One of the easiest things in the world is to mistake an outcome for a story. A beautiful home. A thriving business. A failed marriage. A child in an expensive school. A forty-year-old with no savings. Someone who seems to have it all. Someone who appears to have fallen behind. We see the destination and instinctively begin filling in the journey. Hardworking. Lazy. Disciplined. Irresponsible. Lucky. Entitled. Deserving. Wasteful. Perhaps the most dangerous thing about human beings is not that we judge one another. It is how quickly we become certain that our judgment is correct. Because every life has invisible expenses. Not just financial ones. The kind that never appear on a bank statement or a résumé. Some are chosen. Some are imposed. Some are wise. Some are costly mistakes. Most are a complicated mixture of both. One person reaches middle age with very little savings because they spent years paying school fees for younger siblings. Another because they repeatedly made poor financi...
There is a disturbing moment in the novel Blindness by José Saramago when a man suddenly loses his sight while waiting at a traffic light. His blindness spreads quickly through the city. Drivers abandon their cars. Streets fall into chaos. Institutions crumble. Society begins to unravel. But the true horror of the novel is not the epidemic. It is the realization that the blindness did not begin with the disease. The blindness was already there. People could see. They navigated their lives, went to work, obeyed rules, and participated in society. Yet they failed to notice the fragile threads that hold a community together—responsibility, empathy, restraint. When those threads finally snapped, the collapse appeared sudden. In truth, it had been forming quietly for years. Sometimes I think about that when I look at everyday life in Kenya. We are remarkably skilled at diagnosing what is wrong with the country. Conversations are filled with sharp observations about corruption, inequ...