow, they manage to assemble it into something that feels like them. interesting people have developed taste because they have done the work of figuring out what they actually like. they have interacted with these intricacies again and again, until it became the language only them know how to speak. and normies haven't because they've outsourced that work to everyone else.

I think that's why cool people have this weird, off-gridness about them, and a slight disconnection from the mainstream conversation because their taste is shaped by their own lived experiences, not the algorithm's recommendations.

some people try to imitate the ease with which these interesting people move along with in the world, and end up creating even bigger problems for themselves. they might experience depersonalization or adopt a constant need to perform for an imaginary audience, because their personality is rooted on borrowed concepts, and not what they deeply and genuinely ascribe to. but, for interesting people, it has never been about being seen as different, or edgy, or trying to be "unique" for the sake of it. that is performative coolness.

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interesting people aren't rebelling against anything, not really. they're just trying not to be distracted from themselves. they're not trying to be seen as different, they are different, because they move through the world with their eyes open. they do the things that makes them feel alive, not just look alive.

when you do that, when you start actually paying attention to things that move you instead of what's popular, you start to build your own internal system. you kind of start connecting the dots between things and appreciate the beauty in the mundane. you start creating a world that belongs to you alone and that is what real taste is; cultural awareness guided by a sense of emotional intelligence.

I think most people never reach that point because they lack the patience to sit with the silence. they don't have the patience to feel the boredom long enough to, you know, decide what it might mean for them, to know what they're actually drawn to. and so they fill every gap in their lives with content. and when you fill every page, there is almost no room left for discovery.

cool and interesting people mostly sit in the gaps. they let time pass and let the silence fill them, and pass through them. they let their obsession envelope them, while collecting ideas the way others collect dopamine. I think that's why they develop tastes that feels lived in, almost, because their taste come from real, and not simulated, experiences.

but you can say, "who cares?!" right?

I can already see the questions forming in your brows. "if a person likes what everyone else likes, what is the big deal??"

and that is fair.

a couple of times, I've thought about it too and I've tried to make excuses, but honestly? it's just sad. because, when everyone's taste is the same, when everyone does what everyone else does, no one actually feels anything anymore, slowly. when everything is designed to be liked by everyone, it almost stops meaning anything to anyone.

so, cool and interesting people, in a sense, preserves emotions and depth.

the point of art, fashion, music and culture isn't to fit in, but to feel something. most people are terrified of this. they feel like of they like something too different, it most likely would isolate them. and they're right, it will. curating real taste can be lonely at times. It's lonely to listen to what people don't have a clue of, or wear what people laugh at, or love what people don't understand.

everyone wants to be unique but no one wants to be alone, and so they perform meaning-ness within a boundary of social approval. they want the illusion of individuality; but not the responsibility.

we've turned "taste" into a personality quiz, to signal belonging. It used to be spiritual, revealing how a person looked at the world. now it just promotes whatever page or handle they saw it on.

hence, the difference between cool people and normies isn't judgmental but existential. one lives life curating, searching for and embodying what feels real to them, and the other goes around searching for what's safe.

but that loneliness is the point!

that is where identity begins to form, because your creative compass now reveals itself.

some writers I began my Substack journey alongside stopped halfway through, due to casualties of low engagement. it’s easy to understand why. in an ecosystem that quantifies attention, silence could equate rejection. when your efforts are met with numbers that refuse to move, motivation erodes.

I won’t pretend I’m immune to that logic. I’m not still writing because I exist in some purified, self-sustaining creative vacuum. visibility matters, for to be read is to be met halfway. but the reason I haven’t stopped is because writing has always been my most reliable mode of self-expression. it precedes audience, metrics and platforms, for it is reflexive. I could no more abandon it than I could abandon thinking. perhaps, others can disengage at any moment without losing a sense of self. the curator does not have that luxury. for some of us, creation is a condition. the work continues even if it's not rewarded, because it is necessary.

the responsibility of carrying it means you have to stand alone for a while. you have to look around and realize not everyone is clapping, and this is the point where most would like to turn back. this is where they stop curating and start copying instead.

however, the ones who keep going, who lean into that silence, eventually come out with something real. something that actually has a fingerprint, their fingerprint, on it.

that is what makes them cool and interesting.

it's not the outfit, music taste, it's not even the confidence. rather, the feeling of knowing you made your choices yourself and they're built on a system that mirrors the world which you mentally live in.

that is freedom to me. and that is what makes cool and interesting people incredibly magnetic to the people who gets it.

in the end, it is but a simple case of self awareness turned outwards. understanding yourself makes you move differently and people pick up on that energy easily, whether they react good or badly to it, even if they can't explain it.

when you look at it that way, the whole idea of "being cool" stops feeling shallow.

my eyes darted to the pair of scissors, just barely under my pillow, a few feet away. somewhere between my stream of consciousness, Ms. Rawlings' voice mumbled incoherent words, she was saying something I heard but could not really register at the moment as my attention was at the scissors, wincing thoughtfully and wondering how fast I could make the distance. would I do it? but isn't this one a bit too much now?

"Hannah."

"hm?"

quickly snapping out of my thoughts, I turned once again to look at the women in front of me. she was peering intently into my face, her's drawn taut and with a small smile playing over her lips. she quietly adjusted her glasses, then scribbled something on the notepad sitting in her laps. watching the pen dance rhythmically over white sheets, I didn't look up when she repeated what was said, "Hannah, I was asking how you think our meetings are going so far. have you been keeping tabs on your progress?", she peered over the rims of her glasses now and I absently wondered if it was Cartier. well, atleast one of the fakes.

I loath these meetings now. everything about coming to this strange place made me want to crawl out of my skin. Ms. Rawlings is, apparently, too nosy and I think she derives special joy in barraging me with questions. good ones, terrible ones, personal ones, they were all the same to me.

that's one thing I've hated. questions. everywhere I go were people, people with their probing eyes, filled with something that brought stings to the back of my eyes whenever I thought about it. disappointment.

and so they ask questions. why did you do it? what kind of monster are you? what-? why-?

"yes. I took your advice and have been cutting off people that were not contributing to my peace and growth.", finally, I beamed a smile at her, straightening up on the soft sofa. It creaked a little from the weight, "you were right, they can't afford my attention."

yes, the price of my attention cost an arm and a leg. literally. somewhere inside my head, Mabel's high-pitched screams resounded, it rang until her voice grew hoarse and she, exhausted and weak from all the bleeding. that serves her right, atleast next time she'd think twice before running her mouth at me. there won't even be a next time. since she likes to shout, I might as well give her something to shout about.

earlier that fateful morning, I had only thought to do my laundry but the water I had in my room wasn't much so I set out with two buckets to the tap downstairs. I got there to see a small queue forming, as is usual every single time.

we always stood in queues to do anything here, since the landlord's refusal to renovate the building and add more utilities for us. so every day, one had to endure long or short queues to fetch water at the tap. I was grateful the line this time wasn't so long and so I fell in with the last person. two buckets to my turn and I discovered that whoever own the bucket in front of mine probably left the queue or something as they were no where to be found.

and so, seizing up on the opportunity, I quickly maneuvered and switched our buckets, so that mine was in front now. it got to my turn and just as I was filling my bucket and thanking my luck that I didn't have to wait so long, the owner of the other bucket came back. that was when hell broke loose. Mabel, apparently the troublesome neighbor in our compound, screamed accusations on how I one upped her and other such extremities. I thought that to be really dramatic, as my bucket was already filled up and since no one had joined the line again, she could have the tap for all I care.

I thought to quietly ignore the raving woman and carry my water upstairs but just as I reached out for the handle, Mabel's quick feet gotta them first. I watched in shock as the liquid bathed everywhere, she had tipped the contents of my bucket, spilling water all over the place. satisfied with her act of wickedness, she had hissed and carted away her bucket, back into her room.

amidst all this, I never said a word. no, I wasn't the type to shout and curse and kick people's buckets. I'm not Mabel and I will never be. but I do know how to handle the likes of her. my therapist taught me that, you see. how to handle people like Mabel. she said to cut them off, you see. ofcourse, someone like Mabel doesn't deserve my attention but oh she paid so, so dearly for it.

that evening, I had sneaked over to the gate man's backyard which also served as a storage place for his gardening and working tools. on getting there, I picked up a machete from the select of tools, hid it under my shirt and walked back gingerly to my room. I waited patiently till 1am and then setting out with my weapon and my face covered, I navigated my way to Mabel's door. knocking faintly on the door, I quietly noted my steady heartbeat. It was so quiet into the night that I could hair the faint thump ringing in my ear. It wasn't loud or frantic, and I understood it signifies the absence of fear.

yes. Mrs. Rawlings, I hate to admit, was right. cutting people off was definitely the right thing to do. I heard someone stir inside the room and after a while, a shuffle of feet and for a split second, I looked up to the heaven's and sent gratitude to whoever was out there for sending the therapist my way. she was slowing becoming the answer to my problems.

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the wooden door opened after some time and, immediately Mabel's small head peeked at me from behind, I quickly kicked open the door with my feet. first to do, actually, no dey pain. sleep vanished from her eyes at once and she yelped and ran back into the room. her eyes widened when she saw the machete in my hand and I could see her quickly calculating if screaming for help was the best option.

“please..", she clasp both palm together in plea, "if it's money you want, I really do not have any. please, spare me!"

money? ahh no, I told you before that she couldn't pay me enough for my attention. darting at her, so swiftly that she didn't expect it, I watched the lifeblood stream in rivulets at where my weapon had landed. the orange bulb on the ceiling revealed red liquid pouring out, as Mabel fell to the floor screaming her lungs out and holding the shoulder where I had cut her. the cut revealed a gaping wound and I thought I saw bone. that didn't stop me, I released the machete again and it landed with a sharp thud as blade met the flesh on her feet. with my goal accomplished, I quickly ran out of the room before the other neighbors woke up to the commotion. back at my room, I had soaked my outfit and the machete in bleach and tied them up with an big sack. then I took a hot bath right after.

watching the steam rise from my bare body, I pondered over what had happened.

atleast that'll teach her not to go about troubling people who wanted no trouble, I thought. there was no way they could tie the incident to me and the only thing I had to worry about was to discard the items. that wasn't going to be a problem as I could always burn the clothes and throw the machete into a bush somewhere. It had all gone to plan and that night, while the neighbors were frantically trying to get a bolt ride to cart an already unconscious Mabel to the hospital, I slept like a baby.

my attention came back to Ms. Rawlings. she had taken off her glasses now, dropping it on the table between us, along with her note pad. I've always thought she was beautiful with them on, but taking them off, she looked even more breathtaking. her eyes were a pale blue, and it glinted faintly in the light. It was a very unusual eye color for our people, but I excused it on the fact that Ms. Rawlings is not like our people.

she's... different.

yes, she annoys me occasionally with her questions but she always provided solutions to my problems and she is the only one that seem to show genuine care about me. no, she's not like our people at all and only I know the difference. her pretty eyes, small mouth and broad nose gave more attention and beauty to her features. she was always smartly dressed and knew exactly what to wear to fit her physique perfectly. an epitome of beauty, she is, and the reason why I chose to continue our sessions, even after the Mabel incident.

speaking of Mabel, the little wimp survived. but as I guessed, she wasn't able to name her attacker and so the matter was dismissed as a failed robbery attempt.

the thought brought a smile to my face and earned me an inquisitive look from my pretty therapist. uh oh.

"what are you thinking about, Hannah? it seems to amuse you. let me in on the thought?", Ms. Rawlings asked again. she spoke softly, always. in as much as I hated her prying and probings, I loved hearing the sound of her voice. perhaps, that was what made me follow her guidance so diligently, because she delivered them in such reassuring and confident manner.

ofcourse, she had to have the answers if she maintained such a cool demeanor regardless what I tell her.

"I was just thinking about our conversations. since I've been putting your teachings into practice, I've had no problem embracing my inner peace. I'm really glad I met you.", I beamed a toothy smile at her and she smiled back, sultry and reassuringly. if only she knows how much lengths I am ready to go for her.

"have you been channeling your anger into productivity like I taught you to?", Ms. Rawlings suddenly asked.

I gave her a small nod. ofcourse, I take her teachings very seriously, she should know this.

I've got the obituary in front of our compound gate to prove it. the poor guy didn't have to go that way but one thing Ms. Rawlings taught me is that when people don't respect you, instead of begging them to, you should reciprocate the energy. and that is what I did.

I had just gotten home from class that fateful Friday and decided to do a little studying before the day got dark. the compound was quiet and lonely, as everyone else was either away for work or school. I stripped out of my uniform and took a cold shower, then afterwards made noodles for lunch. I duly noted the decrease in noodle seasoning and I shook my head in disgust. being in this country is indeed very terrible.

having dished out my meal, I settled into my reading table to start the task at hand, when all of a sudden a loud disturbance sliced through the quietude enveloping the environment.

turns out that Jude, my rascallous neighbor that lived downstairs had turned his stereo system on full blast, spinning all the latest afrobeat releases one after the other. this, like my season-less noodles, did not go down well with me at all. I covered my food and quietly went down to ask him to reduce his music.

on getting to his room, I had to knock on the door really hard and for a long time before Jude came to answer, clad in draws only, with a toothpick lodged between his teeth and one in his hair. ignoring the quizzical look on his face, I had promptly asked him to turn down the music as I had studies to attend to. to this, he had laughed manically and asked me to leave his sight. It was his house and he could do whatever he wanted, he said. the air was hot and the mid-Friday sun beat down heavily on my head. my stomach churned continuously with pangs of hunger but none were as intense as the anger welling up inside my heart.

who are raising all these people?! didn't his mother teach him to talk to a woman with respect? or maybe he was one of those kids who refused paying attention to elders' advice.

back when I was younger, whenever one of us disobeyed our elders, my mother would give the offender a resounding knock on the skull, or she'd twist your ear into knots until it feels like it'll fall from it's attachments. I concluded then that maybe Jude has never had his skull knocked on or ears boxed so hard that his blood rang in his ears, therefore the mantle has fallen upon me to teach his some manners.

just as he turned around to head back into his room, I rushed at him immediately, shoving him as hard as I could. the impact of the push had him knocked off balance and the widened look in his eyes was the last thing I saw just as he fell hard on the concrete, breaking his skull in the process. he twitched and gurgled incoherent sounds for a few minutes and everything went still. a pool of blood formed almost immediately where he lay, scarlet red and gleaming.

he was found lifeless that evening by another neighbor that claimed he came to take his charger he had lent Jude the previous day.

both his ears had been cut off and stuffed into his mouth and they said he had a look of terror in his widened eyes right before he died. the compound whispered speculations as to what horrors he probably saw or felt in his last moments, and over the next few weeks, most of them packed out of the lodge.

a half-assed investigation was even conducted at the time but once again I was unperturbed. I knew there was no way they could tie it back to me. finishing with Jude, I had gone back up to my room, washed my hands and sat down again to my plate of now-cold, season-less noodles. the food finished in a matter of seconds and afterwards, I took another shower and as I watched the clear water flow down my body in rivulets, I thought about what had just transpired that afternoon. once again, I pulled something like that off while evading discovery and it only helped solidify my reasoning that I did the right thing, that Ms. Rawlings was right once again in her tutorship.

"If indeed you've been diligently following my advices, then I think they have no reason to keep you locked up in here. maybe it's time you start taking control over your life, Hannah", Ms. Rawlings continued.

maybe she was right.

I looked up at the CCTV camera right above the room, wondering if the two officials were watching her. they who had dragged me into this room long ago and told me I'd rot in here for a long time. they had laughed and made fun of me, they called me all sort of names.. and ever since I've been asking myself, why? what am I doing here? I was just doing what I was told, they had no right to lock me up here. I looked up at the lady in front of me, my head was starting to hurt and my eyes were red and bloodshot from thinking too much. but I knew what she meant. I knew what she wanted me to do, why, hasn't it been her orders I've been following through all these while?

Ms. Rawlings and I had discussed pushing away bad energies from my life, and, right up to a point, I didn't know which energies were classified as "bad" in this case. well, right up to that visit from my mother three months ago.

she had dropped by my place unannounced one fateful day and in as much as I was elated to see her, I grew cautious and wary, deciding to reduce my "activities" around the compound to a minimum. before now, there had been widespread panic in our lodge as a result of several cases of unprovoked murders reportedly going on in the place. this further chased future tenants from coming for the vacant spaces as everyone was scared of being the next victim. for the ones that were desperate and took the rooms anyway, they slept with one eye open, training their eyes and ears to pick up even the slightest movements outside their doors. the pandemonium was outrageous but so was the peace that came after.

less people in the compound meant less trouble to deal with, or so I thought, before my mother came by.

it started with her occasionally disturbing questions during my sessions, with weird questions like, "who is there with you in the room? who are you talking to?"

when I explained to her that it was Ms. Rawlings and further went ahead to introduce them, she had looked at me with so much shock in her eyes and walked away silently. I didn't understand her reaction and was a little embarrassed at why she would be so rude to our guest. but I let it slide.

until two days later, she had called me to the living room, "to discuss something", she said. I had just gotten back from class and since it was the weekend, had decided to take a long nap that afternoon. having completed a lot of projects and attended every lecture set for that week, I was totally exhausted and so the nap was much needed. but mother had said the discussion was more important, and so I respectfully obliged.

mother sat too straight on the armchair, hands folded over her handbag. but she didn’t look tired, she didn’t even look angry. her steady breath and taut face looked like she was about to announce rain had been seen falling elsewhere. the afternoon light slanted through curtains and catching in the fine lines beside her eyes. she looked older than I remembered.

“Hannah, sit.”

her voice was calm and that scared me more than anything else.

I closed the door softly behind me and it's click sounded loud in the quiet living room. Ms. Rawlings sat at her usual spot on the couch, legs crossed, back perfectly straight, the faintest curl of a smile sitting on her lips. she gave me a nod as if to say you’re doing well and for a while, I felt steadied.

“yes, mommy?” I replied, smoothing my hands gently over my skirt. I did not sit. could not.

she didn't bother making me, either.

“who is Ms. Rawlings, Hannah?” her voice had trembled slightly. I laughed then, relieved then confused. was that the bone of contention?

“haba nau, mommy, she's my therapist. I told you already. why are you acting weird about it?”

“because there is nobody in that room with you.”, she heaved. the words came slowly and methodically, like dropping something fragile, bad news or maybe a bomb in this case.

“I saw you talking to a chair.”

that couldn’t be right, I thought, “don’t say rubbish, Mummy, you greeted her.”

"I was actually greeting you, but you were smiling at nothing and it really scared me.”

silence swelled between us.

I looked across to Ms. Rawlings and she said nothing.

“you’ve been talking to yourself again, Hannah.. when did this start? why didn't you tell me??”

the air around me felt thin, my eyes flickered instantly to Ms. Rawlings and then back to my mother. a confused laugh escaped me again, too fast and too strained. surely, this was a bad joke.

“w-what do you mean?”, I rasped, “but you’ve met her. and even, she's-”

I stopped talking when I saw mother’s mouth tremble slightly. in haste, she opened her bag, brought out her phone, and slid it across the table toward me.

“here.. there is no one in that video, Hannah.”

I looked down at the phone screen to see a clip of me sitting in this very living room. I saw myself talking nodding, laughing, pausing to listen, responding to and engaging with… nothing.

there was indeed no figure on the couch.

I couldn't find those pale blue eyes, nor perfect smile nor angelic voice. what was there was empty space where Ms. Rawlings now sat so neatly.

I slowly raised my head.

a joyful but unbelievable sight, Ms. Rawlings was still there, with arms folded across her breasts, head tilted to an angle, looking at me. “you see? I told you” said Ms. Rawlings while shaking her head slowly “bad energy tries to disguise itself as love.”

I felt my blood pressure rise immediately. mother was crying now but I couldn’t hear her properly anymore. all that filled my ears and all I cared about was my therapist’s calm, syrupy voice folding into my head like warm smoke. no, there's no way she's unreal! but the video..

“who are you talking to, Hannah?”, Mother demanded sharply, her voice cracking open at the edges.

I just pointed.

“Ms. Rawlings. see, she’s sitting right there, Mom. why are you pretending she isn’t?”

there is something horrifying about being looked at with both fear and pity at the same time. mother stood up so suddenly the chair legs shrieked against the tiles.

“Hannah, baby.. there is NO ONE THERE!”

her words echoed, bounced off the walls and split into several smaller versions of itself. again, I looked at Ms. Rawlings and mother followed my eyes. I found my pretty therapist still smiling at me, completely oblivious to mom's turmoils.

“I think,” she whispered, shaking her head slowly, “your mother is the problem.”

I felt a cold shiver down my spine and my skin prickled. outside, the sun out and raging but the room felt cold. “that’s not true,” I murmured, shaking my head as well, but the thought had already planted its roots.

“does she respect you?” Ms. Rawlings continued, voice like silk dragging over broken glass. “Is she not doubting you, undermining you?"

her soft voice engulfed my senses, dragging me back to that abyss again.

no.

"... embarrassing you?”

no. no.

“she wants to send you away,” she added.

I think mother was saying my name over and over again, but her voice felt so far away. she stepped closer, reaching for me as though I were a frightened child and not a grown woman with an impeccable sense of reason.

“this has gone too far,” I heard her sobbing, “Hannah, we are going to the hospital right this minute. they’re going to help you.”

help. it was such a strange word.

Ms. Rawlings stood then, gently smoothed the front of her skirt, and my eyes followed her as she walked slowly toward my mother. there was a tight politeness to her face, the calm before a storm.

“she is an anchor, Hannah” she said, “you have to cut her off.”

the world narrowed to a tunnel and my breathing turned shallow. but my heartbeat was not as frantic as I had expected. it was… measured, almost bored.

everything after that felt like a dream.

the last thing I remember seeing was mother’s shocked face and red blood blooming a twisted flower across the pale-coloured tiles.

then silence. but not for long.

they came for me in uniforms and gloves and heavy eyes and mouths that moved but their words were meaningless noise. the neighbors had informed the authorities about a disturbance. and by the time they arrived, I was very much marveled and exhausted from everything that I did not bother doing anything. I just sat there in resignation, beside Mother's body, watching as the life blood gleamed and pooled under her.

they pulled me away from the living room, from the body and the staining floor. from Ms. Rawlings, who watched it all from a corner with an approving, almost proud smile.

“you're finally learning, Hannah,” she whispered to me as they cuffed my hands.

"good job!”

It's a few months passed and the institution I was held in still smelled like bleach and piss. my small room had soft walls and no sharp corners and a single dull-white bulb that buzzed like it had an insect trapped inside it.

outside the door, about 3 guards walked around in slow, looping paths, keeping an eye on the closed door.

“you must stay focused now,” Ms. Rawlings said. it was one of our later sessions, with her seated elegantly on the edge of the narrow bed. “you know they will try to erase you here. they will try to separate us. they say they want to help you but it's all a lie, Hannah", she cooed.

I swallowed.

“I don’t want that,” I said.

“yes. yes. and you won’t let that happen,” she replied. “because you are strong, and you know how to remove what stands in your way.”

My eyes drifted to the small pair of scissors I had stolen at the laboratory the other day, during one of their tests. they said they were going to help me, but all they do is hurt me with their stupid tests and experiments. Ms. Rawlings followed my gaze and a slow smile curved her lips.

“bad energy rarely leaves on its own, Hannah. you know what to do”

that night everything changed and it was quieter than usual.

I was sitting in a crouching position in the middle of the room. waiting. soon enough, I heard footsteps approaching and knew it was one of the guards bringing dinner, as they usually did everyday. I heard bundle of keys clanking and the heavy metal door swung open abruptly. he walked in a few steps and gently out down the tray.

“Hannah! here, eat something. you’ll feel better.”, he was saying, but those words hovered in the air like an insult. he turned to leave.

Ms. Rawlings rose from her sitting position gracefully.

“now,” she said.

I suddenly found unwavering strength within me as I leaped at the unsuspecting guard, pushing the sharp edge of the scissors into the back of his neck. the details of what happened next are blurry even to me. I remember feeling warm liquid on my skin, I remember him falling to the floor. I still recall the weight of his bunch of keys in my trembling palm. I remember a series of unlocking and bolting out of doors.

alarm sounds blared through speakerphones.

it hadn't taken them long to discover the dead guard, and my absence from the cell.

once again there was chaos, blooming like a familiar flower.

Ms. Rawlings walked in quick steps beside me through the corridor, unbothered by the blood, the sirens, nor the screams behind us, nor my frantically beating heart. she never once left my side.

“you’re free now,” she kept telling me, surprisingly falling in step with me even though I was sprinting through hallways.

“no more cages. no more questions, Hannah. you're free!”

finally, the exit doors yawned open before us. outside, the night was wide and waiting, full of everything and nothing at all. momentarily, I forgot my predicament and stared up at the starless sky.

then I looked at her.

“where do I go from here? and.. and will you come with me?”

this time, she paused and my breath hitched. for the first time… uncertainty flickered in her pretty eyes.

“wherever you go,” she said carefully, “I always exist.”

"there she is!", a voice shrieked behind me.

I felt a blunt force against the back of my head and then the lights went out.

anxiety settles over a person when they realize, too late in the evening, that the day has unfolded with all the grace of a dropped plate and they still haven’t done whatever small obligation ties their sense of discipline to their self-worth.

for me, it happens when I'm sitting on my kitchen floor, around the time the late evening air is cool and tender on the skin, and my room is unfamiliar from the darkness engulfing it. (damn you, Nepa.) alas, I am not given much time to begrudgingly reiterate my dissatisfaction at the failing power supply because, suddenly, I remember I haven’t done my German lessons for the day. this realization blooms in my chest like something sour, a mix of guilt and resignation, because I know exactly what comes next.

before I even open the app, I feel that familiar presence on my notifications bar, the green-feathered symbol of my linguistic struggle settling around me like a Dictator taking his seat upon a throne on which he proclaimed himself.

Duo does not endear you with flapping wings or cartoon cheeriness, at least not in the version of reality that exists for those of us who consistently forget to practice until the last possible minute. instead, it is as if the space behind me congeals into a sense of authority so intrusive that even the kitchen walls seem to lean back respectfully.

when I finally gathered enough courage to turn, indeed he was there, occupying space in a way that suggests the laws of physics belong to him personally. hovering over me as one would a child who refuses to do their homework unless supervised. his enormous eyes are not the cute circles they appear to be in promotional ads; up close, they are wide and blank surveillance cameras embedded in the body of a creature that has no concept of rest, mercy or the impossibility of mastering German grammar before midnight.

I sigh.

he did not speak immediately. he was patient enough to let me open the app first. I situated my elbows on an imaginary table and wiped my sweaty palms on my shorts as if preparing for an exam I didn’t study for. only then did Duo glide closer, the feathery edges of his silhouette brushing against my peripheral vision like a warning. there is nothing melodramatic about him, aside the sharp efficiency of someone who has spent far too long enforcing accountability on people who forget “Der,” “Die,” and “Das” are not decorative suggestions. he seeks to enforce every institutional requirements in his linguistic empire and we are the minions tasked to obey.

my lessons took some time to load, with the network taunting me, as though Airtel wanted to test my loyalty, before it even presents me with the first sentence.

eventually, the first opening task appears: “Das Mädchen isst eine Erdbeere.”

it was such a harmless sentence really, but nothing feels gentle with Duo hovering so close that my shoulder blades tense. my brain was working overtime. I know this sentence. I should not be sweating at the sight of it, yet the moment I reached for the keyboard to type in my answer, a blankness washed over me, erasing my recall with ruthless precision of a government wiping inconvenient names from public records.

panic sets in. I muttered the sentence repeatedly under my breath, a tactic that usually helps jog my memory, but the words felt strange on my tongue.

Erdbeere. Erdbeere. Erdbeere.

I know it’s a fruit, but in this moment, especially with Duo’s unblinking gaze drilling into the back of my skull and my streak hanging by a thread finer than my self-esteem, I cannot remember which fruit it is. my panic grew in slow, humiliating waves.

I hesitated too long and shortly after, I saw the corner of my energy bar shrink, an unmistakable signal that errors are not tolerated here, not in this regime, not for students who let the entire day pass before attempting to learn the difference between accusative and nominative cases.

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well, I thought, here goes everything. and so, I took a guess, a gamble if you may, and picked Strawberry. what happened? the app punished me again without delay, making it painfully clear that no mistake goes unnoticed. that chime of failure sliced through my heart, sharp enough that I sat up straighter, suddenly aware of how easily this lesson could turn into a long night.

Duo’s expression didnt even change, he simply regarded me with something that resembled disappointment layered with amusement, as though he expected me to fail and is now watching the predictable unraveling of someone who overestimated their linguistic courage.

the next sentences were not any better, they all came with increasing complexity. I knew then that the app sensed my trembling confidence and has decided to escalate it.

“Ich werde morgen zurückkommen,” it declares, a deceptively straightforward construction that becomes a battlefield in my mind as I try to recall where the infinitive should land and which verb is actually doing the work. fortunately, I managed to get that one right, but my relief is short-lived because Duo, in the cruel ways of Dictators who do not need to raise their voices to inspire fear, leaned in just close enough to whisper his faux encouragement.

"you're doing great! let's make this harder.."

haq!

I subconsciously began pleading silently with the tiny energy bar that kept shrinking every time my brain fumbled a word, and although Duo does not berate me, the weight of his silent expectations was heavy enough to reorient my posture and straighten my spine like a soldier answering to their commander. It is astonishing how much pressure one digital owl can exert simply by existing.

finally, the last sentence appeared.

“Warum lernst du Deutsch?”

the question settled in my bones with a complexity far beyond its vocabulary. why am I learning German? at this hour? in this kitchen? am I here to demonstrate mastery of vocabulary I have no practical use for outside of hypothetical conversations with imaginary German-speaking strangers or here to fuel my existential crises? rather than translate the sentence, I typed in an answer that reflected my exhaustion. the app, ofcourse, marked it wrong, exuding cold efficiency of a judge who has no patience for emotional nuance. I had to correct myself, yet again.

my energy bar was empty now.

Duo hovered closer, silent for a beat too long, before finally giving a satisfied nod, the little happy tune that plays while showcasing your stats in full view. I felt tension release from my heart the moment he faded away, the way inexplicable things do when their purpose for the moment is complete. it is ridiculous, truly, how the lines can blur between language learning and political negotiation, with this tiny animated tyrant keen on engraving the strange, relentless persistence required to stand your ground in the face of your own procrastination.

here I remain, on my kitchen floor, staring at the lesson summary. my streak survived. my nerves did not. my dignity fractured at the edges, a casualty of yet another night spent wrestling with articles and umlauts under the green, watchful wings of a Dictator who refuse to let the world forget that missed lessons have consequences.

with Duo enforcing his terms like the smallest, greenest general the digital world has ever produced, who needs enemies?