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...
Most of us are performing. Not just online — but in our clothes, our conversations, our spending, our silence. We perform for our families, our neighbors, our peers. We perform for strangers on Instagram and for classmates we haven’t spoken to in years. We perform to say, “I made it,” even when we haven’t. We perform to hide the hustle, the loans, the grief, the shame. In Kenya, to look like you’re struggling is often worse than to actually struggle. So we signal. With shoes, with weddings, with cars, with captions. Because dignity — here — is something you must display to be allowed to keep. We borrowed the car, we leased the house, Took the loan, wore the lace, smiled for the photos. Just to whisper to the world — I am not the struggle I came from. When Dignity Must Be Displayed In Kenya, poverty is more than economic — it is a social stigma, a public shame. Many of us are not just trying to escape hardship, we are trying to escape the look of it. In a society where ...